Matt displays our specialty dish, Bob's Savory Oat Fritters

For the 2010 Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championship in Carrbridge, Scotland, we wanted to share some behind-the-scenes of our prep work before we head over for the competition on 10.10.10. Our team made this wonderful video to show you what we’ve been up to and get everyone pumped up for the competition.

I can hardly believe that we’ll be crossing spurtles in3-1/2 weeks! Our time as reigning champs went too quickly and we’re working hard to see if we can’t keep it this year. Just in case we can’t nail down the title as World Porridge Champions, we’ve been busy crafting a specialty dish that we think will garner favorable attention from the judges and is just plain scrumptious! I’ll have the official recipe to share with you soon, but for now, you’ll have to be satisfied with this visual treat.

Matt has the champion's view.

In our hearts, we will always be World Porridge Champions. It’s a title few can claim as their own and we are lucky to have won it. While we’re busy preparing for our journey to the Highlands of Scotland in three and a half short weeks (yikes!), I wanted to urge you to come by our store and look at the trophy before it’s gone. We may be lucky enough to win it again, but winning two years in a row is a rare feat done only once in the history of the competition.

If you’re in the area, come by and bless our trophy before we take it back to the Scots where it may just find a new home in Scotland, Canada, England or possibly in the United States again. If you can’t get down to bless the trophy, we’d love if you would leave us some well-wishes for our champion, Matt Cox as he prepares to battle it out against the world’s top porridge makers.

We’ve got some great things in store for you as the time ticks down to October 10th. We’ll share a wonderful video of the progress we’re making on our specialty dish- now known as Bob’s Savory Oat Fritters- and we’ve got a recipe to give you and some tips for making your own savory oat fritters. We’ll have some guest posts from bloggers of every sort and we cannot wait to share what they’ve written for you! October will be filled with some wonderful giveaways in honor of Celiac Disease Awareness Month. We’ve got a lot of great things planned, so be sure to check back often!

World's Best Porridge

For all the fuss we make over our specialty dish for the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championship, the big prize really goes to the best bowl of porridge. The simplest of dishes takes home the biggest prize. For the traditional category, each contender can only use oats, salt and water. Nothing but oats in their purest form- no toasting or roasting or pan frying- just plain and simple oats.

Unfortunately, making a great bowl of plain and simple oats can be a bit challenging for some. Almost every time I serve oatmeal to out-of-town guests, I hear, “You make these so well, how come they don’t taste like this when I make them?” Truth is, I don’t think about it much any more—just boil water, throw in oats and salt, and stir (clockwise, of course).

To help you find the path to your perfect bowl of oats, here is our winning recipe from the 2009 Golden Spurtle Competition. Enjoy!

Basic Steel Cut Oats

Ingredients:
2-1/2 cups Water
1/4 tsp Salt
1 cup Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats (Organic, Gluten Free, or Regular)

In a medium saucepan, bring water and salt to a boil. Add steel cut oats and reduce heat to low. Stir frequently and cook for 20-30 minutes, depending on how chewy you like your oats. If the oats begin to look too dry, add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of water. Top oats with milk and brown sugar and enjoy!

Bob’s Savory Oat Fritters!

Thank you to everyone who participated. We had a lot of fun bouncing names around and chose this particular name because it’s simple and sounds wholeheartedly American. We’ll be getting out a prize pack to Kim Philpott who suggested this name. If you haven’t seen it, check out her wonderful blog at Made With Love Baking.

Our content has been a little sparse this week, but we’ll be back in action with loads of great articles next week. Have a great weekend everyone!

What would you call this dish?

Yep- it’s that time of year again. We can hardly believe that it’s almost been a year since we claimed the title of World Porridge Champions in the 2009 Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championship. A few weeks ago, we broke out the boxes of supplies from last year and started sorting through ideas for our 2010 specialty dish. Last year we won with our traditional porridge, which consisted of water, salt and oats. We also competed in the specialty category with our Oregon Orchard Oats Brûlée- a concoction of oats, cherries, pears and hazelnuts topped with a candy crust.

This dish embraces Italian flavors while staying true to the oats.

After some serious taste-testing (ah, life is rough) and a bit of research, we’ve settled on a savory oatmeal dish for our 2010 specialty entry. We’ve based this year’s dish on Arancini, a finger-food that originated in Sicily. Arancini is typically a risotto ball that is coated in bread crumbs and deep fried. The ball usually contains a red meat sauce (Ragù) and mozzarella. In place of a rice-based risotto, we are using an oat-risotto that contains pancetta, Parmesan and porcini mushrooms. If that doesn’t sound delicious, we’ve wrapped the risotto around a creamy Pecorino, rolled the arancine in fresh bread crumbs and deep fried them. Talk about decadent! These little balls of gooey oat goodness pair perfectly with a simple red sauce. Watch for the recipe in a few weeks so that you can try them at home.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! What should we call this fancy dish? Fried oat balls doesn’t sound very appealing.  Oat-incini is a bit confusing and doesn’t really tell the judges anything about this dish.  Please help us name our entry for the competition. Leave your idea here in the comments or you can contact us through Twitter and Facebook. We’ll accept names until midnight (11:59 pm PT) Thursday, August 12th, 2010. We’ll pick a name from all the suggestions and the winning name will receive a beautiful spurtle pen from the makers of our myrtle spurtles, as well as a myrtle spurtle, a case of our famous steel cut oats and a $25 Bob’s Red Mill gift card.

The doll has all of Matt's features- including his glasses and signature spurtle stir.

I was all set to write you  a long post about the proposed USDA guidelines for 2010 when we got a visit from our friends Tim and Judy Cebulla. You may remember Tim as our Myrtle spurtle maker from Wood I Kid You? Well, what they brought by for Matt is far more fun for a Friday than the USDA guidelines (we’ll get to those next week).

