The Best Rolled Oats

All oats start as a thick seed from the oat plant; whole oats—called “groats”—resemble grains of brown rice. Groats can be sold whole; chopped into smaller pieces to make “steel-cut” (also known as “Irish”) oats; steamed and then squashed into flat disks for “rolled” (sometimes called “old-fashioned”) oats; or cooked, dried, and rolled ultrathin for “quick” or “instant oats.” Oats are naturally gluten-free, so any products labeled as such simply means those oats were kept in segregated fields and away from equipment used to mill other grains. So which do you choose?

Well, it depends on what you’re making. We prefer rolled oats for baked goods, since their thin, flat shape gives cookies, bars, and toppings just the right amount of chew. And though our preference is always for steel-cut oats in oatmeal—their thicker texture makes a heartier porridge—they typically require an overnight soak or 40 minutes on the stove. Rolled oats take between 5 and 20 minutes to make oatmeal, so they’re a good option if you want oatmeal but don’t have time for steel-cut. Thus, if you’re going to have only one kind of oats in your pantry, rolled oats are the most versatile.

We rounded up five packages of rolled oats with the goal of finding the best product for baking or making oatmeal. Our tasters sampled each product as oatmeal (cooked according to the instructions on the package) and in our recipe for Classic Chewy Oatmeal Cookies; for the cookies, we weighed the oats for each batch (our baking recipes give volume and weight measurements for most dry ingredients, and we’ve found that weights are more accurate and consistent).

The time it took for each product to cook into oatmeal varied—from as little as 3 to 5 minutes for most oats to as long as 20 minutes for one product billing its oats as “extra-thick.” Though three contenders—including the extra-thick oats—made oatmeal that was hearty, two were borderline unpalatable: one too clumpy and dry and the other a gluey mass of goop. Worse, some tasters picked up on a metallic, chemical taste in the mushy oats; all other products were praised for their nutty, earthy flavor.

While texture issues in oatmeal can often be fixed with tweaks to liquid amounts and cooking times, we found that the same problems peeked through in cookies, too. Products that were mushy or parched in oatmeal made cookies that were a tad dense or dry. And that metallic flavor? A few tasters also picked up on it in cookies made with the same oats. That said, tasters liked all the cookies they tried (c’mon, they’re cookies, after all). We were perplexed, however, by the appearance of cookies made with the “extra-thick” oats; they spread into flat disks with crispy edges in the oven, and while they tasted fine, they lacked the thick and chewy texture our recipe promises.

Wondering if our results were just a fluke, we baked batches of Cowboy Cookies with the thicker oats and with the two top-performing products. Once again, the extra-thick oats produced cookies that were skinny, stretched out, and lacy, while cookies made with the other products were fine. What was going on?

There wasn’t a noticeable difference when we looked at the raw extra-thick oats next to standard rolled oats. But we’ve learned to never trust our eyes, so we painstakingly counted out 100 oats from each product and weighed them on a lab-grade scale. We then did the math to extrapolate how many oats were in 1 ounce of each product.

It turned out that the microscopic differences in thickness and heft added up on the scale. Extra-thick oats had about 1,114 oats per ounce, while our preferred oats had an average of about 1,200 oats per ounce. That may not seem like a huge difference, but when you consider that there are 9 ounces of oats in our standard cookie recipe, that’s more than 700 fewer oats to soak up liquid and provide structure. It’s no wonder that cookies made with extra-thick oats spread so thin. It also helps explain the longer cooking time for oatmeal: Added heft meant this product needed more time on the stove to absorb the water. However, products with more oats per ounce weren’t always better: One had almost 1,600 oats per ounce, and its finer flakes quickly disintegrated in water, resulting in mushy oatmeal and dense cookies.

Ultimately, we preferred midsize rolled oats with about 1,200 pieces per ounce. Any smaller and they turned out mushy oatmeal and cookies lacking chew; any larger and they changed our recipes. Our winner, Bob’s Red Mill Old Fashioned Rolled Oats, makes creamy oatmeal in about 10 minutes and perfectly formed, chewy cookies.