Ode to Oats, part I

A genuflection to Irish oats with four breakkie bits to kickstart this month's recipe drop.

Hello dear one!

I'm back with another recipe goldmine this month, helping us to celebrate an Irish wholegrain, and the magical wand it wields.

Quite aside from channeling their goodness into our mainframe, oats are ballistically tasty, satisfying and creamy. We'll be working with those nutty pinhead oats you've seen on supermarket shelves; with regular porridge oats flakes; and with oat flour which is simply oats blitzed through a coffee grinder.

Oats are both affordable and skillful. At €1.20 per kg, they are practically overqualified for the position of Irish superfood of the year. This week, we’ll focus on their legendary fibre.

That bowl of morning porridge carries a talented crew of soluble fibre - known as beta-glucans - gifting our body with immune-loving polysaccharides similar to those found in medicinal mushrooms. (We like). These naturally occurring polysaccharides have shown to benefit heart health by latching onto excess cholesterol in the bowels, and evicting it out the back door like a moody bouncer. (We also like).

Apart from their wad of soluble fibre, oats also carry insoluble fibre which, I note, can cause insurmountable giddiness among some food scientists and gastroenterologists. Insoluble fibre is talented at policing our bowels, improving traffic jams and reducing transit time.

Our awesome microbial community likes to feast, flirt and ferment with this grain’s catalogue of fibre. In doing so, they create entirely new compounds that can help with general housekeeping within our digestive tract. Nice one. It’s indisputable that our gut's bacterial ecosystem plays an Oscar-worthy role in both physical health and in mental health (keep an eye out for next week's separate Health Geek and Date Freak's post). If we are to cope with life's stressors, our little dynasty of bacteria needs more TLC than we realise. The key appears to lie with microbial diversity. That's what we want to achieve here, each and every month. I want to help you build a library of energising, nutrient-rich recipes to service your microbiota as well as your dimples. This week we have four such recipes, all amplifying the majesty oats.