#125 – Just Right: The Story of Porridge (& The Best Ways To Cook It)

Humans have been eating porridge (of which the American oatmeal is just one example) for, as you’ll hear, at least 32,000 years (that places it comfortably in the ‘paleo diet’ era!) Listen in to hear us cover just some of the history of this word and the comforting dish associated with it, as well as taking a tour of the many, many ways it is made throughout the world. Then we’ll focus in on oats – sharing surprising ways in which oat porridge has been served and eaten in the United Kingdom. We’ll also explain the different types of oats used, the best ways to cook porridge and the myriad ways you can serve it.

If you love a bowl of steaming, creamy oatmeal, get ready to wrap your hands around this enlightening, inspiring episode.

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Resources:

Millet Polenta

Different Types of Oats and How to Use Each the Traditional Way

Heritage Oat Collection

What is Sowans?

Ollebrod recipe

How to Roll Your Own Oats (and 3 Good Reasons to do It!)

Gerty Milk article

Episode 70: Fermenting Oats

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Hello, Allison. How are you today?

Alison:
Yeah, I’m good, thank you, Andrea. How are you?

Andrea:
I’m also quite well, quite good. I’m just actually, it’s kind of warm here. It’s not freezing cold. I was outside multiple times this morning with the generator, as you know, and I had bundled up to go out because I was expecting it to be freezing, but it actually wasn’t that cold. It was just kind of weird, but okay.

Alison:
That’s happened here we had.

Andrea:
Snow yeah same last.

Alison:
Week and now it’s gone.

Andrea:
Really mild.

Alison:
So i think we’re kind of yeah we’ve got some kind.

Andrea:
Of the kids were sledding and we’ve still got a pile of snow that camille had heaped up so yeah interesting i’m always surprised by how many similarities there are between, You and I, in the way we think, when we were recently trying to choose some fonts and we both voted the same first and the same second and the same maybe third alternate. And then when we had the logo, we both voted our same favorite, same second favorite, and same nope. And even when I wanted as a surprise to send Gabriel a book for Christmas and you picked up the package and you thought, oh, this feels like the one I got in. They’re from the same author in the same series. And we’ve never discussed those books before ever. It was so funny. But you did get him a different one in the series, thank goodness. So I just thought that was really funny. So, well, wondering what you’ve eaten, because you know I always want to know.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. We had leftovers, but intentional leftovers. I guess they’re still leftovers. I made a big batch of a minestrone soup. And I think a kind of minestrone is sort of a catch-all really now for me. But it’s a tomato-y soup. and we had, I made a massive, the biggest saucepan I own, I made a massive one a couple of days ago with onions and celery and mushrooms and butternut squash, which is delicious, still going and still beautiful even though, you know, it’s New Year. Lots of kale, lots of cavallonero. It was the dark, dark kale, which, you know, you can just cook that for forever and it still tastes amazing. Some cabbage.

Alison:
A few of the homodods peas which I cooked in the pressure cooker beforehand and I’m gluten-free at the moment so I didn’t put any spelt pasta in it which I sometimes do I actually just left it as it was didn’t put anything in and then I’ve portioned it out some of it’s in the freezer now and I think you know I’ll just maybe cook some rice if I want to put extra rice in and stir it into that portion maybe I’ll put some millet in maybe I won’t put anything in it’s got the squash there so it’s already got some carb in it and then I was going to serve it with meatballs I was going to cook meatballs with it um but when I was doing it a couple of days ago it took me so long to chop everything and I wanted to do some reading and I was getting I could feel myself getting a bit kind of angsty because I could see my reading time going out the window and I thought I’ve still got to make all these meatballs you know I’ve got to shape them and fry them and I just thought, I’m just going to put the ground beef into the minestrone it’ll be fine you know so I separated it as much as I could with my hands and stirred it in and so it’s kind of like a ground beef minestrone easy soup thing and um I froze a load and then we we kept some in the fridge and and I had that today with a slice of gluten-free bread which I made which was millet rice buckwheat um, psyllium husk, and I think that was it.

Alison:
Which turned out really nice I feel like there’s something so.

Andrea:
Safe maybe that feeling of having some frozen soup where you just know.

Alison:
There’s a meal I can eat right away.

Andrea:
If I need it.

Alison:
Yeah, it’s just there and it doesn’t, you know, on the days when we’re really busy, maybe Gabriel’s got an activity going on, Rob’s recording someone or, you know, something’s going on, I’m trying to work. It just, some of it I put in those super cubes that we’ve both got, you know, those individually portioned things. And so even then I know that, you know, if say Gabriel’s got a packed lunch and he’s going out, I could just pop two of those out for Rob and I. You know, I don’t have to defrost one that’s intended for three and then have some left over. I try to mix it up a bit in the freezer and it just, I feel calmer when I know that that’s in the freezer because if I don’t have the time.

Andrea:
Then it’s there.

Alison:
It makes a difference to me.

Andrea:
The girls are talking, well, I was going to say that the girls are talking about Supercubes just yesterday in the Discord.

Alison:
Oh, yeah.

Andrea:
And I think Rachel and Molly both got them for Christmas and so people are saying, you know, what should we put in them? And there’s, I guess, different people who kind of have a platform talking about what they freeze in their super cubes and dinner menus and things like that, which is kind of cool. So that was interesting. A little bit to learn about.

Alison:
What about you? Have you had some breakfast?

Andrea:
I did actually have breakfast. But what I had last night was a meal that we have almost every Monday. So I was going to say what it was, which is we make pasta. Usually the macaroni elbow shape which Jacob was going to bring them in the other day and he said what was what is that pasta you want me to get uh the arm or the wrist or something, but um I made myself a small amount of gluten-free pasta because I don’t have a lot of it yet but I just have a little bit and then Jacob made cheese sauce the recipe from the nourishing tradition for children. And then I opened a can of sardines. So it’s just pasta. Then we put cheese sauce on top. And then I put sardines on top of mine. The kids would eat it if I tossed it in. But I had then to deal with the baby got really fussy. And then by the time I came back with the sardines, they were already eating. So I was like, whatever, I’m just going to eat it on mine.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Which is okay. But that’s a really good, simple meal that we usually have on Mondays. yeah yeah okay.

Alison:
And does jacob always make the cheese sauce.

Andrea:
Yeah that’s usually his job usually he does that lunch yeah because he could do it all on his own so it was handy and i i can’t remember if i told you allison but my life changed over christmas because gary and the kids all got together and plotted and they got me a food processor which you know wow i’ve never had one And I’ve been very jealous of yours, We talked about it way back in the beginning Because you use it for shredding sauerkraut Because I was always wondering How do you get those tiny shreds? But If the only thing I did with it Was shred cheese I would be happy I do not like shredding cheese But I was able to shred five pounds Of cheese in the amount of time It usually takes me to dread Shredding cheese So Yeah.

Alison:
Well, you’ve got so many children that, you know, when you shred cheese and you like cheese, that’s a lot of cheese, isn’t it?

Andrea:
What I told Jacob was, well, since we have it out and it’s like already got cheese on it, we’ll just shred this whole thing. And then I told him we could even separate them and put them back in the freezer or do whatever we want. So, yeah, I just figured, you know, use it for all it’s worth when it’s out. So.

Alison:
Do you know where your sardines come from? I’m just looking at thinking about sardines because, you know, Gable does have tin fish sometimes because he doesn’t have egg, which is a bit of a downer. And also he’s not, you know, I’m not completely convinced he’s okay with dairy, particularly cow’s dairies. So he doesn’t have a lot of cheese. And so we do rely for him on fish. And I’ve always found it quite hard to find tin fish that I feel happy about. And I wondered, do you have a better supply over there of tin fish or are you not addressed that way?

