Skip to the tek if you don't care about my thought process, I won't feel bad lol.
I originally wanted a good no-soak oat prep but decided it was a hassle to make a good one. I also realized you don't get that sweet delicious grain water for agar/LC with no-soak, so I shifted my attention to speeding up and streamlining traditional oat prep.
Most oat preps include a lengthy drying time, usually hours to overnight, before they can be loaded in jars to be PC'd, lest you get burst and soggy oats with pools of water in your jars. Often using these teks with longer cook times I get overhydrated and burst oats, even if I dry them for 24 hours. Obvious solution is cook them for a shorter time, but that still leaves the issue of the dry time, and sometimes I'd still get grains that were a bit overhydrated after PC'ing when they looked really good going in.
I don't know about you, but I can't be fucked to let a bunch of oats hang around to dry out overnight on the counter or in the fridge. My kitchen isn't that big, and I have shit to do and grain to sterilize. Not trying to reinvent the wheel, just make it spin a little faster.
TEK: This tek may require some dialing in for your particular oats/stove, but it's pretty hard to fuck up beyond salvage. It was also made with jars in mind, spawn bag notes are at the bottom.
First, get your stockpot or PC and fill it with the appropriate amount of water (roughly 2-3x the volume of oats), use hot water from the sink if you can to speed things up, put the lid on and get it on the stove set to max.
While the water heats, weigh out your oats. I do anywhere from 200-220g of oats per jar. For a 10 jar PC cycle, I went on the lower side tonight for g2g receivers.

Now here's a super hack I found somewhere, I cannot recall where but shout out to that person because it's great: Strainer Bags
You can also find them at home depot/lowes and they might be sold as paint bags, honestly any mesh bag that can be boiled and hold a good bit of weight is fine. I got the 5 gallon size and that fits 10 jars of oats easily with room to expand, if you're using spawn bags instead of jars then you might need to use two. Safe to boil, reusable, and convenient as all hell.
Put the oats in the bag


Elastic opening is great cause you can just put the whole bowl in the bag and dump it out inside. I do this over the sink because it's sometimes a bit dusty, especially if you put DE in your oats.
Tie it off. I like to use a piece of chopstick, twist the end a little and fold it over and use a rubber band to hold it together. Saves the trouble of tying/untying a knot. Chopstick slides out, rubber band comes off easily. Tie it near the top so the oats have room to expand.

Hopefully by now your water is pretty hot, if not go smoke some or make a taco. You don't need a rolling boil, I just look for lots of steam and small bubbles on the inside of the pot like below. Drop your bag of oats in. I like to ease it in and shake it around a bit to spread out the oats and gently rest the knot on top so it can be grabbed later.

Put the lid on, turn the heat off, and set a timer for 25-30 minutes. If you think your water isn't hot enough, you can leave the heat on but your mileage may vary.
Once done, I use a pair of tongs to grab the bag. I pull it out slowly to let the water drain out as it lifts. Lightens the load. If it's still too heavy use a spoon on the bottom for support with your other hand. I also move my pc next to my sink first so it doesn't drip all over the floor/counter. This also leaves you with a delicious pot of sweet ass grain water
This is where the paint bag really comes in handy. No more lifting a heavy ass, recently boiling ass pot full of oats trying to pour it into a colander and splashing hot grain water everywhere.
Put the bag in the sink with or without a colander, but the colander makes these next steps a bit easier. Your oats will be hot and steamy. We do not want this. Rinse them with cool water from the sink. The bag is your friend again, as you can simply flip it over to hit the bottom/sides with cool water. Once they're nice and cool, shake the water out. The bag can support the weight of the wet oats alone but I wouldn't test it with shaking the water out, you can see the seams starting to stretch on the bottom of this bag but I've been using it for a few months. Support the bottom with your other hand while lifting and shaking to release water, or just use the colander's handles and shake the water out. Give it a good number of shakes until water is no longer splashing out.

Once most of the excess water is removed, lay them out as best you can to let more water run off. I use a wide and shallow box(quart jar 12 pack boxes work great) with a towel in it and a screen over it. More surface area the better. Spread em and mix em up to remove any remaining excess water. While you're doing this, pick out any bits of corn or other bullshit, and any soggy and broken oats without hulls that you come across. No need to be anal about it, but I find those to be what makes jars icky, especially after a shake as they smear on the insides of the jar. This problem was a lot worse when I was using other oat teks that cook them more before PC'ing. This way they don't turn to a gooey mess.
The oats will be wet to the touch, and they should be a bit underdone. I took the hull off one and pinched it, you can see the starch still solid white inside the partially hydrated oat. This is fine, this means it has room for more water. Good thing, cause they're pretty wet still.
This part can be skipped, but I'd really shake the hell out of that bag if you do, and then let it continue to drain for a bit and shaking it again, but we're trying to speed things along not wait around for oats.

After spreading and mixing for a few minutes, load up your jars. I usually go for between the 500 and 600mL lines, as they will expand a little. There may be moisture in your jars from the oats already, that's fine. However, if you have water pooling on the bottom of the jar then they're still too wet. I have a few unhulled oats here as I'm nearing the bottom of my bag, but luckily they aren't all the way cooked and soggy and gross and will be fine at be at the end.

Have you been keeping track of time? Should have been about an hour or so since we started, and that's being stoned and going slow because I'm writing up a tek and taking pictures while I do it. Once your jars are ready, put them in the PC and set it up for a two hour cycle, 3qts water with a sploosh of vinegar, 16-18psi, etc you oughta know how to use a PC by now. Some people say 90 minutes is enough, but oats are pretty grody sometimes and we're technically finishing the hydration process so the extra 30 minutes is pretty important. Besides, we saved all that time not having to let them dry.
Ta-da, 3 hour oats, give or take a little time for PC pressure to come up/down. Obviously these can't be used right away as they need to cool. Occasionally I'll get a few jars that still look a little wet when they come out of the PC. As they cool down the oats will absorb the water, and if you're like me where you prep your grain a day or two ahead of time they'll look perfect by the time it's ready to be used.
Results: Fresh out of PC Post-shake

Nary a burst grain in sight. A bit of condensation and moisture pre shake is fine but if you have water pooling at the bottom that's not good but it could still be usable in a few days and a few shakes.
Still a small amount of moisture showing post shake, but these are still pretty hot as it's only been like 20 minutes or so. I usually let them cool a bit longer, but you still want them to be pretty warm when you shake them. Once they're all the way cooled, give em one more shake and they should be ready to go.
The morning after, roughly 9 hours later, fully cooled and shaken once more after being moved to the Mush-Room:

NOTES FOR SPAWN BAGS: I made this tek with jars in mind, but the principle should still work. I'd imagine with spawn bags you'll want to PC for a bit longer, maybe dry for a little longer too. However, I would think people who use bags prep so much grain at once they don't mind letting it dry while they pc batches of bags. Anyone with experience with bags feel free to chime in.
Well, thanks for reading
-------------------- No one likes a naysayer It's probably fine. Even if it's not fine, it'll eventually be fine. So it's fine. PE Adventure
Photosynthesis: A Morning Ritual Ballzagna's Tek Compendium and Notes for Noobs 
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