Why do traditional oats have to be cooked three times before they can be eaten?

"Three ripe" means that oats are fried first and then ground, flour is kneaded when cooked, and steamed when processed into food. "Triple cropping" is a traditional oat food processing method explored by residents in oat producing areas in the process of eating oats for more than 2,000 years. "Three-cooked" food mainly refers to oat flour food, including oat flour, oat nest, oat jiaozi, oat fish, oat cave, oat puppet and other products. The reason why the traditional oat food is "three cooked" is mainly because of the following reasons:

(1) Oats are high in fat, so it is not as convenient as wheat to make flour, so they need to be "fried". Oat seeds have low hardness and high fat content, and are easy to block, grind and sieve. Deep frying is needed to improve the flour yield of oats.

(2) To prolong the storage time of oat flour, it is necessary to "fry". Active lipase in oats will lead to rancidity, spicy taste, microbial growth and shortened shelf life, so it is necessary to fry and inactivate the enzyme.

(3) It is conducive to the formation of dough and needs to be "cooked". Because oat flour does not contain wet gluten, it cannot form dough like wheat flour. To form oat dough, it is necessary to scald noodles with hot water to gelatinize starch, and form dough through the adhesion between starch particles.

(4) When eating, it needs to be cooked to make the starch fully gelatinized.