The homage to Matt is hand made and was a special gift for our world champion.

Tim and his wife, Judy, stopped by our mill today to drop off a surprise for Matt (our world champion)—a beautiful, hand-crafted doll. Judy sells her dolls, along with other hand-crafted items through her store front Threads of Magique on Etsy.com.

We can’t get over how much the doll resembles Matt, chef coat and all! It kind of reminds us of the dolls from Coraline, but we’re going to put that out of mind and focus on the awesomeness of this little guy. Good luck charm for the 2010 competition? Check!

Winston the Wonder Dog

Just a few weeks ago, on May 15th, Bob’s Red Mill helped sponsor the Eugene Scottish Festival as they celebrated Scottish Culture and heritage. Although Glasglow is roughly 4685 miles away from Eugene, you could hardly tell during this day long festival of dancing, music, and food. After all, it’s not often that you can find a Highlander’s Bagpipe band and a sword demonstration on the same day in the Oregon Countryside.

Visitors to the Scottish Festival this year were treated to a variety of traditional musical performances and dancing through the day. There was also a less traditional (but much adored) dog parade featuring Winston the Wonder Dog, the Festival’s resident Scottie Dog.

One of the highlights of the day was the fiddle performance of Rebecca Lomnicky. This amazing young virtuoso is the reigning champion of the Glenfiddich Fiddle Competition in Scotland. And since we are pretty fond of the idea of Oregonians becoming champions in Scottish competitions, we were excited to get this picture of her with some of our award winning oatmeal.

As we begin to make our preparations for Bob’s Red Mill’s return to Scotland to defend the title of World Porridge Champion, it was fun to know that we weren’t the only ones in Oregon with Scotland on the mind recently.

Rebecca Lomnicky

Popcorn and bagpipes.

Everybody enjoyed free cart rides.

Spectators gather for the performance.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our chia seed contest. I have contacted all of the winners. If you did not win this time, keep trying! we have lots of great giveaways and chances to win coming up in the next few months!

A new gluten free mill is being constructed in the gluten free facility.

We have a lot of exciting things happening here at the mill, so I thought I’d give a recap of what’s going on. Probably the most exciting thing happening for us right now is the addition of a new mill to our gluten free facility. The shop is busily constructing the structure to be ready when the new millstones arrive from Denmark (I hear they’re on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic right now). This new mill will allow us to keep up with the demand for delicious, whole grain gluten free flour. Some of the flour that will be ground on this new set of stones include teff flour, garbanzo bean flour, sorghum flour and—coming soon—oat flour! We’ll keep you informed as our new gluten free products reach completion.

Bob's display for the Golden Spurtle win... I personally like the flags!

Bob has been gushing about our Golden Spurtle victory since we got back from Scotland last fall. To help tell our story, he had this great display installed in our lobby. Not only does it document the competition, but it showcases our personal version of the Golden Spurtle. The REAL Golden Spurtle is on display at the store and will travel back to Scotland this fall for the 2010 competition. The one shown here is ours to keep as a reminder of our win over the Scots. The display also shows the new packaging of our steel cut oats. The packaging tells our story and includes both the winning recipe and our recipe for the specialty category, Oregon Orchard Oat Brûlée. I’ve found the beautiful packaging on store shelves here, so look for it next time you’re shopping for your steel cut oats.

There is even more exciting stuff coming down the line- new products, really big news for our mill and Bob’s big 8-1! I’m not at liberty to spill all the beans and grains just yet. Cheers!

The new packaging for Steel Cut Oats- check out the ribbon!

From L to R: Bob, Fergus, Dennis, Matt, Francesca, James, Linda, and Bob's grandchildren Sarah and Chad.

Yesterday we had the honor of entertaining some folks who help make the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championship possible. They flew all the way from Scotland to visit our mill and take a personal tour with Bob. In addition to learning about our company, they’ve enjoyed some quintessential sights around Portland- including Voodoo Doughnuts and Powell’s City of Books. Last night we took them to the Portland City Grill to take in the most impressive view of the city available.

Linda, Bob, James and Fergus pose in front of the water wheel at the Mill Store.

We had a great visit and talked about the competition this fall, where we will defend our title as World Porridge Champions. It was fun to get to know Linda, the organizer, better and talk about fun ideas for making the competition more international. Fergus and James were busy shooting video and snapping photos of their time with us. If you haven’t seen it, Fergus produced this awesome video recapping the competition. Fergus, a high school senior, works with Carrbridge Films to produce amazing films and aspires to attend film school after his studies are complete. James covers the many events in Carrbridge and you can view his extensive photo collection here.

We’re so happy they could visit and learn a little more about the folks who stole the spurtle. They’ll be in town for a few more days and plan on visiting Timberline Lodge and Cannon Beach.

Look, it's me! Here I am shooting some video of the competition.

When our team began planning our trip to the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Championship we had very high hopes for the photos we could capture, the people we could meet, the foods we would taste and, um, the video we could shoot. So we got ourselves a fun and easy-to-use video camera and started shooting movies… er… clips. What we didn’t count on was just how much effort goes into making a lovely video like the one I posted yesterday from Fergus Thom of Carrbridge Films.

I got a video program and my first experiment was a bit shaky. So I watched a couple of tutorials and did some basic step-by-step editing. I am proud to say that after a few tries, I think I have something watchable. Here is Matt explaining who we are and what our dish was all about. Enjoy!

A Wee Bit o\’Banter with Matthew Cox

Next on my list- how to properly size videos to upload into WordPress. Any suggestions? You can email me at Cassidy(at) Bobsredmill.com