The Oatmeal Brand Ina Garten Has Eaten Every Day For 10 Years
When it comes to the breakfast dishes she shares in her cookbooks, blog, and cooking show, Ina Garten isn't one to keep the flavors simple. Her avocado toast recipe from "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook" for example, isn't just mashed up avocado with toasted sandwich bread. Instead, she uses buttered artisan bread, and in addition to the avocado, she adds prosciutto, microgreens or arugula, fried eggs, and freshly squeezed lemon juice topped all off with a squeeze of sriracha.
Garten's gourmet avocado toast — or rather her "avocado fried egg tartine" — is the kind of breakfast dish that you'd probably serve at a special Sunday brunch, and even the celebrity chef admits to not eating it on the regular. As Garten revealed in an interview with Bon Appétit, she actually prefers oatmeal on most mornings, a habit she's kept for over ten years. As for the kind of oatmeal she enjoys, Garten has a go-to brand and a specific way of preparing it.
Ina Garten's favorite oatmeal is imported from Ireland
If you watch "Barefoot Contessa," you know that Ina Garten rarely cooks with store-bought food, and when she does its products like truffle butter. It comes as no surprise therefore that when Garten buys oatmeal, it's specifically McCann's quick-cooking Irish oatmeal. Irish oatmeal is a type of oatmeal made with whole oat groat kernels that are cut with a steel blade, and don't undergo any processing aside from hull removal. It's also sold as "steel cut oats" in the U.S., but the McCann's brand isn't even produced in the U.S. and therefore has to be imported from Ireland.
Per the package instructions, the quick-cooking variety of McCann's that Ina Garten likes can be prepared simply by combining it with hot water, but Garten also adds a generous amount of salt to it. "I don't want it to taste like wallpaper paste," she explained to Bon Appétit.
Why you should add salt to oatmeal
Considering Ina Garten has been putting salt in her oatmeal for over a decade, it's safe to say she knows what she's talking about. But in addition to making oatmeal taste less "like wallpaper paste," salt is also a scientifically proven flavor enhancer. When you use a lot of it, salt is, well, salty, however, if you add only a pinch of it something else happens: it intensifies any sweet or umami flavors present. This is part of the reason why foods like salted caramel and chocolate-covered pretzels are so tasty, and the same applies to oatmeal.
Oatmeal itself is naturally bland, and while you could just as easily disguise that blandness by piling on the fruit and brown sugar, you'll get better tasting results by starting off with a well-salted foundation. To accomplish this, according to Garten's recipe, salt goes in at the beginning of the cooking process along with the oats and water. Garten does add cherries, raisins, and sliced banana in the end, but with or without the toppings the oatmeal is nutty, delicious, and far from bland, thanks to the added salt.