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Do I need an airtight mason jar for overnight oatmeal?
I am not at home and presently I don't have any airtight container. Most of the suggestion online are about using a airtight container.
Can't I use a bowl and cover it with plastic wrapper and then put it in refrigerator?
So the main advantages to airtight:
If your fridge is clean, your worksurface (hands included) are clean, and you're not too worried about smells, you should be fine, especially if you're eating it the next day. Airtight is highly recommended if you're intending to make 1 batch for the week though.
I see. I'll be eating it the same morning.
I eat leftovers I left on the counter overnight all the time. Including a chicken alfredo, though I nuke the bejesus out of those first.
Keep in mind it's the bacterial waste products that make you sick. Heating may reduce their population, but if they've been growing, their poisons are still going to be there.
Probably why I have an iron gut. Mom wasn't above serving far-more-spoiled food.
Serve your kids spoiled food once in awhile friends (almost entirely joking).
I've got food poisoning just reading this. Glad you are good though
Turns out being raised by parents that were raised by farming grandparents that were raised during the Great Depression puts a very different skew on what constitutes 'edible' than the modern era.
Moldy bread did not mean chucking the loaf or even the whole slice.
I'm not entirely unconvinced thats part of the reason there's ever-increasing levels of food allergies, beyond just 'less people dying from them.' Not enough people eating mold and dirt periodically.
I believe there's some research into it, and letting kids stick all sorts of crap in their mouths ends up helping their immune system.
It's just something difficult to set controlled experiments for, lol
I wonder if this is like peanuts, where if they're ingested first the digestive system processes the particles but if they enter the bloodstream first the immune system goes 🚨RED ALERT RED ALERT SHUT IT DOWN 🚨 and so mixing peanut supplements into bottles can help infants develop a safe immune response.
Or if they're similar results with different functions.
"Alright kid, eat this marshmallow off the gas station bathroom floor"
Good luck finding some kids under 6 that wouldn't do that without asking.
Well, I meant more in the context of a playground or at home,lol. Should definitely not let kids eat off random bathroom floors, cleaning products won't help anything if ingested
Oh yes, to be clear I was joking. Mostly. There are a non-0 number of children whom have licked the urinal cake.
"Let" is a strong word. Children are just as smart, or smarter than us, when it comes to figuring out the exact right moment when they can get away with anything.
Plastic wrap will be fine, My family's done it while traveling. You don't need canning-level sealing for this, Mason jars get used for blogs for aesthetics, and individuals for aesthetics or because they happen to have them. They're great, but unless you're specifically canning they're trumped-up tuppwerware.
Similarly with @vord if it was for more than like 3 days I would use a properly sealing vessel, but a Mason jar isn't specifically required.
Thank you! This is really helpful. I think I'll be doing it in glass bowl and wrapping it up with plastic on top.
We use mason jars for that exact reason, with the added bonus that it avoids a lot of those microplastic risks.
I've made overnight oats in a bowl and covered it with a plate and it tasted exactly like the ones I make in the mason jars - so I think it would work just fine.
Just to add to this, they don’t need to be kept overnight. Regular rolled oats will be ready to eat in about an hour or so. Quick oats will be even faster. Steel cut oats will take forever though.
I have no idea what the difference is, but the stuff I make every morning (a mix of what looks like flattened grains and those same grains chopped into small flakes) is perfectly softened and full of milk after two hours in the fridge
Regular oats ("oat groats" or "oat berries") are oblate spheroids with an indented line going through the middle lengthwise. Steel cut oats are when they have been run through steel knives to make them into smaller nubs. Rolled oats (AKA "old fashioned oats") are instead put under big steel rollers to flatten them. Quick oats are rolled oats that have been cooked and dried.
All of these processing techniques are designed to make them cook faster, and I mentioned them in order of slowest to fastest. I'm sure there are differences when you go outside of the United States, though. Having a mix of rolled and cut oats is pretty unusual here.
I should clarify that I have two packages that I then mix myself.
It sounds like it's rolled oats and maybe cut rolled oats? Like an extra step after? Afaik they're not cooked at all
It just occurs to me that there's another form you can get called Scottish oats, which are very coarsely stone ground. It's not terribly popular these days. They tend to be very uneven, so you'll get some large pieces and some very fine pieces. That might be what you're talking about.
If they're flat, you likely have a mix of rolled and quick cook oats. You'll know if you have groats or steel cut because they look more like buckwheat or barley.
Rolled oats are steamed before they're rolled flat. I eat them dry out of the package as a snack if I can't be bothered making muesli.
I recently had to research this bc I wanted to make oatmeal cookies -- here in Germany the common types of oats are apparently kernig Haferflocken (thicker rolled oats), zart Haferflocken (thinner rolled oats), and Schmelzflocken (which are instant oats). Steel cut oats are apparently called Hafergrütze but I've never actually seen those in the store myself.
They're pretty rare here in the US too. Grains in general are getting hard to find outside of some very basic choices. A growing proportion of grocery stores only sell the most basic boring forms of them these days; Aldi, for instance, only sells rolled oats and all purpose flour. I've only seen one store that sells less common grains like rye or bulgur.
Now I'm kind of curious to see if I can make a good oatmeal cookie out of steel cut oats. The texture would be very interesting.
Aldi is a discount grocery store here (...well technically two but that's a long story) so it's less surprising that they don't have more exotic grains to me. Oatmeal cookies benefit from the oats still having some chewiness, so steel-cut might not be bad? The recipe I was using called for old-fashioned.
To be clear, Aldi is a discount grocery store here as well, so I wouldn't necessarily expect them to carry those "fancier" grains. It is odd, however, that they only carry AP flour. Other grocery stores aren't that much better on average; I actually spent quite some time driving around to different stores around my work when I needed whole grain flour because only one of the three stores I went to had it.
The place where I get my less common grains is actually a discount grocery store called WinCo Foods.