Skirlie is an old-fashioned savoury oat dish from Scotland made with oats and onions cooked in butter or dripping.  I’ve been experimenting with this again recently made with olive oil, fresh herbs and a few extra veggies.  It’s ridiculously easy to make, healthy and far easier to wash up than porridge.

Skirlie has a different texture to porridge; it’s a little moist but also chewy, more like the consistency of cooked brown rice. Ergo, if you aren’t keen on porridge in all its gloopiness you may find that you enjoy skirlie. Likewise die hard porridge fans may find it takes a few mouthfuls to get used to.

That gelatinous wobble of properly made porridge comes from the beta glucan in the oats, a type of soluble fibre that becomes jelly-like when moist.  Large amounts of this soluble fibre is root of many of those health benefits ascribed to oats.  It can keep you feeling full through an ability to swell up dramatically when moist and also because it causes the energy from the oats to be released very slowly into your bloodstream (oats are low GI) .  Soluble fibre also seems to assist your body in getting rid of excess cholesterol, helping to protect against cardiovascular disease (and in case you wanted to know but didn’t like to ask, yes soluble fibre helps to keep you regular too).  Skirlie contains just as much of this beta glucan as porridge, it’s just that it is less physically apparent than in porrdige because the dish contains so much less liquid.  Instead all of that that expansion of the oats will happen inside your stomach instead making skirlie a fairly filling prospect.