Unrolled oat perfection at the World Porridge Making Championship

Porridge jaffles. Smoked fish paired with cheesy oats presented in a treasure chest. The meals sound like the stuff of an off-kilter Goldilocks retelling. Both, however, are winning recipes from recent years at The Golden Spurtle.

Each October, scores of porridge fans flock to Carrbridge, a 700-population village in the Scottish Highlands for The Golden Spurtle – aka the World Porridge Making Championship. Founded in 1994 by Roger Reed – the town’s hotel owner and Community Council member – he came up with the event to raise both the profile of Carrbridge and the rich history of porridge in Scotland. Since then, this celebration of the humble oat has laid the foundations for an ever-growing community. 

It’s also the subject of an eponymous documentary, released ahead of the 2025 edition, which captures a particularly historic year for the competition. In 2023, the World Porridge Making Championship was gearing up to mark its 30^th anniversary, and after almost three decades at the helm, it was Charlie Miller’s last year as the competition’s chieftain before he handed over the baton, or rather the spurtle – a traditional wooden utensil for stirring porridge – to fellow villager Alan Rankin. 

The idea to capture this milestone presented itself spontaneously to Constantine Costi, the Australian director of The Golden Spurtle, after hearing about the event via Australian entrant Toby Wilson. Costi visited the village, connected with Miller – who’s now a close friend – and it snowballed from there. 

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Facing time pressure to document Miller’s final chieftain duties, Costi assembled a crew and shot The Golden Spurtle within a year. Across the feature, the whimsical characters and community of Carrbridge are captured vibrantly along with stunning scenes of the picturesque surroundings. ​“I was taken aback just by how eccentric and fun the porridge making community is, and how seriously people take that food,” Costi says, ​“I wasn’t motivated because I’m some porridge expert, or even some great porridge fan, but it was actually a testament to the power of niche obsession.”

This passion now draws people from all over the world to Carrbridge – with entrants in recent years from the Philippines, Canada and India. There are two categories to the competition: the Golden Spurtle and the Speciality Dish. For the former, competitors have to keep it the traditional Scottish way: strictly oats, water and salt. The speciality section is where people get imaginative, the only requirement is the inclusion of oats. 

For the 30 competitors – selected by ballot as the number of applicants continues to grow – the adrenaline-and-whisky-fuelled action takes place in Carrbridge’s village hall across several initial heats. In each round, the challengers have 30 minutes to make at least two pints of traditional porridge and a speciality dish. These are then anonymously presented to a panel of judges who assess the porridge for texture, colour and taste, in addition to presentation and how creatively the oats are integrated for the latter category. From there, the six highest-scoring competitors make it to the final cook-off to determine the ultimate porridge victor. 

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“One of the key rules is that you’re not allowed to use rolled oats,” says Adam Kiani, the (spoiler alert) 2023 World Champion. ​“And we had never cooked with unrolled oats.” Kiani entered alongside close friend and fellow competition finalist James Leach. After some experimentation with oat groats and discovering that steel-cut oats were the most common go-to for competitors, the pair – who lived together at the time – were eating porridge for breakfast, lunch and dinner to fine tune their technique.

For Kiani and Leach, porridge had been a long-time passion prior to finding out about The Golden Spurtle’s existence. The pair run Forridge, an Instagram page dedicated to their culinary experiments with plant-based porridge. ​“We were really excited to be caught up in this bubble of porridge lovers,” Kiani says of the experience. ​“Everyone was so enthusiastic about porridge, from the people who were competing to the people in the audience. There was someone who’d flown from California for the weekend, just to see it.” And the experience kept getting giddier as both Kiani and Leach progressed to the final. ​“When I won it just took me to cloud 99. It was nothing like nothing I’ve felt before, just really crazy and surreal.”