Andrea:
So ours comes from Maine and it’s this brand called Bar Harbor and they come in pretty big tins, like almost seven ounce, which is good because if I’m opening one, maybe I want to like mix it into something for the whole family. I mean, you’d use probably two for everybody, but it’s nice, big ones. And I buy them through Azure Standard because I can buy cases of them. But I also get their mackerel. So I get their sardines and their mackerel. And I really like them both. And I think the hard thing is finding sardines that aren’t packed in soybean oil. So the…

Alison:
Oh, gosh.

Andrea:
Yeah. No, not even kidding. Oysters, too. If you’ve ever looked for canned smoked oysters, I mean, soybean oil, soybean oil, soybean oil. It’s everywhere. Or sunflower seed oil or whatever, some kind of a seed oil that’s probably rancid. So these ones are just the sardines and salt. So there’s no, you know, extras. And, you know, Brittany Elliott in the Discord group, she’s going gluten-free and she’s egg-free and dairy-free as well. So you could probably find some crossover ideas with her for Gabriel because she’s been doing that for a while.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I will. Okay.

Andrea:
Should we move on? Let me tell you what we’ve got.

Alison:
I’ve got a lot to talk about today.

Andrea:
We have a review from Molly Maverick titled The Grandmas I Never Had. She said, okay, I did have grandmas and neither one of these ladies are old enough to be my grandma. But the way that they teach me about and inspire me to pursue an old-fashioned kitchen, home, and life feels like the kind of thing a loving grandma does. I’m constantly thankful for their wisdom and passion on all things ancestral. Every word here on the podcast and all of the interactions in the online community they’ve created fuel me in my quest for a meaningful, beautiful life.

Alison:
I love that.

Andrea:
Yes. Thank you, Molly.

Alison:
I’m glad you said that we weren’t old enough to be your grandmas because I know Andrea isn’t, but I’m kind of heading in that direction.

Andrea:
We started very young.

Alison:
That’s really, really wonderful.

Andrea:
And that our children started very young.

Alison:
Maybe.

Andrea:
Yeah, exactly. We could pull it off.

Alison:
Yeah, maybe. I feel like I kind of resonate with what she said because, you know, part of the reason I started this journey you know on my side is because I do I mean I had grandmas um but they didn’t teach me about anything that you know we talk about or anything the journey that I’ve been on around food and I feel the lack of that very definitely I feel the lack of that and of roots kind of a feeling of like well where where am I what what is this stuff happening in the kitchen what is this food you know and and to part of me going on this quest was to try to re-embody that energy to find that somewhere and to create it with community create it with learnings create it with practical steps in the kitchen so I it’s really lovely that Molly said that I mean ancestral.

Andrea:
Kitchen you you were connecting to your ancestors even if they.

Alison:
Were a few.

Andrea:
Steps back so Yeah.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Before we dive into the topic for today, I do want to talk about the pork book, which if you haven’t listened to our first episode of , do go back and listen to it. And we have a book which Andrea lovingly put together and laid out.

Alison:
Which goes along with that episode, which is selling really well and people are loving it and talking about it and cooking up the recipes in it. Um you can find the book at ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash pork um and do if you get it and you cook the recipes from it do let us know how you find them and which ones are your favorites um because we’re really excited to start this year even just the first episode and we got a cookbook out neither of us saw that coming no exactly and i was like christmas i was like oh really are we doing another cookbook which is nice um i also wanted to say although there isn’t a special download for this episode there is a very relevant one which i put out recently which is my heritage oat collection which has three oat recipes in it and all of them historic and there’s information on kind of how they were originally made and what the recipes are and then you get the full recipes that’s a pdf which you can download and or print off and that’s available on my site which is ancestralkitchen.com forward slash heritage oats or one word just put your details in there and you can get a hold of that and that’s kind of related to what we’re going to talk about today which is another oat dish let’s go to an ad break first and we will come back.

Alison:
Okay, so this episode is all about porridge. And I wanted to start this episode completely with the transparency up front, because I didn’t really realize until I started doing this podcast with you, Andrea, that porridge is not really, for you, is not really what porridge is for me. So I’m going to ask you, what does the word porridge, first of all, mean to you, Andrea?

Andrea:
If I hear porridge, I think of Goldilocks. It’s not necessarily a word that I hear people use, in relation to what they’re about to eat. Although people might. It’s not like nobody knows what it means, but I’ve never heard anybody call their breakfast. I mean, maybe if it’s in the recipe name, they would say it. But it’s not a colloquial term. around here anyway.

Alison:
And so what does the word oatmeal mean?

Andrea:
Oatmeal makes me think of a hot bowl of cooked rolled oats, usually served with milk. In our house, we use maple syrup and we have for many years, but I always grew up with brown sugar. And if you go to, I suppose this is standard American food, if you go to a hotel and you go look in their breakfast area and they will have oatmeal with brown sugar. And then there will usually be a side of raisins as well. So I’m assuming that that brown sugar is pretty standard for people.

Alison:
Okay. So over this side of the Atlantic and also in Australia and kind of any of those territories that colonial England kind of got their fingers into, the word porridge means basically what you just described oatmeal as. So a bowl of hot cooked oats. In modern days, usually rolled oats, often cooked with milk. And we don’t often use maple syrup because it’s kind of not so local over here. But usually with brown sugar or blueberries or some kind of fruit, some nuts, perhaps honey on it. That’s what porridge is to British people.

Alison:
Oatmeal is not what you associate it with. Oatmeal actually means, to me, stone ground oats that are raw, i.e. not cooked oats. So the word meal, like we would talk about a flour being a meal, M-E-A-L. Oatmeal means, in British English, stone ground raw oats. So we’ll talk a little bit more about the word oatmeal later, but I wanted to kind of bring that up to begin with because this episode is about porridge. Yeah. And it’s about porridge from a British perspective. But for everyone who’s listening in the States, I mean oatmeal. For you, that’s oatmeal.

Alison:
And I’m going to keep calling it porridge because I’m British.

Andrea:
I mean, I like, I think there maybe is a little bit of revival behind the word because it does pop up in kind of quaint little recipe titles here and there. So I think sometimes anything that smacks of being British is like, Yeah, let’s just say that word because it sounds better.

Alison:
It’s like retro. Yeah, it sounds good. Okay, so the word porridge was first recorded in . And the etymology of it is really quite interesting. Pottage, which probably you’ve heard of, is a kind of a medieval dish that’s like a thick stew or soup. And that comes from the French word potage, which is P-O-T-A-G-E. Which means in French, something cooked in a pot. So basically, it just means a pot with bits in it, vegetables and meat and all that kind of stew.

Alison:
That word pottage developed into porridge, but possibly influenced by a Latin word, porum. Porum means leek, and leek was used to make a thick stew called a poré. So maybe the kind of etymologists think that maybe that word was influenced by that. By the th century… The word porridge meant cereal with milk or water. So it kind of changed from pottage being the stew that often did have grains in it as well to porridge just being a cereal cooked with milk or water. Scotland has a word which is similar but slightly different, parritch, which I’m not saying it in a Scottish accent and I’m not going to because I will just destroy it, but it’s p-a-r-r-i-t-c-h. And you sometimes see that on Scottish kind of packets of things. That was first recorded in Scotland in . Ireland had a different term for porridge called stirabout, which they called stirabout, I guess, because it’s kind of stirred.

