The story of Oats
Oats have one of the more unusual origin stories among grains. They are usually treated as a secondary crop: a weed that grew among wheat and barley, and was gradually taken into cultivation. As those two cereals spread west into cooler, wetter lands, the oat weed did well there, and farmers began to keep it. Genetic evidence places the ancestor of cultivated oats, the wild oat Avena sterilis, in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.
For a long time oats were not respected. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew mainly the wild oat, saw it as a weed in grain fields, and the Roman writer Pliny considered it a threat to barley. Domesticated oats appear relatively late, in Bronze Age Europe, where their tolerance of cool, wet summers made them valuable. They are particularly important in north-western Europe, and oats still turn up in porridge, oatcakes and brose across Scotland and Scandinavia.
Oats make it gentle. Not much else to say.
In India, oats are a recent arrival on the plate, and many families first met them as a breakfast porridge. But the grain has a surprising amount to offer a roti. Oat flour is mild and creamy, it soaks up water and softens a dough, and it brings soluble fibre, the same kind of fibre barley is known for.
We use oats in small amounts, around 10 to 15 percent in blends such as First Light and Easy Evening. Beyond 15 percent a dough gets sticky and hard to roll, so a small share is the sweet spot.
