Cream of Wheat Recipes: 8 Ways Beyond the Plain Bowl

In Britain we mostly meet semolina pudding, which is the same idea with a different grain, and the complaint is always the same: it is bland and it is boring. Both are true if you only ever do the one thing with it. The useful fact about cream of wheat recipes is that the cereal behaves completely differently depending on how much liquid you give it. Thin, it is a drinking porridge. Standard, it is the breakfast bowl. Thick, it sets solid when it cools, and a solid block of cooked farina can be sliced, fried, baked, or cut into squares. That last property is where all the interesting recipes come from.

Which ratio do you need?

Everything below starts here, so it is worth learning one table instead of eight recipes. Cream of wheat absorbs its liquid quickly and keeps thickening as it cools, which is why a bowl that looked right in the pan turns stiff on the table.

Our cream of wheat guide covers the lump-free technique that applies to all of them: rain the cereal into simmering liquid in a thin stream, whisking the whole time, never dump it in.

The sweet bowls

Three variations on the 4:1 breakfast, each a genuine departure rather than a different jam.

1. Brown butter and cinnamon

Brown 2 tablespoons of butter in the pan before adding the milk, then cook the cereal in it. The nutty solids stay in and the whole bowl tastes toasted. Cinnamon and a spoon of dark brown sugar finish it.

2. Coconut and cardamom

Cook it in tinned coconut milk thinned with water instead of dairy, with four crushed cardamom pods added to the liquid as it heats. Fish the pods out before serving. Mango or stewed apricot on top.

3. Malted chocolate

Whisk a tablespoon each of cocoa and barley malt syrup into the milk before the cereal goes in. The malt does something cocoa alone cannot, and it is the same trick that makes malted milk drinks taste the way they do.

The savoury bowls

This is the direction most people never try, and it is the better one. Outside the United States, hot wheat cereal is far more often savoury than sweet.

4. Stock, cheese and a soft egg

Cook the cereal in chicken or vegetable stock at 4:1 instead of milk, season it hard with black pepper, stir in a handful of grated parmesan or cheddar off the heat, and top with a soft-boiled or fried egg. It eats like a fast polenta and takes five minutes.

5. Miso and spring onion

Cook at 4:1 in water, then whisk a heaped teaspoon of white miso into the finished cereal off the heat, since boiling flattens miso’s flavour. Sliced spring onion, sesame oil, and chilli crisp on top.

The set-and-slice recipes

Here is where the 3:1 ratio earns its place. Cook the cereal thick, pour it into a lined tin about an inch deep, and chill it for at least two hours. It sets into a firm, sliceable block that behaves like polenta.

6. Fried farina slices

Cut the chilled block into finger-width slices, dust them in flour, and fry in butter or oil until golden on both sides. Serve savoury with a fried egg, or sweet with syrup and berries. This is the classic thrifty use across central and eastern Europe, where yesterday’s porridge became today’s breakfast.

7. Baked semolina squares

Same thick base, but stir two beaten eggs and 50 g of sugar into the cooked cereal before it cools, pour into a buttered dish, and bake at 350°F for 30 minutes until just set and lightly browned. Cut into squares. It lands between a baked custard and a cake, and it is the closest thing to the semolina pudding I grew up with.

8. Farina dumplings for soup

Beat one egg and 3 tablespoons of cream of wheat with a pinch of salt into a stiff paste, rest it 10 minutes, then drop teaspoons of it into simmering broth and cook 8 to 10 minutes. These are Grießnockerl, the Austrian soup dumpling, and they are the lightest thing you can make from a box of hot cereal.

Can you make these with farina or semolina instead?

Farina yes, semolina with an adjustment. Farina and cream of wheat are the same product under two names, so every recipe here works with either box, no changes. Semolina is coarser and milled from hard durum wheat rather than soft, so it drinks more liquid and takes longer to soften: add about 15 percent more liquid and a few extra minutes, and expect a slightly grainier result that is very good in the baked and fried recipes. Our semolina flour guide explains the milling difference, our semolina bread recipe puts that coarse durum grind to work in a loaf, and the USDA FoodData Central entries show the two are nutritionally near-identical, since both are refined endosperm.

What goes wrong most often?

Lumps, and a bowl that stiffens before it reaches the table. Both are timing problems rather than recipe problems.

1. Lumps. The cereal hit the liquid too fast. Pour it in a thin stream while whisking, and any lumps that do form will whisk out with another minute of cooking.
2. It set too thick. Cream of wheat keeps absorbing after it leaves the heat. Pull it a shade looser than you want it, or loosen with a splash of hot milk at the table.
3. The set block will not slice. It was not thick enough or not chilled long enough. Use the full 3:1 ratio and give it two hours minimum in the fridge.
4. It tastes flat. Salt the cooking liquid, not the finished bowl. This matters more in the sweet versions than people expect.

Where to go from here

If you want the background rather than more recipes, what is cream of wheat covers what farina actually is, how it differs from grits and semolina, and whether it is worth eating. Any box of cream of wheat works for everything above. For the wider world of hot cereals, our what is porridge guide runs from oats to congee, and if you would rather use a whole grain than a refined one, barley makes an excellent hot cereal and how to cook steel cut oats covers the oat side properly. For the gluten-free equivalent, amaranth cooked as porridge is the closest match in texture, and amaranth is naturally gluten-free where farina is not.