Starting February 15, 2022, we will no longer purchase or eat any food from the grocery store (except salt & baking powder). Instead, we are choosing to experience what it is like to raise and forage for all of our food. This means EVERYTHING: flour, oil, honey, spices, cheese, fruits, nuts - Follow our journey and learn about feeding yourselves
When we decided to spend a year eating only food we have grown or gathered, I started looking around my pantry and I took stock of the staples used on a regular basis. Some foods I would clearly have to give up, such as coconut oil and cocoa powder, but others got me thinking about foods we could raise or forage that would make suitable substitutes.
Rice was in this later category. Johnny grew up in south Texas with family ties to Louisiana Cajun cooking, which incorporates rice routinely. I have Italian roots. We ate rice or pasta on more nights than not. In addition, we didn’t grow oats, which we ate 3-4 days weekly as granola or muesli, so even our breakfast routine was going to look very different. It seemed our eating habits were going to change drastically. And they certainly have, but not quite as much as I feared...
Introducing sorghum. When I hear sorghum, my first thought goes to molasses-like syrup that I’ve tasted on occasion. Sorghum is an interesting plant in that the stalk is packed with a high-sugar syrup much like sugar cane, and yet the seed heads are an easy-to-harvest grain. Sorghum is technically a grass plant, so the seed heads are truly a grain.
The seed heads are easy to snap off the plant, and the seeds are relatively easy to break loose of the seed head. The seeds are already dry at the time of harvest, so minimal processing is required. And since you don’t need to grind them prior to cooking, they are ready-to-go, even more so than field corn. In fact, if you can grow corn, you can grow grain sorghum.
The best part is sorghum’s versatility in the kitchen. When cooking with sorghum grain, I’ve come to think of it as something like rice-meets-quinoa. In fact, it has more protein than quinoa (5g per half-cup cooked, compared to quinoa’s 4g and rice’s measly two grams). You also get more in volume: rice doubles when cooked, whereas sorghum nearly triples!
At the beginning of each week, I cook up about 2.5 cups dried sorghum grain, which gives me 7 cups of cooked sorghum to play with. Sorghum takes a full hour to cook, so cooking a week’s worth at once saves time later. Many references suggest 40-50 minutes, which is what I tried at first, but I kept complaining that it was tiring to chew. Also, my yields weren’t matching up to the tripled volume I read about. When I tried cooking our dark-seeded sorghum for a full hour, I realized I hadn’t been cooking it long enough. Test the softness of the cooked grain before deciding if yours is done cooking.
We have been eating this a 2-3x each week as a breakfast porridge. Don’t let the word porridge scare you. I simply modified a rice pudding recipe to transform it into a healthy breakfast dish.
Ingredients:
For 2 servings-
1.5 cups cooked sorghum
3 cups milk
1/4-1/3 cups dried apples slices, coarsely chopped into bite-size pieces*
1/2 tsp powdered spice bush berries (or cinnamon)
2 Tbsp honey
2 egg yolks (optional)
3-4 Tbsp toasted pecans, broken into large chunks
Directions:
Add sorghum, milk, dried apple pieces and spice(s) to a medium sized pot. Bring almost to a boil, then reduce heat to a low simmer and cook covered for 20-30 minutes, until most of the milk is absorbed. Stir periodically.
While the porridge is cooking, toast pecans on a carefully watched dry cast iron skillet (or in the oven on a baking tray at 20-degrees F). When they just start to release their beautiful, toasted aroma, remove from heat.
If you want to thicken the porridge further with egg yolks, temper the eggs by adding a couple spoonfuls of hot milk from the porridge/pudding to the eggs and mix well. Add the warmed egg yolk mixture back to the pot.
Add nuts and honey just before serving.
*The dried apples infuse the pudding with their delicious flavor, especially if you find some that were sun-dried.
For muesli we simply mixed the pre-cooked sorghum with milk, maple syrup to taste, and a mixture of dried fruits and nuts. I don’t like it as well as muesli with old-fashioned oats, but it is an option if we are in a hurry some mornings.
Sorghum grain can be substituted into any recipe that calls for rice or quinoa. Be mindful of the cooking time and simply adjust accordingly if needed.
As for grain bowls, your imagination is the only limitation!
Sorghum makes a nice hearty addition to a last-minute breakfast-for-dinner themed meal. Top warmed pre-cooked sorghum grain with eggs, greens, and cheese and mix it all together with some roasted pepper salsa or smoked hot pepper sauce. More protein and heft can be added by incorporating black beans &/or sausage. And if you have access to avocadoes, well – need I say more?