Alison:
And interestingly, the fact that you call porridge oatmeal probably has something to do with how the dish travelled from Europe to you over in the States because immigrants from Europe brought porridge to America with the word as well in the s and s. But because oats weren’t grown in the places where they were, they used the same method and then they applied it to a local grain, which was usually corn. So they would make corn porridges instead. And so I think, although I’ve not read this anywhere, I think the reason why Americans call oat porridge oatmeal is probably to distinguish it from a corn porridge. Because if they were cooking corn porridges, then when they got to oats, they were like, oh, well, maybe I ought to call this one oatmeal.

Andrea:
It’s kind of like what you said in a pork episode where in the Chinese language, you know, meat, pork is meat. And then you have to say specifically sheep.

Alison:
Exactly.

Andrea:
Meat or whatever.

Alison:
To make it that. Yeah.

Andrea:
Hmm.

Alison:
And because I also think oatmeal wasn’t already used. You know, in the UK, you wouldn’t call oatmeal, you wouldn’t call a porridge oatmeal because oatmeal was already a term, meaning stone ground in your oats. Whereas because the US didn’t have a tradition of kind of local oats ground in a stone mill, That word wasn’t already associated with raw oats. So it could be taken and used to describe a cook’s dish. Interestingly, Quaker, who in air quotes invented rolled oats, they didn’t invent rolled oats to the s. And that’s where oats really became quite popular in the US.

Andrea:
What do you mean, quote unquote, invented?

Alison:
Well, they didn’t invent them. A company, a guy, a German guy who worked for a milling company, invented or patented the technology to squash oats rather than to stone ground them in roller mills. But that company was then bought by someone who was bought by Quaker. So Quaker didn’t really invent rolled oats, even though they kind of claimed to.

Andrea:
Not the people.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Quakers.

Alison:
Exactly. Yeah. um so the us has only really known rolled oats for oatmeal true um not oatmeal and when quaker had that breakfast cereal kind of patented and ready they ran the um the first national magazine adverts for breakfast cereal and at the same time gave away free packets of rolled oats to people so rolled oats then kind of um conquered the whole of the u.s and really most people that i’ve talked to in the states unless they have particularly you know um gone into their british background don’t know about stone ground oats i think we have to thank okay um’s.

Andrea:
Red mill for bringing.

Alison:
Anything like that back into.

Andrea:
American consciousness with the the.

Alison:
Scott show right the.

Andrea:
The hot cereals, those sort of terms that he uses, are probably the primary place that we saw it come back.

Alison:
Yeah, you’re right. Bob’s Red Mill is the only place that I’ve found in the US that still, that does create and sell an oatmeal.

Alison:
You can buy it and it’s called, as you said, Scottish Oats. there are other companies that import oatmeal from the uk and you can buy them in kind of you know stores that are british um but i’ve not been able to find a company in the us other than bob’s red mill that creates raw stone ground oats so you’re right it is part in part due to them that that kind of has become a little bit more popularized in the us okay i wanted to talk a little bit about how long we’ve been eating porridge and i just say ages absolutely ages um there’s a there’s people who are paleo like to think that paleo man lived on meat and veg alone but he didn’t he ate grains um and the best exploration i have of that is um in italy in southern italy the archaeologists there discovered a year old pestle in a cave which had remnants of swollen gelatinized oat grains in it. Not just normal oat grains, but oat grains that have been gelatinized, i.e. they’ve been cooked with water. And they put this through their, you know, equipment to find out more about it. And they came to the conclusion that the methods that these people were using , years ago were multi-step. They were drying the grain, they were heating the grain, they were grinding the grain, and then they were cooking the grain. Basically, they were making porridge.

Alison:
In the Stone Age. So we’ve been eating it a very long time. And as you know, as you come closer to us through history, you find in Denmark, there’s evidence from , BCE. The Tolland man, who’s a bog body, died in BCE. He had porridge in his stomach. In that case, that porridge was mostly barley. But as we will talk about in a minute, porridge is not just oats. Okay. Do you have any questions, Andrea, before I move on?

Andrea:
Keep it coming.

Alison:
No, okay, cool, cool. Okay, let’s talk about variety then. Porridge overtly is associated with oats because of Scotland. Scotland has done a great job of exporting porridge around the world and when people think of the word porridge, they think of oats. But porridges have been and are still made with so many other grains basically it’s just a starch or a grain-based stew so if you think about other types of cereal stews or porridges we have congee which is made with rice in japan wheat cream of wheat i know you have that there that’s basically a wheat rule barley porridge is made with very often and in the uk before oats became popular a lot of the porridges with barley any sort of mush made with corn is a porridge so polenta is a porridge there are toles that are made in south america are porridges mush or grits are porridges you can make porridge with millet and they do that a lot in africa um there’s a recipe on my site for millet polenta which i will link in the show notes um buckwheat porridge can be made with buckwheat which is kind of casher, which we’ve talked about before. Porridge is also made with sorghum in places where sorghum is grown and is a staple grain.

Alison:
Porridge can be made with rye um there’s a recipe another recipe on my site for olibrod which is a traditional danish porridge made from stale rye bread and beer which doesn’t sound that appealing but it’s i don’t know i want to try that.

Andrea:
Sounds pretty good.

Alison:
It’s it’s so it’s so good it really is you know if you’ve got homemade rye bread or rye bread that’s been made by you know an artisan baker good rye bread it is it is so delicious with the beer and it’s like a dark beer i’ll put a link to that in the show notes to my recipe um you do not have to use grains so traditionally in a lot of cultures roots have been used in polynesia there’s a porridge called poi which is made with taro which has often been fermented i think maybe there’s a reference to that in western price’s book um i vaguely remember that um you can use potato i was just going to say.

Andrea:
That she i.

Alison:
Know she.

Andrea:
References ugali which is that i don’t know where.

Alison:
Yeah how.

Andrea:
Many places in africa make that but i know that our kenyan friends made ugali for the babies.

Alison:
I remember they.

Andrea:
Get little there’s actually special bags with uh like little teddy bears on it and stuff they gave us one.

Alison:
What’s that made of oh.

Andrea:
I do not remember i have no idea probably probably.

Alison:
It is a porridge i mean yes yeah it’s a porridge.

Andrea:
Basically but i feel like i remember it because They gave it to us when Jacob was a baby, and I feel like I remember it being kind of like a cream of wheat situation. But you are…

Alison:
Yeah, okay.

Andrea:
You can ferment it, so…

Alison:
In the same way as you might do with that taro, fermented taro porridge. Legumes also have been made into porridges. If you think about peas pottage, which is an English dish, which has been around for centuries, that’s basically a pea porridge. If you are excited about porridges, like me, you can look up porridge on Wikipedia and you will find pages and pages. I’ve never thought about doing that. Pictures of people’s porridges. Yes, I’ve been there a lot. Because I feel like, you know, there has to be a porridge that listeners haven’t tried. You know, I’ve just given you a massive long list. And I’d be surprised if everyone listening has tried every single one of those porridges. And they are really good. You know, you can play around with them and put different add-ins in. And to explore grains, they are a really simple, easy way to play around with different grains.

Andrea:
I don’t know if this qualifies or if there’s ancestral precedent for this. But in my, I guess, misinformed paleo years, then there was this porridge that I really liked to make because it felt like porridge, but it doesn’t have grains in it. And you would grind up different nuts and coconut flakes and things like that and then kind of cook it. And it kind of gives you that feeling of eating oatmeal. It was really nice, though.

Alison:
Yeah. Yeah. I never did that. it sounds nice sounds nice um okay so yeah those are lots of different non-oat porridges so do have a play with those if you’re if you’re feeling like you want to um experience a different type of porridge before we carry on and talk about oats let’s take a break.

