The early history of cultivated oats is not clear. For centuries oats were considered to be a weed in barley and wheat fields. Oats took root in northern Europe and particularly in Scotland.
Oat mills made their appearance in Scotland, in 18th centuries, typically incorporating kilns for roasting the grain. After being heat-processed, the oats went through a so-called groat machine, which removed the hulls by the action of a fan.
Scottish people have kept fit and strong for centuries with oats as a staple food.
Almost all oatmeal available in the United States during the early 19th century was imported from Scotland and Canada and sold primarily in pharmacies.
In the new world, the French coureurs de bois recorded the division of labor in the harvesting and cooking of wild oats among the Illiniwek. The men harvested the grains by shaking them into a passing canoe; women then cleaned them of chaff and spread them on wooden lattice over a fore for several days.
Then the oats is putting in skin bags, forced it into the holes in the ground, treaded out the grain, winnowed it, reduce it to meal, boiled in water and seasoned it in bear grease.
As the oat grain has evolved, so have different cultivars of oats that can be grown and bred for unique processing, manufacturing and even nutritional qualities.
Oat milling in the United States developed and became increasingly centralized throughout the nineteenth century as large oat milling companies became established. The early oatmeal tended to be very floury, as oat groats were ground on millstones, with sifting to remove some but not all of the resulting flour.
Oat milling took a great step forward with the invention of a groat-cutting machine by Ehrrichsen in 1877. Ehrrichsen was employed in an oatmeal mill owned by Ferdinand Schumacher, of Akron, Ohio, who was the known as the oats meal King and later was one of the founders of The Quaker Oats Company.
The groat-cutting device aided in the formation of granular or steel-cut oatmeal, which produced a cooked cereal with a superior texture, containing little or no fine flour, even without sifting.
Subsequently, steel-cut groats were rolled into flakes to form quick cooking oats similar to the most popular cook-up oat cereal of today.
It is the company’s greatest contribution to kitchen efficiency where a quick cooking Quaker Oats introduced in 1922, which recued preparation time form fifteen to five minutes.
History of Oats Processing
