Groats are nutritious but can be difficult to chew, so they are often soaked before cooking. Groats are used as an ingredient in soup, porridge, bread, and vegetable-based milk.
Groats of many cereals are the basis of kasha, a porridge-like staple meal of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In North America kasha or kashi usually refers to roasted buckwheat groats in particular.
In North India, cut or coarsely ground wheat groats are known as dalia and are commonly prepared with milk into a sweet porridge or with vegetables and spices into salty preparations.
In Yemen, boiled groats are eaten as a hot breakfast cereal, known as harish, and topped with clarified butter (samneh), or with honey.[1] In Palestine and Syria, the same dish is known locally as ğarīš (Arabic: جَرِيش), which may also refer to the farinaceous dish of semolina.
Groats are also used in some sausages, such as black puddings. A traditional dish from the Black Country in England is groaty pudding (not to be confused with groats pudding). Groaty pudding is made from soaked groats, leeks, onions, beef, and beef stock, and baked up to 16 hours; it is a traditional meal on Guy Fawkes Night.[2]
Sliced oat groats are known as steel-cut oats, pinhead oats, coarse or Irish oatmeal.
From the top: fine, medium, and coarsely cut oat groats (i.e. steel-cut oats) Bottom: uncut oat groats
The grain is cleaned, sorted by grain, size and peeled (if necessary) before being hulled. Additionally, the grains can be sliced on a "groat cutter", which can be adjusted to cut fine, medium, or coarse groats. Regardless, thereafter the groats are freed from any adhering parts of the shell by a brushing machine. In the case of cut groats, their fragments are sorted according to size by sieving.
