Pressure Cooker Strawberries and Cream Steel Cut Oats
Steel cut oats toasted in butter, cooked in the pressure cooker until they’re tender, then mixed with sweet, sliced strawberries and chia seeds, served topped with brown sugar, almonds and a splash of cream. A stick to your ribs breakfast you can feel good about eating.
Lately, they’ve had big beautiful strawberries at the market. I brought a Costco size package of strawberries home, and there were plenty of strawberries for the dessert I was making, as well as breakfast the next day.
I did a quick internet search for strawberries and steel cut oats and found two recipes that I really liked. One from the Food Network with brown sugar and toasted oats, and one from Liz, The Lemon Bowl, with chia seeds which add extra protein, fiber and Omega 3’s to your breakfast.
Making Strawberries and Cream Steel Cut Oats in an Instant Pot
So I took what I liked from those recipes and turned them in to a pressure cooker recipe. Pressure cooking steel cut oats is the best way to cook steel cut oats. Not only is it faster, but the oats get much more tender when cooked under pressure. If you haven’t cooked steel cook oats yet, give it a try.
Strawberries and Cream Steel Cut Oats
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 1 cup steel cut oats
- 4 cups water
- 1/4 cup cream
- 3 tablespoons light brown sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 cup chia seeds
- 1 1/2 cups sliced strawberries
Instructions
Add butter to pressure cooking pot, select Sauté. When butter is melted add the oats and toast, stirring constantly, until they smell nutty, about 3 minutes.
Add water, cream, brown sugar and salt. Select high pressure and set 10 minutes cook time.
When beep sounds, turn off pressure cooker and use a natural pressure release for 10 minutes and then do a quick pressure release to release any remaining pressure. When valve drops carefully remove lid.
Stir oats. Stir in strawberries and chia seeds. Cover and let sit five or 10 minutes until oats are desired thickness.
Top with additional sliced strawberries, brown sugar, sliced almonds, and splash of cream.
For the 1/4 cup of cream which type of cream is best: heavy, light, table, half ‘n’ half?
Hi Anita – I use heavy cream because that’s usually what I have on hand, but any of them would work.
I made this recipe exactly how its written and it is amazing! The oatmeal is so creamy. It’s my favorite way to eat oatmeal now. I’ve done it without any fruit and it’s so good too! Thanks for another great recipe.
Thanks so much Natalie! The pressure cooker really is the best way to make steel cut oats.
Toast is mentioned in the instructions but not in the ingredients???
Hi Euayne – when you’re sauteing the oats in butter it’s called toasting the oats. There isn’t any bread toast involved.
Hi Barbara. I made this a couple of weeks ago and loved it! Do you think I could use frozen strawberries? If so, would I need to change anything else? Thanks so much for all of your amazing recipes!
Thanks Melissa – glad you enjoy it. I think thawed frozen strawberries would work well in this recipe without any changes.
I made this over the weekend and it was delicious! I used oats that included flax seed for an additional health benefit. Thanks for the recipe.
I’ve never cooked steel cut oats in my pressure cooker but looking at this recipe and your photos……I’m definitely gonna start. That looks like one amazing breakfast.
Thank you Barbara.
Thanks Carol – yes, you definitely need to start 🙂
I haven’t cooked oats in my pressure cooker yet. I’m going to have to give these a try. I like my oatmeal tender and I like that this is faster than the stove top. It sure looks beautiful.
Thanks Bonnie – I always have to cook the oats for much longer than the package recommends on the stove top to get them as tender as I like them. I’m sure you’ll like them in the pressure cooker.
Thanks for this recipe! I LOVE oatmeal/porridge and steel-cut oats and have been looking for pressure cooker recipes after getting a stove-top one for Christmas last year. I usually make a batch of porridge overnight in the slow cooker so it can soak up the maximum amount of water, but I would love to try the pressure cooker soon.
Hi Jessica – definitely give it a try. Let me know what you think.