Alison:
Okay, so I want to focus in this section on oat meal porridge, so porridge made with oats. There are many different types of oats and they can all be cooked into porridge, whatever, even oat groves, you know, the whole oat grain can be cooked into porridge. I have an article on my site which details all of the different types of oats and how they’ve been traditionally used and gives you information on how to cook them. So I will link that in the show notes. So I don’t feel like you kind of have to take notes or worry here. You can go and look at that article later.

Alison:
As we talked about earlier, rolled oats are ubiquitous now. Really, whenever anyone thinks about oatmeal or porridge, depending on what side of the Atlantic they are, they think about rolled oats. Rolled oats cook really quickly. You know, even if you get the jumbo ones, they cook quite quickly. But as we know, because the world has to be quicker and breakfast has to be quicker Because companies are trying to compete with boxed cereal, which is so quick, you just pour it out and pour your milk over it. Oats have been made smaller and processed more minutes is too long for a porridge two minutes is too long for a porridge we need instant porridge um and you can buy oat flakes that are um that look like this is sawdust and and make porridge out of them if you wish i would suggest you don’t but it is possible um and all of that even the rolled oats are not traditional.

Alison:
Traditionally, porridge was made with oatmeal, which as I explained over here in the UK is stone ground oats. So that is oat groats that have been passed through a mill where the stones are made of stone rather than metal, you know, roller mills. And that oatmeal can come in various sizes because it’s been sieved traditionally. As it comes out of the mill, it is sieved into different sizes so you can have fine oatmeal which is almost like a flour you can have medium oatmeal which is a bit bigger or you can have pinhead oatmeal pinhead is about the same size as the steel cut oats that you have in the states so if you ever see in my recipes the word pinhead then you could just use steel cut oats well that’s good to know, Steel-cut oats are different because they’ve been run through a steel mill, whereas pinhead oatmeal has gone through a stone mill. Traditionally, the cultures that ate porridge in the UK used the pinhead or the medium oatmeal, so quite big oatmeal.

Alison:
Alongside those oats, there are also naked oats. So this is where I have to get a bit technical. all oats that come to us, all normal oats that come to us have been kilned before they arrive at our doors even if they’re oat groats, you know the whole grain and the reason that happens is because oats have a hull that adheres to them really tightly, and in order to get that hull off because it’s indigestible, they are put through kind of big tumblers and the oat groat gets damaged in that damaging um, air gets into the grain, which causes an oxidization process and makes a fat in the oats go rancid. So, to counteract that, normal oats are put in a kiln to kill off the enzymes so that when the hole’s taken off, they won’t go rancid. Is that clear, Andrea?

Andrea:
No, that does.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
That does make sense.

Alison:
Yeah. Cool. Okay. So, any oats that you buy, if they are not naked oats, will have been cooked, kind of cooked, kilned before they get to you. Naked oats are different. So naked oats have like a paper thin hull and you can take those off without damaging the oat grain. They taste different because they haven’t been kilned, they haven’t been processed at all.

Alison:
And Lizzie, who is a supporter of the podcast and I’m mentoring at the moment, she’s working on a grain project and which is bringing into the world with a kind of a flavor wheel. She has done a lot of tasting she’s she previously was a professional taster and she’s tasted normal oats and last week she tasted naked oats for the first time and she told us all on discord just how different the naked oats tasted to the normal oats they’re kind of a greener flavor and less um less toasty um because they haven’t been kilned so that was a long way of saying in the past in the uk naked oats were used to make a porridge they were traditionally grown in cornwall um and strangely china which is not what i expected when i did the research um there were different genus in china but they were still naked oats and they were used to make a porridge called gertie milk which is a traditional cornish naked oat porridge which i learned of thanks to harriet gendel who is a lady who’s doing her phd on Naked Acts.

Andrea:
That is amazing.

Alison:
Which is quite cool. There are also black oats, which I’ve talked about before and we’ve talked about in some of the private podcasts. There’s been a revival in Wales of black oats. Generally with flavour, the less processed, the more flavour your oats will have. Kilning does impart that toasty flavour. So the naked oats don’t have it. You can also grind and roll your own oats. So if you have a mock meal you could put oat groats in that and make a kind of an oatmeal with it i don’t put mine below number three because oats are a particularly fatty grain and if you try to grind them really finely they will kind of gum up your meal because of the fats in them it’s good to know i think that question pops up just.

Andrea:
Every so periodically in the discord if you can put oats in the mock.

Alison:
Mill.

Andrea:
Yeah, I did not know. Through the mock mill. That’s good to know.

Alison:
Yes, you can. Also, if you want to, if you don’t want stone ground oats, but you would like rolled oats, you can roll your own oats. And some of the more expensive mills do come with a roller.

Alison:
And I also know you can buy from Mock Mill a machine called the Flake Lover.

Alison:
Which electronically kind of flakes your oats you put them in the top and then you get rolled oats flaked out out the bottom um we have a machine called a marcato marga which is an italian small steel roller mill which we crank by hand and we put oats in the top and roll them through and make our own um rolled oats there’s an article on my site called how to roll your own oats and three good reasons to do that so if you’re interested in rolling your own oats go and have a read of that I would say basically it’s a it’s a game changer when we got that roll and when we started rolling our own oats the flavor that you get from them is incomparable you know we’ve talked about how when you grind flour and you leave it on a shelf and you buy it you know in a package and how long has it been on the shelf and you’re leaving it in your shelf and and everything is kind of degrading you think about it it’s the same with rolled oats although they’ve not been made into tiny particles they have been you know the grain’s been opened and it’s been squashed and much more of the grain is exposed to air and you get all the degradation and flavor and nutrients that happens with that when you roll your own you know you’re literally rolling them the night before you have the porridge and you can taste the difference in them you really can um so if you’re thinking about possibly doing that, I would recommend it.

Alison:
Okay. Um, The one other thing that I wanted to say when we’re talking about variety and different types of oats is that oatmeal porridge belongs to the whole of the UK and Northern Europe, not just Scotland. Scotland has done a great job of exporting it and making that part of their culture. And because so many Scottish people went over to the States through history, through the last few hundred years, there is a lot of association with porridge and Scotland. But Wales has such a long tradition of using oats to make porridge and Yorkshire, which is in northeast England and Derbyshire and Ireland. Wherever oats grew in the UK, porridge was an absolute staple.

Andrea:
So how do we make porridge? Get us to this part.

Alison:
How do we make the best get us to the eating boat okay so i think that you know if i went back and i talked to scottish people and welsh people and irish people throughout history they would all argue about what makes the best porridge just like when you go to do it this way no don’t put the salt in here no exactly um i i think they might argue or they might just say because most of them were struggling to put food on the table, we remember. They might just say the best porridge was the porridge that was there, ready for them to eat, to put their spoons into.

Alison:
I think from my perspective, the best answer to that question is probably to share the ways that we make porridge in our home because I think that makes the best porridge. We buy naked oats and we roll them at home using the Mercato Maga, like I said. We also have in the cupboard, medium oatmeal and pinhead oatmeal, which has been ground in a stone mill in the UK. Naked oats are my favorite and they make a great porridge either in the pan or if breakfast is busy which it it often is in this house we cook them in the instant pot i know quite a few people who are on discord um do their oats in the instant pot and i think it’s not quite as nice as doing in the saucepan and stirring them but you know if you want to get breakfast on the table you can just put it all in the instant pot the night before, press the button, and in the morning.

Andrea:
That’s it. Your porridge is there. It has that word we love, instant.

