Clogstoun Porridgee for Resilience

Jonathan Clogstoun-Willmott

December 15, 2020

Clogstoun Porridgee is a superb way to strengthen your microbiome, the health in your gut that keeps you resilient and assists your immunity. It’s basically porridge made the Chinese way, which seems to increase its benefits.

Clogstoun Porridgee Ingredients

You’ll need:

One heaped cupful of organic pinhead oats
About 12 cups of boiling water, preferably filtered
Oil for example from coconut, sunflower or olive; several tablespoonfuls
Salt – preferably sea-salt: about 2 teaspoonfuls
Optional – chopped ginger root, to taste, or add this before eating
Thick-base saucepan
A wooden spoon, long-handle
Ideally, a double saucepan as well, into which the prepared mixture goes overnight
About 15 minutes
Good sauce of variable heat, such as gas

Pin-head oats?

Even better might be whole oat grains, but I haven’t tried them. Pinhead oats are also known as steel-cut oats, or coarse oatmeal. They are made from oats from which the husk has been removed, then are chopped or cut into this smaller ‘pinhead’ size.

You can make this with rolled oats but I prefer the grain to be as near its original form as possible. I suspect rolling oats makes them oxidise more quickly, but this shouldn’t matter if you buy fresh oats regularly.

Making Clogstoun Porridgee!

1/ Heat the empty thick-based saucepan until it is hot enough to make popcorn.

Saucepan should be hot enough to make corn pop! — Heat the saucepan!

2/ Pour in the pinhead oats, stirring them vigorously until you see steam rising from them.

3/ Add the salt, stir it in.

4/ Add the oil and stir vigorously so all the oats are covered in oil. You may hear one or two ‘pops’.

If you have an extractor fan over the stove, turn it up high.

Waiting for the Steam to rise from pinheads being stirred over heat for Clogstoun Porridgee — Stirring water into pinhead oats to make Clogstoun Porridgee

5/ Add a small amount of boiling water. You’ll get lots of steam. Keep stirring vigorously (you’ll soon understand why the spoon needs a long handle) until the water is absorbed.

Clogstoun Porridgee after two addings of hot water and stirring — Early stage Clogstoun Porridgee, after stirring in water just twice.

6/ Keep stirring all the while, adding a little more boiling water each time the mixture begins to dry. Don’t add too much boiling water: you want the grain to be ‘thirsty’ each time you add more, so it quickly absorbs it.

See above for what it looks like after doing this twice = 2 processes. Still fairly coarse.

This stirring in each time you add water seems to be a vital method of ‘preparing’ the grain for the next addition of hot water. After adding the water, basically you want it to be absorbed or steamed off before adding the next water. That way, the grain expands as it absorbs the water and then loses some of it as you keep stirring, so the grain begins to stick to the base of the saucepan, now thirsty for more water.

Scroll down for what to do next!

Repeat the process!

7/ Repeat, again and again, preferably until you’ve used nearly all the water. Keep stirring all the time.

8/ Eventually you’ll find it takes longer for the grain to absorb the water.

See below for what it looks like after 8 processes: you’ll notice that there is a milky liquid separating the remains of the grains. Here the starch has separated out, making the porridge far more digestible but – important – it takes with it more water in a digestible form so, we think, it takes longer to digest and you absorb more.

Clogstoun Porridgee after eight processes — Clogstoun Porridgee after stirring in hot water 8 times

9/ Turn off the heat.

If you have a double saucepan, tip the mixture into the top half of it and cover with the lid. Place the top half of the saucepan on the bottom half of the saucepan.

Add the last of the water. Stir it in. You can probably add even more because you’ll be amazed how much water the grains, given time overnight, will absorb.

Leave it to cool overnight.

Leave the saucepan to cool overnight. — Clogstoun Porridgee in a double saucepan, left overnight.

10/ Here’s what it looks like the next morning, having absorbed all the additional water overnight.

Clogstoun Porridgee after being left overnight — Clogstoun Porridgee awaiting re-heating in the morning.

