Wild rice porridge is a great way to enjoy our native grain at breakfast time: Creamy, studded with fruit, nuts and seeds, it’ll get your day started right.

Wild rice is native to North America, and the best stuff is true wild rice, which grows wild (duh!) and is harvested all over the northern Midwest and Canada. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Manitoba have the best wild rice.

Yes, you can get cultivated “wild” rice, which is mostly grown on farms in California and Arkansas, but it’s inferior to the real deal. Normally I get all up in arms about the cultivated stuff, but in the case of wild rice porridge, an even cheaper product — cultivated, but broken-grain wild rice — works very well.

We made wild rice porridge a lot when I worked as a chef in northern Minnesota at a grouse hunting lodge, and the trick to an easy breakfast was to cook the wild rice the night before. True wild rice doesn’t take too long to cook, maybe 20 minutes, but the cultivated stuff can take up to an hour. Not ideal for breakfast.

So cook your rice with just water and a little salt until it’s tender, then drain and keep it in the fridge, where you can store it for a week or so. Then, when you want breakfast, you put the cooked wild rice in a pot with milk and/or cream, heat it to steaming, and you’re good.

(Side note: If you want to eat your pre-cooked wild rice for lunch or supper, try my wild rice salad, or my wild rice pilaf with mushrooms.)

How you make your wild rice porridge is a matter of taste. I generally add whatever fruits (dried, frozen or fresh) that I have handy, along with some nuts and seeds, a bit of maple syrup, honey or brown sugar, and if I reheated the porridge in just milk, a little butter for richness.

Here’s how we made wild rice porridge at grouse camp:

• True wild rice, broken grains (these cook faster and are cheaper)
• Half and half, or whole milk plus a little heavy cream
• A pinch of salt
• Maple syrup to get it sweet, but not overly so
• A mix of dried berries: lingonberries, blueberries, craisins, black currants, golden raisins, etc
• Chopped walnuts, pecans, or hazelnuts. Sunflower and pumpkin seeds are great, too
• If we wanted to get crazy, a dash of cinnamon

You can mix and match as you see fit. But dried fruit adds tartness and chewiness, the creamy stuff some needed fat, the nuts crunch (also fat), a sweetener to make it all nice.

Once the wild rice has been cooked, a batch of wild rice porridge comes together in about 5 minutes. Easy-peasy.

Oh, and if you have leftovers? Keep them in the fridge separately from your cache of pre-cooked wild rice, then add the leftovers to some new wild rice the next time you want some porridge.

If you liked this recipe, please leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating and a comment below; I’d love to hear how everything went. If you’re on Instagram, share a picture and tag me at huntgathercook.