Alison:
Instant. Yeah, instant oats. Breakfast. Only take hours. Yeah, exactly. I always use water. We don’t use milk because we rarely drink straight milk. So we’ve just kind of got used to water. Sometimes I will ferment the oats, which we will talk about a little bit later and there is an episode back in the annals of the podcast called fermenting oats which you can listen to if you’re particularly interested in that so sometimes i ferment them sometimes i don’t um there is a difference in flavor if you ferment them you know you you do actually taste that kind of sour flavor it comes through um and i kind of like to have a bit of variety.

Alison:
Um toppings are very personal between you know the three of us here in my my household have very very different toppings on our porridge you might do them all at the same time you know in the instant pot and it goes beep and we’re kind of dishing it out from there or dishing out from the saucepan but the three of us have particularly different toppings um so i’ve just got a list here of some of the toppings that we use kefir milk kefir sometimes oat milk cream butter olive oil, linseed crunchy nuts coconut oil vanilla essential oils they go really well in porridge miso almond peanut butter vanilla salt um i thought you’d like the essential oils bit andrea i have a cinnamon the cinnamon bark that you sent me in the cupboard and sometimes i just you know we will just put a drop it’s so strong so you don’t need much but literally like a drop of cinnamon oil in the porridge and stir it around and it goes so well especially.

Andrea:
If then you’re putting some crunchy nuts on top of that.

Alison:
That sounds really good really really yummy i like to put because i don’t have sweet things um i’ve kind of got used to my porridge with nuts and linseed and olive oil i like that i will put salt on it um gable has miso in his porridge almost every morning um miso and linseed and olive oil rob always puts kefir in his bowl and often we will put um collagen powder in our porridge not at all traditional but does it gives us more protein if we feel like we need it in.

Andrea:
It pretty well.

Alison:
Yeah yeah just dissolves and you just stir it in as As long as you stir it, as soon as you put it in.

Andrea:
It goes in absolutely fine. I think I know the answer to this. But is sweet porridge a fairly new invention?

Alison:
Yeah, so we’ll probably, we’ll talk about how it’s traditionally served, but all throughout history until sweet things became more readily available to the masses, which in England, you know, was part of the Industrial Revolution when there was kind of leftover components from making sugar. And that was cheaper in the form of treacle which is kind of like molasses more cheaply available to the masses until that was around porridge was really not traditionally sweetened routinely, although I think sometimes honey would be used you know because honey is a traditional excuse me sweetener in the UK and has been around for a very very long time but obviously honey was very special yeah and on a daily basis I don’t think most families had access to it. So porridge has always been traditionally.

Alison:
A salted dish not a sweet dish and um you know if you go to the there are there is a porridge championships in scotland which um has been going a few years and every year they have people compete to make the best porridge you know they’ve got the porridge judges and they have to use stone ground oats so they have to use oatmeal they cannot use rolled oats because that was not traditional and they are making traditional porridge and they all use salt they would not make a sweet porridge if you talk to any kind of traditional um scotsman who kind of cares and knows about his heritage i think he would probably think you were a soft english person for having a porridge sweet yeah oh that.

Andrea:
Makes sense that makes sense can’t see.

Alison:
Those so yes riding.

Andrea:
Their horses off into the misty mountains with their sweet and dope.

Alison:
Yeah exactly um i it took me a while to get used to salted porridge but i would say now i i don’t feel the need to have porridge sweet really i i like salt in porridge i feel like it brings out the flavor of the grain more than smothering it in sweet things maybe that’s because we use such good raw ingredients you know we talk about that so much when you when you have good ingredients that you’re starting with then you don’t need to add so many things to those dishes so if i’m starting with naked oats or oatmeal that I’ve ground in the mock meal or, you know, normal oats that I flaked myself in the macato marga, then… That raw ingredient has more flavor in the first place. And we all know that salt kind of brings out flavor. And so just putting the salt in is often enough.

Andrea:
I saw your snarky note up above that you were too nice to read, which was basically, well, you’d have to sweeten those nasty little instant oats.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Yes, you would. Well, you would. If you buy those Those packets of instant oats that Quakers sell in the supermarket, you’re going to want to sweeten them because they’re just, they’re like sawdust. They’re just cardboard.

Andrea:
I’ve definitely eaten them.

Alison:
So let me tell you.

Andrea:
They’re pretty sweet. But I can imagine that if you were eating that sawdust or the, what does Megan call the bits of tea at the bottom of the barrel that they put in tea bags.

Alison:
Not for good stuff.

Andrea:
It would be a punishment to be like, oh, I’m not going to eat sweets, so I’m going to eat this without it. Look, I’m so Spartan, you know, I’m suffering for health. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re not suffering.

Alison:
No, no. Get hold of some oats and flake them yourself, you know. Get hold of some naked oats and try it.

Andrea:
I’ve never flaked oats. So that’s going to be a new Rubicon for me.

Alison:
It’s so delicious. It really is. um you know that not to say that you can’t put all these different toppings on you can you know they do enhance dish but i through having good ingredients i’ve come to really appreciate porridge as as it was originally eaten in this country which is just with salt okay i wanted to talk a little bit about pinhead oatmeal and making a good porridge with pinhead oatmeal so for everyone who’s in the states that’s kind of as i said equivalent to steel cut oatmeal so if you can get hold of steel cut oatmeal it makes a very good porridge um really it’s the best kind of grain to make a standard oat porridge with much better than flaked oats unless you’ve flaked them yourself um because the bits are kind of bigger and haven’t been processed as much it needs longer um cooking time because it needs time to absorb the water so the best way i’ve found of cooking pinhead or steel cut oatmeal is to soak it in four times its water by weight. And then boil it.

Andrea:
How long do you soak it?

Alison:
And cook it on low for minutes. Soak it overnight. So the night before, if you just want to make a peanut oatmeal, you just put your oatmeal in a bowl, soak it in four times. It’s watered by weight. In the morning, bring it to the boil and then cook it on low for minutes.

Alison:
There is another way, which I could share if you want me to, Andrea, which is more, it’s more labour intensive. But it does I’ve tried both ways and it does make a difference to the finished porridge okay so um for this one it’s as I said it’s more labor intensive but the day before you want to eat your porridge soak your oats in one and a half times the water by volume so one cup of the steel cut oats to one and a half cups of water so do that the morning before you want to eat the oatmeal so say you want the oatmeal for sunday breakfast do that saturday morning, then in the evening saturday evening put all of that soaked oatmeal and water in a pan then add another three cups of water bring it to the boil simmer it for minutes make sure you’re stirring because otherwise it will stick to the bottom of the pan when that’s done turn it off, Add salt. I do three quarters of a teaspoon of salt to grams of oats. That feeds three of us. Obviously, you’ll need more salt if you’re going to up your oats from grams. Stir the salt around, put the lid on the saucepan, just push it to the side of your cooker and leave it there overnight. Then in the morning, this is Sunday morning now we’re talking about, I told you this was complicated.

Andrea:
Didn’t I?

Alison:
You reheat that pan. So, just turn the pan on, let it heat up a little bit, put your wooden spoon in, stir it around. It will be quite thick at the beginning, but as it starts to heat up, it will loosen up. And then when it’s reheated, it’s ready to eat. And it sounds more complicated than it is. Once you get into a routine of doing like that then you know you kind of get used to it but the the thing about doing it this way is that traditionally porridge was cooked in a cast iron pan on a open fire or a range for a very very long time and that allowed that steel cut chunky oatmeal to really hydrate fully and just become something that it can’t do when you only cook it for minutes kind of reminds me of your and you.

Andrea:
You know when you cook the risotto and you add the.

Alison:
Water.

