Starbucks Oatmeal: The Oatmeal Wars, Part III

I was walking through the airport one day a few weeks ago on my way to LA, saw that Oatmeal was now being offered by Starbucks. Having an idea of what good oatmeal should taste like, I wanted to try some but wasn’t particularly hungry. This week, with 14 inches of snow on the ground christmas day I decided to walk over to the local starbucks at 21st and overton and give the oatmeal a try. Blech! Its advertised with this picture of beautiful oatmeal and all these fluffy letters talking about ‘wholesome and nutritious’. Turns out, its just rolled oats with some hot water poured over them. nothing more than instant oats. For fruit: some really dry and hard raisin things, its clear that craisins are superior topping for oats. The brown sugar wasn’t awful, and a little packet of nuts (no, nuts do not go on oatmeal).

Avoid the Starbucks oatmeal. For the price of it, you can buy yourself a box of quaker oats, ask for some hot water, and be just as well off.

What they COULD have done, to actually do something truly customer oriented, would have been to have real oatmeal cooked up in each store in the morning, served fresh with craisins and some organic brown sugar. Charge 3.25 and everyone would be happy. When you attempt to cheat customers with solutions that only go half way you can tweak your balance sheet in the short term but in the long term you create negative value. Starbucks no longer has any brand trust with me. I can’t trust their baristas to have any pride in their work and I can’t trust their food to have any authenticity to the ‘premier experience’ they are trying to create.

The Oatmeal Wars, part II

Returning to the oatmeal saga: Previously I used John McCann's oatmeal from Trader Joe's as my oatmeal of choice to cook in the rice cooker. After extensive research and testing, I found what I believe to be a superior product, and I'll explain why. The product is Bob's Red Mill stone ground oatmeal. The primary reason is that I was having problem with a 1 cup serving boilng over in my Zojirushi rice cooker. Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oatmeal is giving me no such problems. I also think the texture of the oatmeal is slightly better.

This was discovered when we recently paid a visit to the Bob's Red Mill grocery store in Portland, OR. Was a fun experience, they had lots of dried stone ground goods besides oatmeal including whole wheat chocalate cake mixes and a bunch of other goodies. Its about 20 minutes from downtown but worth the trip! Lots of healthy stuff to eat, and they serve a breakfast and lunch menu to try out their products. As I move my diet towards less processed foods, I can imagine Bob's Red Mill products becoming quite popular in my pantry!

Cooking Oatmeal in a rice cooker

Oatmeal...in a rice cooker?

Stacey and I had been frequenting a local coffee shop over on Hawthorne, Common Grounds, handily one of the best of many in portland. They have had some impressive oatmeal on their menu, and we were dropping a few pennies a week on this stuff. Way better than the instant oatmeal i eat fairly regular in the mornings at work. I decided to try to recreate it.

First, I went to trader joes and stared at the various oatmeal offerings...irish oats, rolled oats, steel cut oats, various instant oats. I decided to go for a very innocent, old fashioned looking can of John Mccann steel cut oatmeal.

Next, I went home and followed the instructions, boiled some water, put the oatmeal in, total freakin' disaster. Didn't absorb the water, was a glutenous mess. Reminded me of my experiences trying to cook real rice. That's it! Use the rice cooker.

So, I pulled out the rice cooker and looked at the settings. Turns out there is one called 'porridge' on my fuzzy logic zojirushi 5000 so i went about setting it up, turning it on, and putting in the appropriate ingredients (oats and water as described on the oat meal container). After about an hour and a half (including 45 minutes soak time that the rice cooker appropriately counted down for me without any intervention on my part...i love this thing!) the rice cooker beeped at me and out came some absolutely DELICIOUS oatmeal. Great stuff, I mean legendary for those cold winter days.

I also added some organic brown sugar, craisins, and homemade granola from Elephants Delicattesen to give it some crunch and sweetness. I'm not sure the 'organic'-ness adds to the brown sugar, I think its more like 'not the cheap stuff' that makes it better than just average brown sugar.

So, takes longer than the instant stuff, but it tastes great. I'll be adding this to the cooking arsenal.