Oil gelling agent (OGA), a material which can solidify the oil liquid into semi-solid or solid aggregate, provides an alternative for the recovery of spilled oil on water surface. In this paper, we used wheat bran, a byproduct during the milling of flour, as a raw material to prepare a polymer-based OGA. Various techniques were employed to study the morphology, surface and wetting properties of the OGA. The results showed that the developed material exhibited a multi-scale porous structure with excellent hydrophobic and oleophilic performance, and had the capacity to absorb a variety of oily compounds by 4.9-12.0 times of its own weight. Furthermore, the polymer-grafted wheat bran showed outstanding gelling capability to the various oily compounds with reasonable recyclability, demonstrating the feasibility of this material for practical application for oil recovery.