Andrea:
Or the broth a little at a time and you’re heating it and stirring it?

Alison:
Yes. Letting it soak in letting it absorb letting it kind of do its thing um you know we we can’t easily cook porridge for three hours now because we don’t have the cast iron pots it all just sticks to the bottom of our saucepans and we don’t have a range you know a very small kind of fire where we can just leave it to the side you know like like people used to and so if we try to cook porridge for three four hours to allow it to really hydrate properly it’s going to be a disaster and this way, mimics that what would happen in that three and four hour cooking time by soaking your oats then cooking them and then leaving them on the hob you know with it off overnight and and it does taste different it really does it’s got a different consistency it it just feels different on your tongue and with steel cut oatmeal that, That way that it has more processing is by far my favorite way to eat oats. And it’s not much hands-on, you know, it’s half an hour hands-on really. The rest of it, soaking, minutes of hands-on in the evening, and then turn it off and just reheat it in the morning.

Andrea:
And I would probably just do that evening part. If I do anything breakfast related, it’s usually when I’m putting away everything from dinner, doing the dishes, kind of in the kitchen.

Alison:
Exactly.

Andrea:
Slapping around.

Alison:
Anyway. Yeah. So you can turn around every five minutes and give it a stir. It’s not a problem because you’re there anyway. Yeah, exactly. In practice, it works really quite well. Just sounds a bit daunting when I read it all out. Okay. So having asked me, Andrea, what’s the best way to make porridge and listen to me tell you what we top our porridge with, tell me how you make porridge over there and what toppings you use.

Andrea:
Well, I don’t want to say now that you said all these awesome ways. Well, no, really, it’s pretty simple. It’s more or less the Nourishing Traditions version, except I don’t always soak it. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, like you said. Not really related to if I’m in the mood for the flavor, more related to if I forgot to do it. But I’ll do a cup of Scottish oats, which is our favorite. So we don’t always buy the Scottish oats but i throw them in the blender and kind of i guess i could use the food processor now and kind of par grind them to their rolled oats kind of par grind yeah grind them to get them to kind of break up like that sorry squattish people don’t listen to this part and then i put the ratio is one cup by volume of the oats to three cups of water, And a pinch of salt. You can soak that overnight.

Andrea:
Sally in Nourishing Traditions has you soak it with some of the water and then add more water the next day and then put it in a pot. I just put everything in the pot and then I just leave it. I don’t fuss with adding more later. And then I don’t fuss with using an extra dish. I used to do that and then I’ll realize, what am I doing? I’m just moving it from one dish to another. So I just put it in the pot overnight and then just simmer it on the stove. So i personally my preference is butter and salt you’ve really gotten me on the non-sweet pancakes and the non-sweet oats so thank you for that um and then my kids most of the time want maple syrup on theirs but if they have plenty of butter you could get away with just that too but they are pretty adamant about the butter now so i also jacob brought me breakfast one time, he likes to make make breakfast which is awesome and he brought me a bowl of breakfast and it was these oats and he had taken a bunch of dried apples that we had made and kind of stirred them in it was so good so i really like that too.

Alison:
That sounds nice. I want to know how Gary has his. I know Rob will be interested to hear this. How does Gary eat his porridge?

Andrea:
He doesn’t eat porridge.

Alison:
Oh. So you’re just making it for you and the kids?

Andrea:
Yeah. Gary doesn’t care for it.

Alison:
I love you.

Andrea:
I’m trying to think if I’ve ever seen him eat it, maybe once or twice, but he doesn’t usually eat it.

Alison:
So does he not eat your baked oatmeal that you do either?

Andrea:
I don’t know that I’ve ever offered him baked oatmeal. I’m trying to remember. Probably assumed he wouldn’t eat it. He might do. And it’s not as weird as it thinks when you remember that most of our breakfast is just me and the kids. So it’s not like he’s sitting there not eating.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. He’s up and out.

Andrea:
And then when he’s going to be here for breakfast, I just automatically plan something else. Sorry, Rob.

Alison:
Yeah. It’s an interesting… No, that’s fine. I’ll tell him anyway. There’s an interesting point that I’m going off topic a bit here that I wanted to put in before we go to a break, which is we have had quite a lot of discussions about porridge on the Discord channel recently, the podcast supporter community. And quite a few people have said they can’t tolerate porridge in the morning. They can’t have oatmeal in the morning, but they’re fine with it in the evening. Um so i think i would say to anyone who’s kind of listening to this and thinking i’m not sure that oatmeal works for me in the morning um to make sure that you’re having some protein and some fat with it if you do you know that it’s not just you’re having kind of sugar on the top um you can put collagen powder you can put eggs in i often used to make porridge and stir an egg in you know a minute or two before it’s finished um and you know make sure you’ve got that butter on it or cream on it try it savory um or if you you know if you still can’t if you don’t feel right with it in the morning um do try it in the evening because i it was really interesting to kind of read that quite a lot of people who are in the community were saying oh it just sits better with me in the evening i did see that and.

Andrea:
I was gonna say on gary if if there wasn’t such a.

Alison:
Tradition of.

Andrea:
Sweet porridge that we had both grown up around he’d probably be more likely to eat it but he doesn’t really care for super sweet things and so i think the.

Alison:
Idea of a bowl with.

Andrea:
You know brown sugar on it in the morning is just not appealing to him.

Alison:
Shockers not really his thing and yeah i can get that so.

Andrea:
Maybe if he was presented with it more in a savory version it would be more appealing.

Alison:
Yeah okay um well i’m gonna i’m gonna go to ad break and i’ll and i’ll come back in a minute and talk to you about a savory porridge that i’ve been experimenting with recently. Okay, so we’re going to talk a little bit about Scotland and the way that oats are eating in Scotland now. But I do want to just talk about, as I said, savoury porridge that I’ve been playing around with a bit. I found a reference to a Yorkshire version of porridge called Stirabout, which strangely is the same name that the Irish often called standard porridge. But this is a very particular Yorkshire kind of incarnation of porridge. And there’s not a great deal of reference to it in my history books, but I’ve been experimenting in the kitchen, as I do, and playing around with it. And I’ve come up with something that’s really, really quite tasty. So the idea is that it’s oatmeal, porridge oats, cooked in the fat that you’ve previously fried bacon in. So I thought when I first heard it, I thought, hmm.

Andrea:
Sounds like lots of good things.

Alison:
Exactly. So I fired off some bacon, which on my side of the Atlantic is back bacon, which doesn’t exist as we’ve established in America. But I guess you could use streaky bacon, your normal bacon, something with a good portion of fat on it. I just put that in the cast iron pan. And then I take it out once it’s kind of got, you know, a bit kind of browned and there’s lots of juices and fat in the bottom of the pan. Take it out and put it on a plate to one side and then put the oats in the cast iron pan, stir them around put some water in and get the the bits that might be on the bottom of the pan mixed into that water and then just keep adding water until you’ve got the right consistency I’m cooking for about minutes because I’m using pinhead oatmeal you could probably do it with the rolled oats and it wouldn’t take as long to cook.

Alison:
And then my favourite way of serving it has been to cut up the bacon that I’ve previously cooked. I just use scissors because it’s simpler, into little strips. Just before I’m about to serve it, pour that bacon back into the pan, stir it back in. So it’s a kind of a bacon-y, fatty porridge thing with bits of bacon inside. Just delicious already. And then whilst i’m kind of waiting for that to all go around and plating up stuff i poach an egg um for myself because the boys don’t eat eggs but i do and then blob my porridge in the middle of the plate to make a little depression in the top and put my poached egg in the top it sounds so good it’s so good i’m thinking gary yeah i think you would so.

