Haydninvienna is doing porridge!

Well, that depends. "Doing porridge" is old-fashioned British slang for serving a sentence of imprisonment. What I'm doing is investigating a foodstuff, inspired partly by MrsLee's experiments with smoothies and partly by this book:

Just for the sake of clearness, the title is Porridge & Muesli. The copy I'm looking at was published in the UK, but the book originates from Sweden, and there's a definite Nordic cast to the recipes. Thus there's lots of recipes using oats, and some using barley, wheat, rye and rice, but none using polenta or grits. (There is one that includes potato, but has rye or barley as well.)

For the sake of this exercise, "porridge" basically means a grain (milled or not), cooked in a liquid. "Grain" includes true cereals (wheat, maize, oats and whatnot) and "pseudo-cereals" such as buckwheat and amaranth. Again, for this exercise, the liquid will be water or milk, but not stock (thus keeping out risotto and pilaf). I say "basically" because it may include fried porridge (a suggestion in the book), which sounds weird but is a regular treatment for polenta, which by my definition is a porridge.

I've been eating porridge on and off for most of my life. In my youth this meant rolled oats cooked in water, or occasionally a now-gone product called Breakfast D-Light, which was basically wheat semolina. Later in life I went over to cooking the oats in milk, and using a microwave oven to do so. The microwave cooks ordinary rolled oats quite well, although it takes longer with them than with than any of the quick-cooking or instant varieties. At times I have been known to put peanut butter in it.

I'm not limiting myself to the recipes in the book. Adam Liaw has a couple of porridge recipes on the SBS Food website, one at least of which I intend to try: Buttered Oats with Masala Chai Sugar. Actually, if you search "porridge" on the SBS Food website you will find lots of inspiration.

I'm not doing this in the interest of health, particularly, just of interesting breakfasts. A propos of which, earlier in the week Mrs H and I visited an organic grocer nearish to us, and they had lots of stuff that might be useful, but jeez Louise, the prices! They had Bob's Red Mill organic rolled oats (unstabilised, I assume, although I don't think it specified) for A$21 for a 2-lb bag. I've just bought a 500-gram packet of organic unstabilised rolled oats from my local supermarket and paid A$3.50 for it. That makes the Bob's one pretty close to 3 times the price. If you want to eat healthy, for the organic grocer's definition of healthy, you evidently need to be rich. Healthy isn't for us poor folk.

So I intend to make recipes, from the book and elsewhere, sporadically over the next few months (since it's coming into what passes for winter here), and report on what I find.

Oooh, sounds intesting! I am looking forward to reading about your journey in the land of porridge ;-) Starring this topic and wishlisting the book.

>1 haydninvienna: Wow on the price of the organic oats. We have Bob's here and I haven't looked at the prices recently, but will do so today as we are making a trip to the store and I need rye flour.

I do know that organic products cost more, and sometimes are organic in name only. Labeling laws here in the states suck.

Have fun on your breakfast adventure! I look forward to reading about it. If you rule out stock, does that mean you can't have congee? My daughter made it once for me and it was such a comforting breakfast, but I don't know what she used to make it. Might have been milk.

Bob's Red Mill Organic Scottish Oatmeal is my #1 oat because it's the tastiest I ever had AND it cooks in minutes. But I do keep a bag of steel cut around, for when I feel virtuous... and have time to spare for stirring the stuff. Of late the prices have gone through the roof but I have porridge only a few times in a week.

Having been to the store and looked over the Bob's Red Mill organic selection, I can confirm that here in California, the cost averages about $5 for a 1 lb. bag of ground grain. $4.75 being the most common price, but going up as high as $7.48. I purchased the dark rye flour ($4.75). I also purchased a bag of einkorn flour ($7 not a Bob's Red Mill product) to experiment with. It said you can make porridge with it, but I may need to get a coarser grind to do so. When we were first married there was a product called Wheat Hearts that we used for hot cereal. Sadly they don't make that anymore. They have something called Cream of Wheat, which is not the same. The closest I have come to Wheat Hearts was a ground grain product I found in an Indian grocery store. The store is too far away for convenience to me.

Who would have thought there'd be so much interest in porridge!

>3 MrsLee: I'm not sure about tackling congee, but who knows? My understanding is that generic congee is cooked in water, but I can see no reason why stock couldn't be used. My problem with congee is that so much of its appeal seems to be based on the additions — spring onions*, bonito flakes, meat floss, and a million other things. I can probably get most of these — it's a very mixed community here and every shopping centre has an Asian supermarket — but for the time being I'll stay reasonably close to my comfort zone.

>4 LolaWalser: I've never actually tried steel-cut oats. Maybe I should. I used to see it in Ireland (Flavahan's brand, natch) but Flavahan's also make a rolled oats which is available in England, and which I did try and didn't like.

>5 MrsLee: As I said, there used to be something called Breakfast D-Light in Australia, which would be the equivalent of your Wheat Hearts. Those and Cream of Wheat are probably all wheat semolina. But as there are two kinds of wheat (durum and soft), there are two kinds of semolina. All the semolina I can see in supermarkets or on the net is durum semolina, which makes sense since it's used for making pasta. (Or so I understand.) Your Indian grocery store probably sold you sooji, which is semolina.

Well, I thought I should start from the basics, so I tried the ur-porridge (at least if you're a Scot) — with butter and salt. Never actually tried it this way before. However, I broke with tradition by cooking it in the microwave oven (6 minutes in 3 2-minute bursts in our 1200-watt oven) and using milk rather than water. Verdict: not bad, and may be worth repeating. Suddenly remembered that Tony Hancock (anybody?) explained why so many doctors seemed to come from Scotland: "It's the porridge, you know.".

