Australian Wins Porridge Championship with Innovative Jaffle

An Australian food stylist has captured the top prize at the World Porridge Making Championship, sparking international praise for her audacious culinary innovation.

Caroline Velik, a Melbourne-based food stylist, won the specialty dish category at the prestigious Golden Spurtle competition in Scotland's Highlands over the weekend, earning acclaim from judges and fellow competitors alike for pushing the boundaries of traditional porridge.

Velik's winning creation—a porridge jaffle crafted from yogurt flatbread and stuffed with a rum banana filling infused with iconic Australian ingredients—left judges impressed by its originality. She also claimed silver in the overall Golden Spurtle award for traditional porridge made only with water, salt and oats, narrowly missing the top honour after Norwegian competitor Sven Seljom took the main title with his Norwegian Black oats porridge.

The event, held in Carrbridge in the Scottish Highlands, drew 30 contestants from 14 countries who each had just 30 minutes to prepare their dishes. The field included previous champions, making Velik's dual recognition particularly notable.

Speaking to media after her victory, Velik described the unconventional path to her winning dish. She initially planned to use bread—the traditional base for an Australian jaffle—but was forced to innovate when competition rules prohibited it.

"It really threw a spanner in the works," Velik said, given the tight time constraint. Her solution was to create a yogurt flatbread that would puff up in the jaffle iron like a doughnut, providing an unexpected texture that the judges evidently appreciated.

The specialty dish itself was a love letter to Australian food culture. Velik layered her mother's time-tested rum banana recipe—made with Bundaberg Rum and bananas—into the flatbread, then topped it with wattleseed extract and Davidson plum sugar. The combination of nostalgic family cooking and contemporary plating demonstrated what the food stylist said was her core motivation: bringing Australia's culinary story to an international stage.

"I felt like I wanted to bring parts of Australia and our history to what I was cooking," Velik explained.

Her journey to victory was unusually long. After spending more than a decade refining her porridge techniques—sparked by her husband's interest in premium oatmeal—she first competed in an online version during the COVID-19 pandemic, then travelled to Scotland to compete in 2022 before finally securing gold this year.

The international judging panel, led by Scottish MasterChef finalist Sarah Rankin, clearly embraced Velik's philosophy. Alan Rankin, the event's Porridge Chieftain, praised both the winners and the competition's broader quality, remarking that the standard of entries "was exceptional, and it's wonderful to see the event continuing to go from strength to strength."

Even Seljom's victory—which crowned his traditional, minimalist approach to porridge—underscored the diversity of views within the porridge community. Velik herself noted the surprise that three simple ingredients could yield such different results.

"You think it's all going to taste the same but you'd be surprised how many differences you can get with just those three ingredients," she said.

The victory caps an unusual culinary quest that began with a German oat roller and evolved into a championship-winning innovation that merges traditional comfort food with global ingredients.