What’s different about instant oatmeal that allows it to be made quicker than regular oatmeal?
In: Chemistry
It’s already been cooked. You’re just rehydrating it.
Regular oatmeal is just crushed oats. You still have to cook it, and oats aren’t a particularly fast-cooking grain. The various versions of regular oatmeal, like “whole”, “steel cut”, or “quick-cooking” have all been processed to varying degrees to speed up how fast water can get into them.
But if you cook the oats, then dry them back out, you don’t have to deal with the cooking again, you just need to rehydrate the dried oats back into cooked oats. That’s instant oatmeal.
The same mechanism works for instant mashed potatoes, Kraft Easy-Mac, etc.
It contains a proportion of blended oats, which have been milled to a powder. This allows it to cook much faster. Baby oatmeal (porridge here in the uk) has a very high proportion of milled oats. It also results in a smoother texture.
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