Andrea:
Take us back to scotland you’re going all over the place and you keep.

Alison:
Alluding to scotland.

Andrea:
So they seem pretty.

Alison:
Critical yeah and.

Andrea:
Tell me about how they ate them and maybe some of i know you’ve sort of tantalized me with some tidbits of information so if you have some more to share.

Alison:
Yeah yeah it’s really interesting how the scots ate porridge because it’s you know aside from the fact that it was savoury not sweet it’s it’s very particular you know because it was a food that they were eating once sometimes twice a day day after day after day and so we know when that sort of thing happens how many traditions kind of grow up around it so as i said um the scots ate porridge which they called plural so they called porridge them oh um what i i researchers don’t really know why or how that started, they seemed to… Kind of think that it was a term of respect that they would call porridge they.

Andrea:
It’s almost semi-anthropomorphized and not as cold as it.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Wow. So they ate them with salt, with salt, and not with just a little bit of salt either. You know, when you look at traditional recipes, I’ve… I have slightly minimised the salt in the versions that I make at home and in the versions that will go in the book that I’m writing, because when I try it with the amount that it appears to be, although it’s quite difficult because they just say one spoonful and you think, well, what spoon are you talking about? Are you talking about this spoon or that spoon? Did they have measuring spoons back then? I don’t think so. So what spoons did they use? I don’t know. Anyway, that’s a whole rabbit hole that I have not got to the bottom of yet. But I tend to just ease off the salt a bit. It traditionally was very salty.

Andrea:
Very salty.

Alison:
And I’ve thought a bit about why that was. And I think that… You know, the Scots were very, very active. When you read about how much porridge they were eating and what they were doing every day on the land, on the crops to subsist, the animals, the ground that they were looking after, the work that they had to do is just amazing. And, you know, they would have, I guess, sweated a lot even in that cold weather. And so I think they would have needed salt. And I think, you know, they didn’t have the sweetener. And so at that point, if you want to bring the flavor out in something, then you’re going to add salt, really. It really does bring the flavors out.

Andrea:
That seems logical, your ideas.

Alison:
No one really explains in any of the books why they put salt in it. You know, I don’t think there was a choice between salt and sugar at an early stage. But no one says, oh, this is why we put salt in it and why we didn’t have it, you know, without any salt at all. A lot of the books that I’ve read say, you have to use the salt. And that’s the end of the sentence.

Andrea:
It’s not a question.

Alison:
Exactly. So they put salt in it and they served it traditionally in wooden bowls and ate it with spoons made from horn, which I presume they would have carved themselves. And on the table, they would have the wooden bowl with the porridge in. Most often it was an individual bowl but in some places it was one big communal bowl, and alongside that wooden bowl of porridge they would have a little bowl of cream or milk on the side and the then what they would do is they get this horn spoon put their horn spoon into the porridge take a scoop of the porridge and then that was warm obviously at that point then put it into the cold little bowl of milk or cream that put that spoon in there and then eat it. So they were having the warm porridge. I guess they didn’t pour the milk or the cream on it like we would because it would cool down.

Andrea:
It sounds kind of amazing because you would get the… Textural differences and temperature differences and then you’ve got the salt in there and then milk is pretty sweet or cream especially that’s pretty sweet.

Alison:
Yeah so it’s really good and then those small spoons you.

Andrea:
Shared pictures of the spoons you got and.

Alison:
Even the shape.

Andrea:
Of them i feel like you’d be tasting better you know off of those little concave.

Alison:
Yeah spoons.

Andrea:
The way the way that they were shaped almost like little tiny ladles not really ladles but deeper.

Alison:
Yeah yeah i’m really interested yeah it i mean we’ve done this more than once definitely i mean quite a lot and the whole the whole package you know using pinhead or steel cut oats cooking them for a long time you know or doing that leaving overnight thing and reheating them produce and putting salt in produces a porridge that just is so superior in flavor and then you’ve got that that’s really warm like you said you’ve got the textual difference of the smooth creamy you know dairy product and you’re dipping that in the flavor of the dairy with the salt and the kind of the porridge is still defined it’s not mushy because it’s got the larger oats in it it’s been cooked properly it’s got a bite to it and you’ve got the bite and the salt and the cream and it’s just it it’s really it’s a different experience to just making porridge with rolled oats and putting brown sugar on it it’s a different experience um, There’s one more thing that I wanted to add about the Scots, which, again, there’s mystery over and historians don’t really know why they did this. But they get their porridge standing up. Yeah, exactly. They must have had to reach down to the table to get their milk and then spoon it in.

Andrea:
Like even at home?

Alison:
Yes, even at home. That’s so weird. You know, some people have said, oh, it’s because porridge was, you know, so revered. It was a mark of respect that they stood up to eat their porridge. Other people have said it was because it was a longstanding tradition and they always had to be ready to kind of someone to attack them. Yeah, longstanding. Great. And so they were like, they were on their guard at all times standing up because then they were ready to defend themselves. Like a real man eats standing up. Exactly. Exactly. But I think the most convincing explanation I’ve heard is that it just comes from a time when there just wasn’t enough places for people to sit because there wasn’t enough furniture in the house. And so without chairs for everyone, as we have the luxury of today in most homes, you know, we all have chairs we can sit on. But that hasn’t always been the case. And so without chairs to sit on, they would stand up around the table and eat their porridge.

Andrea:
I thought the whole family was just standing and adding porridge. Yeah. Like this isn’t, we’re hurrying up, we’re just chatting, eating, or like what? I don’t know.

Alison:
I don’t know. I don’t know. Because we haven’t got footage that goes back that far.

Andrea:
Maybe they weren’t chatting, maybe they’re just focused on…

Alison:
Eating on their porridge yeah wow yeah so when those cook-offs or whatever you called it.

Andrea:
That they do do they have.

Alison:
To stand.

Andrea:
To taste it.

Alison:
No they don’t lame no they don’t because and the reason i know that is because someone um last year made a film like a documentary film of the um porridge championships in scotland and over christmas um i said no rob and april you’ve gotta you’ve gotta watched this documentary did you really yeah so we all sat down we only watched about two films a year we all sat down and and watched the documentary on the porridge champion oh my gosh did gabriel watch it too i bet he did he did um and you know what was wow it was it was really quite funny it was done a bit tongue-in-cheek um but it did go on somewhat and gabriel’s like is he finishing that Okay.

Andrea:
I’m over it now. Another bowl of oatmeal.

Alison:
No, you saw the judges sitting down and eating, so they didn’t stand up for that, no.

Andrea:
Wow, okay.

Alison:
They didn’t do the milk and the cream either, so that’s kind of been lost. Anyway, is that sated your Scotland?

Andrea:
Wow, yeah. Now I’m fascinated. I’m going to try eating standing up.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly, see if it tastes different. I wanted to throw a few other things into this last section, one of which is don’t be scared of making too much porridge, because there are many things you can do with leftover porridge. I know that Francine, who’s a community supporter who’s in Australia, regularly makes like double the porridge, she told me on Discord. So she makes, she does it in the instant pot and she makes twice the amount she needs for one day. And then she just leaves it in the instant pot, I think just on the side, what isn’t eaten. And then the next morning she reheats it and they have it for breakfast the next day.

