Traditional and modern oat-based foods

Oats have traditionally been used mainly as oatmeal, bran or flakes, which are used to produce porridge, bread and breakfast cereals. Apart from porridge, which can be made from 100% oats, in most consumer products oats are added as an ingredient, to provide increased customer value. Most of the novel oat ingredients are bran or β-glucan-enriched oat fractions. Furthermore, in addition to the health-promoting and technologically versatile fiber fraction, oats contains high amount of fats with nutritionally beneficial fatty acid and lipid class composition, proteins rich in valuable amino acids, and unique phenolic compounds, such as avenanthramides, among other minor nutrients. However, only a small minority of oat crops is processed to food and other valuable products, and most of the harvested oats are used for animal feeding purposes. The kinetics of β-glucan solubility and the tendency to form very viscous shear thinning gels varies in different oat products. Thus, modern oat ingredients are suitable for various types of food applications without the adverse effects that were evident in conventional oat products. These novel ingredients are available in various forms with different composition, appearance and taste, and different technological functionality. This chapter introduces oats as a food raw material, its composition and its technological properties. It presents different types of oat products and some examples of production technologies, summarizes current knowledge on the health-promoting effects of oats, and discusses the future trends for oat products. Oat products are divided into traditional and novel oat products.