To re-warm Clogstoun Porridgee

1. If you’ve done this right, by the morning all the water will have been absorbed.
2. Carefully add even more boiling water, enough so that it makes last night’s mixture easy to stir.
3. Re-heat the mixture. If using a double saucepan put boiling water into the base and heat it again to boiling. Replace the top half over it. Cooling then re-heating changes the chemical structure of the oats making them a better food for all the good bugs in your gut. Cooling alone turns it into ‘resistant starch’ reducing the glucose peak, and re-eating apparently reduces this glucose peak by another 50%. So this means it takes longer for the food to be absorbed, reducing your urge to snack and cutting the calories you absorb. So it’s good for dieting too.
4. Stir the porridgee. If in a double saucepan you need to do this just once or twice as it heats up from the boiling water in the bottom half. If you left the porridgee in the original saucepan, you’ll need to stir it more often to prevent it from burning and/or sticking to the base.

Eating Clogstoun Porridgee

Now, this is where we part company with the normal way of eating porridge, though of course, you can do what you like.

Eaten the following way, you dispense with milk, sugar, honey, raisins, banana, fruit etc., most of which would tend to increase phlegm after eating. IF you don’t want that, read on. (Of course, all those things would probably increase your glucose surge too: not a good idea!)

Instead you take your Clogstoun Porridgee with Tamari soy sauce, chopped ginger root and some toasted sesame oil. You can also eat it with some organic sauerkraut or kimchi, depending how dotty you are about all these great ‘health’ foods!

Or you could add other vegetables from the previous night’s meal. Or add a boiled egg. The Clogstoun Porridgee should help you digest these ‘extras’ more slowly. That means you won’t feel hungry for longer.

Take a slice of fresh ginger root and chop into little pieces.
Place ginger in a bowl, and pour hot Clogstoun Porridgee over it, mixing it up.
Add about a teaspoon of toasted sesame oil. More if you wish.
Add at least a tablespoon, even two, of tamari sauce.
Mix it all up. It may be hot, so taste and eat.
Yes, it is salty.
Benefit from at least 4 hours of repletion, warmth and resilience.

All that Salt?

If this bothers you, take less Tamari. But don’t reduce the amount of salt in the basic recipe. The salt there has a purpose which is not just to make it good to eat but to strengthen your Kidney energy and function. The toasted sesame oil helps too. The salt probably also helps the grains absorb more water.

Warming and Good For You? Benefits?

Clogstoun Porridgee is a food for cold weather and winter in cold climates. I wouldn’t think of it in summer unless I were convalescing or the weather very cold.
It is highly nutritious and warming. It tastes more interesting than normal pinhead oat porridge which means you may want more of it! That’s all right – it’s not going to make you fat.
In fact the mixture is very filling so with a modicum of self-control you won’t need to snack before your next main meal. So it can help you diet by regulating your Blood sugar.
Its fibre content is exactly what the good bugs in your digestion love. It is a pre-biotic and there’s more of it than in many other kinds of grain.
Oats are, like other whole-grains, thought to be beneficial in lowering the risk of cardio-vascular disease.
Oats have apparently been eaten for 32000 years, says the New Scientist. So you’re in good company.
Oats contain lots of minerals, vitamins and other good stuff.

Other Benefits from Chinese medicine

Cooked the way described above, I believe that one of the main benefits of Clogstoun Porridgee, not mentioned so far, is that you absorb more yin benefits than if cooked the normal way. Those benefits come from better absorption not just of all those vitamins, minerals etc, but of water.

If you are thirsty and drink some water, I suspect that many people’s digestions can’t handle it properly, So it gets urinated out quickly.

Pure water may not be absorbed as well as in Clogstoun Porridgee — Jug of water.

However, by absorbing Clogstoun-Porridgee along with the other nutritive benefits of the grain, your body can find a place for the water. So less will be urinated away, as your body makes better use of it.

This should also mean that your body learns to make better use of moisture, helping your skin, your eyes, your blood and brain become healthier. Especially beneficial for Blood, as meant in Chinese Medicine.

And just as important, allowed to regulate its fluid levels, your body urinates away the surplus. In time this should mean better fluid balance and less oedema (- but this is theory: I don’t have research to back it up.)

This is what I mean when I say that it improves the balance of yin fluids in your body. Those yin fluids give you resilience.

Another benefit? You won’t need so much water through the day. Get used to the idea of drinking fluids only when thirsty, not because you read somewhere that you needed them.

Do you need to drink more fluids? How do you know? The best way is to check the colour of your urine, assuming you’re taking no extra vitamins or foods that might colour it.

If it’s a pale straw colour you probably don’t need more.

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