FORAGED PORRIDGE? IT’S THE NORDIC WAY.

Foraged porridge? Meet the Danish American chef who is making it a reality in the Bay Area

There’s a lot happening in the world right now to make us crave comfort, so it’s no shocker that hygge — the Danish concept of all things cozy and comforting — has spiked on the trend-o-meter.

For Kristen Rasmussen, that feeling of hygge can be found in a simple bowl of porridge.

Rasmussen is a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN), an avid forager and the founder of Rooted Food, a consulting company focused on nutrition. Growing up, she loved to cook and contemplated going to culinary school. Instead, she ended up studying nutrition and science in college because it was, in her words, a “cool way to talk about food all day — and have more job potential.”

She spent nearly a decade teaching food science classes at UC Berkeley and the Culinary Institute of America (Greystone), in addition to consulting for Bon Appetit Management Co. and Cal Dining. But for the past six months, she’s turned her gaze once more to cooking by hosting hygge-inspired porridge pop-ups in the East Bay.

Rasmussen has always enjoyed the occasional bowl of hot cereal for breakfast, yet she didn’t become obsessed with porridge until several years ago, when she spent two months working in Copenhagen as a visiting researcher at the Nordic Food Lab.

During her stay, she happened upon a porridge-focused restaurant called Grød, named after the Danish word for “gruel.”

“In America, our visions of porridge are oatmeal, and you kind of eat it because you have to,” says

Rasmussen.

This was not the case at Grød. The restaurant served sweet and savory porridge dishes made with a variety of grains — rye, oats, quinoa and more — and creative toppings like fermented rhubarb, pea shoots, toasted hazelnuts, molasses and skyr, a Nordic cultured dairy product similar to yogurt.

“It made you excited about porridge,” says Rasmussen.

Like hygge, Nordic cuisine has grown in popularity in recent years. Rasmussen sees the popularity of both as symbolic of people’s desire to unplug, slow down and find comfort in an increasingly busy world.

For Rasmussen, who is of Danish descent, her porridge pop-ups are a way to connect to her family’s heritage as well as to link her love of cooking, nutrition and foraging. And in the meantime, she gets to test out a potential new career path.

She has pared back her full-time teaching schedule to focus more on her pop-ups, which she named after her Danish great-grandfather, Rasmus. Her cooking style — she describes it as “West Coast Nordic” — may be inspired by her roots, but it’s strongly influenced by California ingredients and flavors.

For her porridge creations, Rasmussen sources grains from Berkeley’s Millet Project, a campus research group devoted to studying and reintroducing the ancient grain. She also loves to make porridge variations with buckwheat and a blend of nine organic grains from Central Milling.

Toppings vary seasonally, and in keeping with her love of wild foods, they include plenty of foraged ingredients found around the Bay Area like feral rhubarb, dandelion greens, nasturtiums, wood sorrel, edible flowers and bay nuts (bay nuts are found on California bay laurel trees, and like bay leaves, are edible; when roasted, they take on a coffee/cacao flavor). She rounds out the rest of her foraged finds with produce from local growers like Top Leaf Farms, which specializes in farming on East Bay rooftops.

Rasmussen acknowledges that it’s a bit of a challenge to sell porridge as a concept for a potential restaurant, so to round out the business, she’s also planning to add smørrebrød (Danish open-faced sandwiches) to the mix.

“You start thinking about it, and every culture has a porridge,” says Rasmussen. “It's just a very comforting food.”