Since that milestone 2023 event, the two of them have returned each year. Alan Rankin, the current Chieftain of The Golden Spurtle, mentions Kiani and Leach coming with a crew of friends each year, and explains that this more widely reflects younger audiences and competitors attending in recent editions. ​“We’ve got this audience dynamic that is changing. We’re seeing a lot more younger people,” he says, ​“and the feedback that we get is this is just so quirky, fun, and it’s an escape from all the crap that’s going on around us. That’s the atmosphere that we’re enjoying and also trying to cultivate.” On the competitor side of things, it’s also brought a new energy, with fresh entrants vying for the title alongside the long-time regulars.

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Stills from The Golden Spurtle, directed by Constantine Costi.

As word has continued to spread, The Golden Spurtle film release has added even more spotlight. With the heightened attention, last October’s edition became even more of a village-wide celebration – with the local hotel, pub and café all livestreaming the main village hall event proceedings to accommodate increased attendance.

This boom in popularity also speaks to a wider trend. In recent years, similarly oddball events that tap into unique, rural traditions – like worm charming or competitive egg throwing – have experienced a surge in younger audiences attending. Part of this feeds into a greater connection with the land and an interest in folkloric preservation. It’s also in line with people craving IRL community in the face of digital isolation. ​“There is something in the culture that people are yearning for – this analogue simplicity encapsulated by competitions like The Golden Spurtle,” Costi says. ​“We think we’re so advanced and AI-ified, but at the end of the day, there is something inside of us that wants to do absurd rituals in the middle of the forest.”

As Costi’s documentary shows, The Golden Spurtle isn’t just about competitive oats. It is about this connection. After the film premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, Costi organised a special screening in the Carrbridge village hall prior to its UK release. ​“It was such a beautiful experience, I felt like I’d made a high-end home movie for the place,” he says. ​“And Martin the whisky guru gave me a handmade Scottish passport.” Rankin jokes that since the documentary came out: ​“Charlie is getting his leg pulled in the village.” He adds: ​“Constantine came up with a view of doing a film about the competition, but he ended up doing a film about the village and the people of the village.”

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This tender approach, capturing the charming joviality of the community, is what makes The Golden Spurtle so disarming. ​“I don’t think you need big, controversial dramas for something to be a compelling watch,” Costi says of creating this gentle snapshot into a niche world. ​“You rarely think about cinema as a vehicle just to feel something. Often there’s this obsession with how it looks, or the narrative or the twist, but sometimes just cultivating a feeling is also a very rewarding takeaway from an artistic experience.” 

With the release of The Golden Spurtle, Carrbridge’s porridge legacy has been going global. The film has been hitting big screens worldwide, with a recent tour leg in Australia. ​“I’ve been quite taken aback with how moved a lot of audience members have been,” Costi says. ​“I think there’s something interesting about wistfully watching something from afar that you want to be a part of.”

And the porridge gospel has also been spreading in other ways. For Kiani and Leach, since their Golden Spurtle debut they’ve given a lecture on the history of porridge at the University of Heidelberg and been running pay-what-you-can community porridge gatherings in the park. In February, they’ll also be running a pop-up café at Stirchley Co-operative Development. Competing in that 2023 edition has been a real catalyst for these projects. ​“The stars aligned and everything sort of fell perfectly into place,” Kiani says. He also adds that as long as The Golden Spurtle is running, he plans to continue going back each year, either as a competitor or spectator.

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Photos by Michael Harley.

For The Golden Spurtle team, they’re embracing and adapting to the continued growth with a gleeful wonderment. The latest development they came up with, Rankin recounts, is the muckle spurtle (‘muckle’ means ​‘big’ in Scottish). The six-foot golden spurtle made by village chainsaw carver Alice Buttress started out as a joke until she turned up to the next committee meeting with it, and the muckle spurtle became a popular fixture at this October’s event. ​“Our watch word is evolution, not revolution,” Rankin says, ​“That sounds a bit corny, but we don’t try to do anything too crazy.” And they don’t need to; this infectiously playful spirit provides the driving force that keeps this Scottish tradition going and connecting with more people year-on-year. 

The Golden Spurtle, directed by Constantine Costi, is available to stream now.

Kez Cochrane is a freelance culture journalist. Follow them on Instagram.

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