This Canned Ingredient Does Wonders For Boring Breakfast Oatmeal

Oatmeal is one of the best breakfast staples you can eat when you're looking for a warm and comforting dish to begin your day. However, while using milk instead of water to make oatmeal will produce creamier results, those looking for an even better outcome need to add another dairy ingredient to improve the dish even more. Using sweetened condensed milk in your oatmeal recipe is an old-school trick to give the dish a boost in creaminess and sweetness. Even just a small scoop of the ingredient can produce a rich, sugary version of the classic dish.

Sweetened condensed milk — which is made by evaporating the water within milk and adding sugar to it — has a consistency that can't quite replace milk itself in your oatmeal recipe, but can be added alongside the milk and other mix-ins before you cook it to achieve a uniform flavor and texture. Alternatively, if you want to make the dish even more noticeably sweet, mixing the sweetened condensed milk into the dish after the fact will do just that. While sweetened condensed milk is much better suited as an additional upgrade rather than a full replacement for your water or milk, it undoubtedly gives oatmeal a complete overhaul, making it creamier and much more decadent in all the best ways.

While sweetened condensed milk isn't a total replacement for milk or water in oatmeal, evaporated milk — which is essentially sweetened condensed milk without the added sugar — can be used as a replacement for either ingredient to great effect. Because evaporated milk doesn't have the added sugar that sweetened condensed milk does, its texture is much more fitting to be the vehicle for creamy oatmeal. In fact, using evaporated milk as a replacement for standard milk is what makes avena — also known as Mexican oatmeal — so unique and delicious.

However, while the use of evaporated milk works wonders to give oatmeal a superb texture, it doesn't enhance its overall sweetness in the same way that sweetened condensed milk does. To fix this, you can always add a scoop of sweetened condensed milk, but adding honey is also widely recommended as one of the best ways to make the meal sweeter. Ingredients like brown sugar and maple syrup can also produce great results for your dish. Or, if you don't need your dish to be especially sweet, you can instead top it with some dried fruits, walnuts, or spices like cinnamon or nutmeg to give a massive upgrade to your creamy bowl of oatmeal.