Recipe photos by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty

As a bread baker, I’m absolutely obsessed with grains, well beyond their use in my loaves. One of my favorite non-bread grain applications is in a porridge, whether savory or sweet. Like many people, my go-to cold-weather breakfast is oatmeal, preferably made with hearty steel-cut oats, topped with maple syrup and a blob of peanut butter stirred into it.

But I love porridges at other times of day too. Congee, or rice porridge, is a savory breakfast staple in East, South and Southeast Asia, and a regular favorite in our kitchen. As is risotto, Italy’s answer to congee, and polenta, a cornmeal porridge.

And while I tend to avoid porridges in the dog days of summer, their chill-chasing qualities are welcome the rest of the year, especially here in New England, where the cold can linger long past the spring equinox and settle in again soon after Labor Day.

For the following savory porridge recipes, I wanted to feature wheat and its gluten-containing cousins, since they don’t appear nearly as often as other grains do in that setting. There is an Armenian-style mushroom and barley soup (yes, I call it a soup, but thanks to the creaminess that long-cooked barley lends it, it definitely sits on the edges of porridge territory). There’s farro e fagioli, Italian porridge made with farro—or emmer, a type of wheat—and white beans that’s either a wheaty risotto or a grainy pasta e fagioli, depending upon which way you look at it. And finally there’s a classic Chinese congee, but made with bulgur wheat rather than rice, something inspired by keshkeg (or harisa), an Armenian chicken-and-wheat porridge.

While I live for the balmy days of summer, I’m grateful for the warmth that porridges like these supply the rest of the year.