Israeli ingredients a recipe for ‘Pearly Spurtle’

For Rachel Visontay, porridge is a daily ritual. She eats it every day, packs bags of oats when she travels and has spent years refining her morning recipe.

So, when she heard about the Pearly Spurtle, Australia’s first porridge championship, she knew she had to enter. The competition was inspired by The Golden Spurtle, a documentary about the annual World Porridge Making Championships in Scotland, which Visontay had watched at the Sydney Film Festival last year.

“When I heard that there was going to be an Australian version, after a friend of mine saw it on social media, I jumped at the chance,” says Visontay. By day, she works as an epidemiology researcher at the University of Sydney, studying the effects of alcohol on the brain – a world away from competitive porridge-making.

At the inaugural event, held at Pearl Beach on the NSW Central Coast, 15 competitors had 30 minutes to make two dishes: a classic porridge using only oats, water and salt, and a “creative” porridge that could be almost anything, as long as oats were a key ingredient. After the first heat, the five highest-scoring competitors advanced to the final, where they had to make their traditional porridge again.

Visontay came second overall, behind winner Robby Reid, who’s now set to compete in The Golden Spurtle in Scotland. But she won the creative category – and a $500 cash prize – with a Mediterranean-style porridge featuring her favourite ingredient, figs. 

“I am a bit of a fig obsessive. I have a newsletter about figs, and so I knew that when I had to make a creative porridge, it had to feature figs somehow. That was the impetus,” says Visontay.

“Porridge is a super wintery dish, and I thought if I’m going with figs, why not make a summery Mediterranean porridge? So, there was some tahini, some date syrup, certainly flavours I encountered in Israel a lot.”