Hi Rachel,

I love that you’ve ordered some naked oats from Hodmedods. They’re such a wonderful supplier. Yes you can use your Mockmill to mill them. Just this morning I made porridge with Hodmedods naked oats that I ground on setting 20 in my Mockmill 100.

Grinding them in a stone mill results in a varied texture – some very fine particles and some very chunky particles. If you want to create something that’s uniform (i.e. more aligned with oatmeal that you might buy from a UK supplier), you need to use sieves. I have written about this in this post: https://ancestralkitchen.com/2025/05/03/how-to-make-stone-ground-oats-oatmeal-in-the-mockmill/

In addition to using the Mockmill, you could also buy a flaker. I have a Marcato Marga mill, which is hand-cranked and easily produces flaked oats for me. Otherwise you can cook them whole as you would rice. I hope this helps – enjoy!

The message that you got back from the supplier confirms that these are naked oats. All other oats have to be steam-treated to stop the process of rancidity that is kicked off when the incredibly hard hulls are taken off.

I have also found that sometimes naked oats are not as well hulled as they should be. The hull is paper-thin and therefore easy to remove but I think doing this in large quantities with machines is a fallible process. Hence why you are dealing with some of these paper hulls still left on.

The response that you got from your supplier (which I saw in my email) does not answer your question. Yes they’ve told you that they need to be frozen because they haven’t been stabilised but they haven’t addressed the fact that they’re not taking the hulls off properly.

A few photos of the oats and peeled off hull.

Actually I’ll have to learn more. It took a bit of effort to remove the hulls. The farm is fairly local.

I believe so, Alison. I bought them at a co-op in the bins so I reached out to the farm supplier. The message I got back from them is that they have not been steam treated for shelf stability. I had frozen them without thinking about the significance of their being raw groats. Very flavorful.

Is this naked oats Julie?

I was surprised to realize that some (very few) of my oats were still in the hulls. Now that I take the time to go through them all before flaking them I can finally cook up creamy porridge. I wonder if that’s a good sign (that they weren’t over processed) or a quality problem. I do rather enjoy searching for and peeling the hulls now that I’ve resolved that confusing problem. Thanks for this great information, Alison.

Lovely to hear from you from all the way over in Australia! You definitely can get whole oat groats in Australia – I have some followers there who buy them. I’m not sure about stone-ground oatmeal though, I’ve yet to know of it there.