I also remember Peter van Rensselaer Livingston's story about egg recipes: that one year when money was tight and his game chicken flock long, he started trying all the egg recipes from A to Z, "but became very weary after Eggs, Jockey Club"."

*US scallions.

>5 MrsLee: There's a recipe in the book called "Wheat flour porridge with butter". It looks to me very much like a cooked blonde roux made from wheat flour (fineness not specified) with a chunk of butter melted into it. Might give that one a miss, I think.

>3 MrsLee: Organic labelling law in Australia has a modicum of teeth, and is enforced from time to time. There are standards that food labelled as "organic" should meet — that is, compliance is voluntary, but the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's product labelling guide says that "If you claim that your produce is organic in line with any standard, your produce or product must meet requirements outlined in that standard or you risk making a misleading claim" (pages 19 and 20), and exposing yourself to enforcement action. Compliance with the standards for products that are to be exported is mandatory. (The reason why overseas consumers appear to be better protected than Australian ones probably has to do with the limits to the Commission's powers under the Australian Constitution — export is a matter for Commonwealth law, but consumer protection generally within Australia is not.)

>6 haydninvienna: When my daughter made the congee it was very simple. Maybe it had a little ginger in it? She made for me as my first food after 3 days of extremely painful food poisoning and all that goes with it. It was the first time in those 3 days that I thought I might live, so I have fond memories.

>7 haydninvienna: Yeah, I would make that my last choice.

>8 haydninvienna: Here I think the ingredient list has to be accurate, other than that, it's fair game. Your best bet is to look for the seal of approval from a few organizations that are diligent.

I use a rolled oat from Costco. Not sure you have that store in Australia? Anyway, it has been sprouted (soaked) and then dried. Supposedly better for digestion, although I believe there is more than one opinion on that. They take longer to cook than quick oats and have a firmer texture, but since I use them mostly in smoothies, it doesn't matter.

>6 haydninvienna:

Steel-cut oats have more fibre per serving and the porridge tends to be "chewy"--more or less, depending on how long it's been cooked. That's as much as I know about it. There's also, to me, an undefinable taste difference, nothing dramatic, maybe a stronger nuttiness to the flavour? Anyway, they are considerably cheaper, so using them now and then also extends the shelf life of my preferred option.

>7 haydninvienna:

Sounds like the classic poor man's meal across every culture--almost anyone could get some water, some grain or seed to cook it in, and then if you could procure a spoonful of butter... a feast!

>10 LolaWalser: You also need some form of fuel to boil the grain, not to mention a container that can stand the heat.

Yesterday, rolled oats cooked on the stove, stirred assiduously (I well remember the PITA of cleaning a burnt saucepan) with a handful of chopped dried fruit and some jam for sweetening, or substantially what I'd been eating as overnight oats. Today, same without the dried fruit or jam, but with a spoonful of peanut butter and some honey. The latter is basically what I'd been doing in Doha. (I recalled that the reason I started using the microwave oven was that using the crappy stove in my flat in Doha was such a pain. Now I have a dinky little portable induction hob, and it works much better.) Verdict: both OK, and better than using the microwave oven.

>10 LolaWalser: , >11 MarthaJeanne: The very diversity of "porridge" shows how right this is. Grain, water, a cooking pot and fuel and you have dinner. The ultimately simple "porridge" was just the hulled grain (probably cracked), boiled*. The grain doesn't have to be farmed, of course. And in parts of Australia a basic foodstuff of the indigenous people was nardoo, the sporocarps of a fern, so not a seed at all. But they used to grind it and bake it. No cooking pots though.

*eg "frumenty", known in mediaeval Europe, which is basically just cracked wheat berries, boiled. I think the ancient Greeks had a barley porridge as well. Occurs to me that frumenty is pretty close to an exact equivalent to steel-cut oats. And at a slightly more advanced level there is the Neapolitan Easter tart called pastiera, which I understand to be filled with cooked wheat berries flavoured with orange flower water. Apparently in Italy at the right time of year you can buy precooked wheat in cans, specifically for this dish.

First recipe actually from the book: oat bran porridge. Rather to my surprise, not bad at all. The resulting porridge is rather like semolina in texture, and is similar to ordinary rolled oat porridge in flavour. The book's recipe uses half a cup of oat bran, a generous cup of water (I used milk, of course) and a pinch of salt. For serving add a blob of Benecol (a plant-based allegedly-cholesterol-lowering margarine, apparently not available in Australia) and some blueberry puree. According to my doctor, my cholesterol levels are quite satisfactory, so I used ordinary butter. As I said, not bad, and I will be repeating this.

Pura, which is essentially polenta, Bosnian style, from SBS Food in Australia. Verdict: edible, but probably better without the buttermilk. I will try this again in more conventional (for me) breakfast fashion.

Of the vast number of porridges made from cornmeal, I have personal experience so far only of polenta, mamaliga (the Rumanian version, via my daughter and her Rumanian partner) and n'shima/ugali/mealiepap/whatever. N'shima was how it was shown on the menu of a pretty good resort hotel I stayed in in Zambia a few years ago.

>14 haydninvienna: Mieliepap and sheba (a sauce based on tomatoes) feature on the takeaway menu at Skukuza, where the combination is to be recommended. I've also had it recently from a takeaway in our neighbourhood; also good.

>15 hfglen: Seems like a not too distant relative of polenta with rage Bolognese ...

>16 haydninvienna: Possibly closer to Napolitana with African seasoning; the protein in both cases was boerewors served alongside.

ETA: Polenta around here is normally yellow; mieliepap / putu / sadza / ugali / whatever is almost always white, and often not as tasty.