I love steel cut oats toasted in butter and pressure cooked. I share with my great-grandson (age 4) who loves them as well. I haven’t cooked with the brown sugar in them, we just sprinkle on top, but I’ll try that. I don’t usually put fruit in them to heat so I’ll try that as well. However, I do find that steel cut oaks or any oatmeal raises my blood sugar something awful so I have to be very careful about how much I eat. If you are diabetic or pre-diabetic, watch out for that.
Hi Gayle – I didn’t know that about oatmeal raising blood sugar levels. Luckily, that’s something I haven’t had to deal with yet.
Gayle, I’m so glad you mentioned the blood sugar spike issue for people with impaired glucose metabolism or diabetes (any grain can spike glucose levels, actually, no matter how “whole” it is, because grains’ high starch content is quickly broken down into glucose and absorbed).
I Do love oats, but after experimenting using the suggestions at bloodsugar101 dot com, I find I must strictly limit my oat consumption (a few years after a gestational diabetes pregnancy I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes due to impaired first phase insulin response, and I’m working hard to avoid progressing to full-blown diabetes by sticking to a minimally processed real food diet and testing my blood sugar after meals often). When I do eat oats, it’s in VERY small portions (no more than 1/2 cup cooked) and always with other foods that contain fat and protein (like an equal or larger portion of whole milk yogurt and a handful of nuts) to avoid a blood sugar level that goes up too high for too long. Less processed oat forms (such as steel cut oats) cause might raise blood glucose a bit slower and lower than super-high spiking highly refined oats like those in Cheerios* and instant oat products, but my own repeated blood glucose testing after eating various forms of oats have shown me that I need to be careful even with steel cut oats. All starch converts to glucose eventually – so limiting starch minimizes the stress on my ability to utilize glucose.
*Cheerios is not the “heart healthy” cereal the manufacturer and AHA would have us believe – Cheerios is a highly refined and processed form of oats – practically an instantly absorbing bowl of glucose – the highest blood sugar level I have ever had from food was after a bowl of Cheerios with a little milk equaling 75 grams of carbohydrate – sort of like a home version of a glucose tolerance test. Research very strongly indicates that chronically high post-meal blood sugar levels are a much better predictor of heart disease than any cholesterol numbers, but the fear of natural fat & cholesterol and processed grain food industry influence over the past half century overshadowed the stronger BG-CVD evidence.
I do frequently cook whole oats (from the bulk bin) or steel cut oats in the pressure cooker for my teenage son, however, I always soak the (untoasted) oats overnight (or at least a few hours) in filtered water and a spoonful of plain live culture yogurt to neutralize the substantial amount of phytic acid (phytate) content in oats that can bind with minerals and prevent absorption. I just start the soaking after dinner or before bedtime in a bowl inside my electric Instant Pot pressure multi-cooker (with a trivet and water in the liner pot) and cook it in the morning – it’s so easy and finishes cooking in a few minutes (soaked oats also cook very fast in a regular pan on the stove or in the microwave). I often also include a bit of untoasted buckwheat groats or buckwheat flour with the soaking oats because buckwheat contains a substantial amount of phytase (oats don’t contain much phytase, and human digestive systems don’t make very much); phytase is an enzyme that breaks down grains’ high phytate content).
Essentially, the traditional method (pre-industrial) of preparing oats and other grains by soaking before cooking improves digestibility, nutrition content, as well as neutralizes problematic anti-nutrient compounds that are high in all grains (soaking imitates nature – contact with moisture initiates the seeds’ sprouting process by neutralizing sprouting inhibitors – but it also makes seeds easier to digest). When my dad was a kid in the 30s and 40s, oatmeal containers always included instructions to soak before cooking, but for some reason they don’t now, so that knowledge has been lost by the generations raised on processed, packaged foods. More info is at http://www.westonaprice.org/beginner-videos/proper-preparation-of-grains-and-legumes-video-by-sarah-pope