Cooking with Radishes and Oat Berries

In my humble opinion, radishes are greatly under-appreciated, as are whole oat berries. So this colorful summer salad celebrates them both!

If you’ve never cooked with oat berries, you’ve been missing out. While pricey quinoa grown halfway around the globe has become uber-trendy, good old oats have been here all along, grown all over the local countryside. Not only are oats local, but they rival quinoa and other whole grains in nutrient content.

Oat berries, also known as "oat groats", consist of the whole oat grain, before it’s rolled flat into the familiar breakfast porridge cereal we know. As a whole grain, oat berries can be cooked just as you would farro or wheat berries, which is to say you cook it like pasta in a big pot of salted boiling water. It takes a while to cook, up to an hour, but by soaking the grain overnight, the cooking time is reduced and the digestibility of an already highly digestible grain is increased. Once the grain is cooked to perfection (it should be chewy, not mushy or crunchy) it is drained. And I like to also rinse it well in cold water. (Without a good rinse, oats can have a cloudy and slightly viscous residue from the cooking water and the texture can be a bit reminiscent of porridge, which doesn’t lend itself well to salads and other uses). When cooked to perfection and rinsed well, oat berries lend themselves beautifully to grain and vegetable salads. You can also serve them as a substitute for rice.

In terms of nutrition, oat berries are high in protein, high in fiber, and rich in minerals like iron and phosphorus. Oats are also highly digestible and gluten-free. I recommend buying organically-grown oats whenever possible since conventionally-grown oats are sprayed with glyphosate herbicide just days before harvest, leaving behind residues that frequently show up at high levels in pesticide residue tests.

As for radishes, they come in so many shapes, sizes, and colors! I recommend buying them at your local farmer’s market. Chances are they will be freshly harvested (ie: more crunch and flavor!) and they are likely to come in more interesting varieties than the uniform grocery store red radishes. Not that there’s anything wrong with a lovely round red radish, but it’s fun to explore the multitude of radish varieties out there.

In the spring, I love growing an assortment of purple, pink, red, and white radishes in my garden. And in the fall, I like to grow the larger radish varieties like watermelon radish and daikon. I use them in salads, pickles, and they’re delicious roasted in the oven! And as you’ll see in the video, my chickens love to snack on the leaves, so it’s a great crop all around for everyone.

I hope you enjoy this simple summer salad and that you feel inspired to experiment with whole oat berries!