Andrea:
Well, it’s like she’s doing that thing you said with the… The oats that you cook and then the next day you heated them again. It’s kind of what she’s doing.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. It’s the same. Yeah, it’s the same thing. Another thing I didn’t say about Scotland is really traditionally they used to pour cooked porridge into a drawer and then slice it up during the following week and eat it. So traditionally it’s been cooked in large batches and eaten cold or eaten later. You know, if you do that, you are following tradition without maybe knowing it. So, yeah, don’t be scared of making too much. Make too much on purpose because there are tons of things you can do with it. Like you just said, you can reheat it. It’s simple, just reheat it. And maybe you need a little bit more liquid, maybe you don’t. You can slice it up and eat it like the Scots did. You could even pour it into a drawer if you want. If you do, send me a picture.

Andrea:
I would like to see this.

Alison:
You can use it in a bread. it’s kind of like having a scald in a bread which I talk about in the spelt, bread book it makes bread softer and kind of moister so you can just if you’ve got leftover porridge you can put it into your dough and just bake it into a bread you can put it into soup and then whiz up your soup with a blender and it it’s like a creamer for your soup you can mix it with flour and or eggs and make it into a kind of a thick sort of solid batter and then fry it, you can put it in a pancake mix so if you’re mixing up some pancakes you know with whatever grain and you’ve got some leftover oats um leftover oatmeal in the fridge you can pour it you know dollop that in kind of squash it on the side a bit to make it break up and have it in your pancakes um there’s just there’s tons of stuff that i’m going to make a list somewhere i think some blog post of of things you can do oh yeah i want to see that um that.

Andrea:
Would be amazing.

Alison:
But do make all the things yeah could.

Andrea:
You talk just a little bit about the fermentation and oats we kind of skirted around it a bit but we didn’t talk.

Alison:
About why.

Andrea:
Anybody would want to do it or what it actually does other than the taste yeah.

Alison:
Okay cool um as i said earlier we’ve got um episode number which i’ll link in the show notes is over an hour of us just talking about fermenting oats so if you’re into it then you will really like that episode um just to kind of give an overview fermented porridge tastes different and a lot of people prefer the flavor of fermented porridge to straight porridge um particularly if you’re using standard oats they can give you some kind of extra flavor that perhaps is you know lacking from a store-bought rolled oats um it’s a it’s a tangy flavor and depending on how long you ferment them for you You can have a light tangy flavour or, you know, a really heavy tangy flavour.

Alison:
Whilst you’re fermenting obviously probiotics are doing their stuff in there with whatever live starter you’ve put in there whether it’s sourdough starter apple cider vinegar kefir you know anything that’s got live bacteria and obviously when you cook those the probiotics have gone but as we talk about very often on the podcast there’s survivors of the probiotics the.

Alison:
Postbiotics and power probiotics that do really good things in the intestines and you will be getting those when you’re eating fermented porridge. In the process, the fermentation goodies break down the starches in the oats. And so it’ll be easier for you to digest your porridge if it’s fermented. And if you are able to ferment your porridge with a grain that has phytase in it, then you will also be breaking down the phytic acid. If you want to hear more about that go back and listen to episode because I explain that oats are low naturally in phytase and so if you want to neutralize the phytic acid you need to introduce another grain to the ferment that has high phytase like rye or buckwheat. I do have videos on fermenting oats on my YouTube channel so if you look up Ancestral Kitchen on YouTube you’ll find there’s one called healthy fermented oats and another one particularly on phytic acid so you can watch both of those i also have a free training called fermenting oats which is a video of a conversation i had with kirsten shocky at the fermentation school and if you search on my website ancestral kitchen.com for fermenting oats i’ll also put a link in the show notes then you can watch me talk about fermenting oats for an hour and.

Andrea:
Perfect and speaking of fermenting oats we and we can’t end the conversation on oats and scotland at the same time without me asking you what is suins and you should explain that yeah aspect of their culture too.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so Suwens is just amazing. It’s an absolutely delicious porridge made in a particular way and has been traditional to Scotland and Wales in a slightly different rendition and Ireland for many, many centuries. I’ll put my article on Suwens in the show notes, so if you want to have a dive into that, then you can read that. Um suins is kind of it’s been a really big part of my oat journey i i discovered it kind of early on when i was interested in finding some non-dairy probiotic for gabriel because when he was very young he really couldn’t tolerate any dairy at all that’s where bosa came from the other kind of um gluten-free dairy free probiotic that i regularly make in my kitchen and i found suins at that point um.

Alison:
Because the reason I noticed it was because when you make it, you get a porridge, which is called suins, and a probiotic drink, which is called swats. And when I saw that, I thought, oh gosh, I could have porridge for me and we could all eat the porridge and then we could actually drink, Gabriel could drink this swats probiotic liquid and have homemade probiotics that don’t cost the earth and haven’t got dairy in them. Um so i know a lot of listeners know about soons because they’ve done my course which again the show notes are going to be long for this episode i will link in the show notes um it’s a delicious.

Alison:
Porridge which was made traditionally in scotland from waste and how that happened was the scots would grow their oats and then they would send them to the mill to be um ground up in those stone mills that I’m talking about and they’d be sibbed into various forms of oatmeal and then there would be a kind of the dust that was left behind and wasn’t didn’t make the grade as they would say for the different types of oatmeal and that was basically bits of husk that was still left on the oat that hadn’t come out when they tried to get the husks off with little bits of the starchy white bit of the oat attached to them. And the miller would give back the crofters, the people who’d grown the oats, two bags, one with the oatmeal in, the other one with this waste in it. And rather than throw it away, the Scots fermented it.

Alison:
Putting water in it and leaving it for up to two weeks.

Andrea:
Wow.

Alison:
And then created this amazing porridge, which is so fine.

Alison:
I describe it as eating clouds and so flavoursome. It’s a natural fermentation. There’s no starter put in it. So whereas if you’re fermenting porridge oats, you would put your sourdough starter in your kefir and your porridge is going to reflect the taste of the starter that you put in there. You know, so if you’re putting rice sourdough starter in it, it’s kind of going to taste like you might expect rice sourdough starter, you know, cooked to taste. Whereas Suins is different because you don’t put a starter in it and it just ferments on, you know, what’s naturally in the air and on the grain. It has such a delicate flavor, which predominantly tastes like honey to me, even though, you know, there’s no honey in it at all. Um and not only do you get this amazing porridge which um is super easy to digest because it is just the white part there’s no husk or hull in it that is sipped out in the process and it was traditionally in scotland used as a health food you know for people who perhaps a bit weak and needed building up or needed to have a time when they didn’t need to digest as much um not only do you get this amazing porridge which tastes like honey and is really easy to digest. But you also get swats, which is the liquid that you fermented those oats in, which you can heat up if you want or drink cold and has a kind of a lemony flavour and is a probiotic drink.

Alison:
Which is just, I mean, it’s just, I find suins amazing because it’s made from something that was going to be thrown away and someone just came up with this method and then found this food that is incredibly easy to digest and has a probiotic drink too.

Andrea:
It just checks all the boxes.

Alison:
Amazing. Amazing, you know? Amazing. Okay. So, is there anything else I need to say or have I said enough?

Andrea:
No, this is so wonderful. I feel like you’ve opened so many little doorways for me to peek into when it comes to porridge and it just has so much context all over the world that it’s really cool to see it kind of in that pride of place on the shelf. Not just a afterthought or the shortest thing but actually a very special and delicious.

Alison:
Ancestral treat it can be it really can be and you know when when it’s made with good ingredients and in a in a loving way you know however you choose to do that it’s um it really can be a very special food and i i think it deserves whether you call it oatmeal or whether you call it porridge i think it it deserves to be um lauded more for sure absolutely, oh thank you well thank you for being my foil this.

Andrea:
Was delightful i’m always always happy to listen to.

Alison:
You talk about.

Andrea:
This history and flavor.

Alison:
Wonderful thank you very much andrea i shall see you next time.