Conventional cooking wisdom tells us to soak grains like barley or steel-cut oats overnight to cook them more quickly and produce better results. Serious Eats’ tests, however, suggest you can skip that step and cook them straight from dry.
Picture: countrymcitym
Daniel Gritzer cooked side-by-side grains that were unsoaked, ones that were soaked overnight, and ones soaked overnight with salt. His tests included whole-grain barley, pearl barley and steel-cut oatmeal. He concludes:
Well, mainly that soaking grains isn’t necessarily going to speed things up, and salting doesn’t seem to make a (salt-)lick of difference. And when soaking does help, as in the case of pearled barley, it doesn’t always look pretty. If you don’t care about appearances and are desperate to knock 15 minutes off the time it takes to cook polished grain, go for it. I, for one, will just accept my grains as they are and wait patiently for them to do their thing.
So if you forget the overnight soak, don’t worry. You can still cook those grains with little detriment in terms of time or flavour. However, one reason you might want to consider soaking grains is to possibly make them more digestible. Your call.
Do I Need to Soak My Grains? [Serious Eats]
Comments
3 responses to “Don’t Bother Soaking Grains For Time Savings Or Flavour”
It’s also a good idea to soak them if you are cooking them in a stew or similar one pot dish as they will cook at the same rate as your vegetables or starch such as pasta or potato.
Grain should only be used for two things, beer and breakfast. everything else is immoral. Unless you are mashing in for beer, grains should never touch water. if milk is not involved, grains should never touch any liquid at or below room temperature. think about the future of that grain that has given its chance to be a plant for you. Becoming beer is an honor, becoming some yuppie stupid food is a disgrace. You should be ashamed, apologize to your grains then make a delicious beer from them.
p.s. bread is ok but only if the grains were milled first to make beer. Beer and bread go well together.
You hear that, @Markserrels? Time-saving!
(Ah, but does it affect the taste?)