Pesto has been a bit of a cheat item, as I’m using some made last year with olive oil. The basic concept is mixing sorghum with pesto to taste, adding protein of your choice (de-boned chicken or rabbit are nice delicate flavors for a pesto), feta cheese, and veggies (my favorites are broccoli and tri-colored bell peppers, which we add from our freezer out of season). Some additional basil leaves, cut chiffonade style and sprinkled on top as a garnish is a nice finishing touch.
I’ve made another dish inspired by the Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen cookbook:
Ingredients:
1 cup dry sorghum grain
6-8 cups assorted greens (we used kale, chard, dandelion & chickweed)
1 winter squash (butternut)
3 cloves garlic
1 apple
4 cups edamame in pods (or 2 cups shelled)
1 cup pecans
1/4 cup oil (sunflower or pecan)
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp maple syrup.
Directions:
Boil sorghum for 50-60 minutes. Meanwhile, skin and slice squash in 1/2 inch thick rounds and roast slices on a greased cookie sheet at 375 for 20 minutes. After 10 minutes, add bite sized apple chunks to the pan. While the oven is hot, place 3 garlic cloves in a tsp of oil to roast for about 10 minutes or until soft.
Boil edamame for 5 minutes, cool under cold running water and shell if needed. Toast pecans if desired either in the oven in a dry baking dish for 5 minutes or on a cast iron skillet on the stovetop for 5 minutes. Watch carefully so they don’t burn.
Coarsely chop greens and sauté in a tsp of oil.
For the dressing, mix oil, vinegar and maple syrup with a pinch of salt.
When everything is cooked, mix greens, squash, apples, pecans, garlic and edamame. Serve on top of the sorghum and drizzle with the dressing.
Ingredients & Directions:
2-3apples, cored and sliced
Sauté in butter &/or oil (we used pecan oil and our rendered lard)
1 red bell pepper, sliced - add to skillet.
1 sweet potato, sliced - add to skillet
(I always bake several sweet potatoes at the beginning of each week to use in various dishes - a practice I highly recommend. In cooking this breakfast bowl, I had a precooked sweet potato on hand, and so added it later)
When apples, peppers 🫑 and sweet potatoes 🍠 are soft, add 1/2 cup pecan halves, 1/4 cup green onions and 1.5 cups pre-cooked sorghum.
Season with foraged ground spice bush berries (or cinnamon, nutmeg & ginger) and top with 1 Tbsp maple syrup per bowl when serving. Makes 3 servings.
Adding sautéed yellow onions and even some ground pork if you are a meat-eater would be nice additions.
It doesn't look like much, but it tasted great and was very satisfying!
Raw dry sorghum seeds can be ground into a flour and used as a gluten-free flour for many recipes. It is the principal ingredient in jowar roti, or Indian flatbread. There are many people more experienced than I am at making this, so I defer to the great and powerful google on this one.
Even though we have access to about 8 cups of wheat flour weekly, I have used our sorghum flour to augment and even substitute for wheat flour in muffins, pancakes, piecrusts, and more! It grinds much more easily than wheat in our home burr mill (The world's finest hand grain mill | Country Living Grain Mills), and I think it would grind up fine in any home blender. Sorghum/milo is a great home-grown gluten-free grain that is way too under-utilized in North America!
Apple Pecan Muffins with Whole Wheat and Sorghum Grain Flour
Kitchen Sink Quick Bread with Whole Wheat, Acorn Flour and Sorghum Grain Flour
Popcorn
I had to try this. The dry seeds do in-fact pop into a pop-corn-ish snack, but they are so small. Where a ¼-1/3 cup of dried popcorn makes a 3 cup mountain of popped corn, the same amount of sorghum pops into maybe a cup of puffed snack equivalent. Cute, and maybe a fun ingredient in a baked good, but I’m not inclined to work this into my diet routinely.
Sorghum as a home crop
We first grew a multi-purpose variety, as Johnny was initially interested in diversifying our sources of sweet, but we quickly realized the grain potential growing in our crop field. Using the canes to obtain sorghum syrup was, well – let’s just say I’m glad we had the experience, but the workload to yield math doesn’t add up. At all! The multipurpose varieties aren’t well suited to seed harvest, as the seeds shatter (drop) too soon. We are now growing a variety that is bred for grain harvest. There are lots of small seed packets available, but check out Milo or Grain Sorghum Seed from Welter Seed & Honey Co. - Onslow, Iowa if you think you might plant a larger plot.
If you can grow sweet corn, you can grow sorghum!
Starting February 15, 2022, we will no longer purchase or eat any food from the grocery store (except salt & baking powder). Instead, we are choosing to experience what it is like to raise and forage for all of our food. This means EVERYTHING: flour, oil, honey, spices, cheese, fruits, nuts - Follow our journey and learn about feeding yourselves