The Dutch Win Porridge: A Golden Spurtle Story from Carrbridge
Updated: Oct 7
AI illustration for the4pegs.com, in our So Scottish palette.
Every October, the little Highland village of Carrbridge hosts the most important breakfast in the world. The World Porridge Making Championship draws porridge obsessives from everywhere — and this year the Golden Spurtle is going home to the Netherlands, with a Dutch champion who carried her own water from home in her luggage.
Gina Saarberg, 28, beat 29 competitors from 14 countries on Saturday, following the same recipe that won her the Dutch championship in July: organic pinhead oats from a Dutch mill, salt — and that water.
How the Dutch Took the Golden Spurtle
Porridge isn't something that's widely eaten in the Netherlands. Gina only discovered it in her student days, on rolled oats, and when she switched to oatmeal she found it made a much creamier porridge — it reminded her of rice pudding. Even the salt was a competition discovery: she only started adding it when she began competing, and quickly realised it brings out the nuances and makes it taste much better.
She isn't wrong. The classic category at Carrbridge is almost monastic in its rules:
Oatmeal, water and salt. Nothing else — no cream, no honey, no shortcuts.
Thirty competitors from fourteen countries, from Australia and South Africa to the Czech Republic, Norway and Switzerland.
Judged by serious chefs — this year's panel included a former Gleneagles chef and a bakery owner from Grantown-on-Spey.
The whole thing is run by Carrbridge volunteers and sponsored by Hamlyns of Scotland.
Read The Standard's full report here — and the championship has its own site at goldenspurtle.com.
And the Speciality Prize Went to a Cannoli
The speciality round lets imagination loose, and this year it went to Rob Reid, 36, from Sydney — a man with a Scottish dad and a Sicilian mum who found the obvious answer: porridge cannoli. The shells are like brandy snaps but made with Marsala; the cream is ricotta, mascarpone, icing sugar and traditional porridge pushed through a sieve, all held together with toasted oats ground in a mortar and pestle. In half an hour.
The porridge chieftain, Alan Rankin, called it what it is: a wonderfully quirky tradition that thrives on good humour and friendly competition, offering a wonderful escape from the daily grind.
Porridge: The Taste of a Scottish Childhood
Porridge is such a big part of every kid my age who grew up in Scotland. It was the bowl you stood over of a freezing morning before school, and every Scottish household has its opinion on the great question: salt, or sugar? (In my house, we knew the answer.)
As a child, the magic of my grandmother's porridge was that it floated in milk. It was so stodgy it stuck together as one, and when you poured the cold milk over, it came away from the bowl and floated — I've never seen porridge do that since, I don't think it exists anymore. And she was salt, not sugar.
The Best Porridge I Ever Ate
Still — the most delicious porridge I've ever had wasn't made by any champion. It was the whisky and crème brûlée porridge at Inverlochy Castle Hotel, the beautiful castle hotel just north of Fort William on the west coast. Their breakfast is a proper occasion, and the porridge arrives with a caramelised sugar top you crack with the back of your spoon, with whisky cream to pour over — a legacy of the hotel's Roux restaurant days. It was absolutely the most delicious way I've ever had porridge.
Photo by Sharon McMenemy Khan, at breakfast at Inverlochy Castle Hotel.
And the breakfast room has one more claim to fame: the view. Queen Victoria stayed at Inverlochy in 1873 and said she had never seen anything lovelier or more romantic — she even painted watercolours of it. The mountains haven't moved since.
The view that inspired Queen Victoria, filmed by Sharon McMenemy Khan.
Inverlochy Castle Hotel — worth the trip for breakfast alone.
The Porridge Trail: Grantown to Cawdor
Carrbridge's porridge doesn't end at the village sign. Half an hour north, in Grantown-on-Spey, Kirsten — everyone calls her KJ — ran the Mountain Cafe in Aviemore until June 2020, when the pandemic closed it for good. Her answer was to open a bakery in an industrial estate unit: Unit 9/2, Achnagonalin, the least romantic address in the Cairngorms, now one of its most useful kitchens. The bakes go out on an e-cargo bike — the greenest delivery van in the Highlands — and the car park fills with walkers and cyclists coming out of the national park, loading up on calories before the road north.
Take the car, take the bikes, stop at the bakery on the way out of the park, then north through Inverness to Cawdor. Stocked pond, stables, a croquet lawn — a house with real soul. My cousin worked on the estate after university. It's a trip that would impress everyone.
Cawdor Castle has been the Campbell family's home for centuries — Shakespeare borrowed its name for Macbeth's scheming thane, though the real castle was built long after the real Macbeth. It's still a lived-in family house, not just a look-at one.
KJ's Bothy Bakery — baked in a Grantown industrial estate, delivered by e-cargo bike.
Cawdor Castle — the Campbells' family home, open seasonally.
Even If You Can't Get an Award-Winning Porridge
You're probably not going to import Dutch water or build a cannoli in thirty minutes, and neither am I. But that's the joy of porridge: it forgives everything. Good oats, a pinch of salt, a little patience — and if you're hosting visitors through a Scottish winter, a proper bowl of porridge in the morning is the warmest welcome there is.
Even if you can't get an award-winning porridge, you can always get something absolutely yummy.
If you try any of these — Carrbridge in October, Inverlochy's breakfast, or your own pot on the stove — come find me on Google Maps, where I share my Edinburgh favourites as a Local Guide, and follow along for more So Scottish adventures.
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