In the fall of 1861 there was a bumper crop of Sorghum
and the Old Northwest made use if it.
"Sorghum: Our Sweet Heritage
A recipe is much more than merely instructions on how to cook a dish. Recipes are road maps to culture. They show us where we came from, providing essential windows into how our parents cooked and how we evolved as a society. Tucked away in regional cookbooks, books from the Amish, Appalachian Mountains, the American South and Midwestern Heartland you may find sorghum molasses included in the list of recipe ingredients. Now sorghum “molasses” is a bit of a misnomer. Pure sorghum producers refer to their product as sorghum or sorghum syrup, to distinguish it from molasses.
Regular molasses is a by-product of the manufacture of sugar from sugar cane. There are three kinds. Light molasses is residue from the first extraction of sugar and is the sweetest. Dark molasses is obtained from the second extraction and is less sweet. Blackstrap molasses is the final residue, very dark and rather medicinal in flavor.
One of the oldest natural sweeteners, sorghum syrup is made by processing juice squeezed from stalks of certain types of sorghum plants called sweet sorghum. Sorghum, a member of the grass family, looks a lot like corn, although the seed is arrayed in clusters rather than in an ear. Probably indigenous to Africa, its deep branching roots make it drought resistant, and it does well with summers like the last one in Wisconsin. Innumerable varieties abound. Fibers of broomcorn sorghums are used for brooms, grass sorghums for pasture and hay, and pulverized grain sorghums for livestock and poultry feed. Only a small amount of sweet sorghum, the cane juice of which is boiled into syrup, is grown at all, and most of that is locally consumed.
Some people see sorghum as a health food because it has substantial amounts of iron, potassium, phosphorus and calcium. We, of course, are concerned with the sublime. Sorghum has a buttery complexity unmatched by sugar molasses; one author refers to it as “just about the elixir of the gods”. Richer than even the best honey, it’s the preferred topping in the South for hot biscuits (mixed with butter in a 3 sorghum to 2 butter ratio) and a flavor enhancement for such baked goods as cookies, pecan pie, gingerbread and stack cakes. Simply marvelous with baked beans and slipped into barbecue sauce, sorghum pairs up perfectly with sweet potatoes.
Here are some general guidelines when substituting sorghum for molasses. Substitute one for one in non-baking applications (BBQ sauces, baked beans, etc). In baking recipes (cakes and cookies) substitute one for one, but cut the amount of sugar called for by 1/3.
Sorghum has been known to have a shelf life of anywhere from 10 to 25 years, and no refrigeration is necessary after opening. The outside of the bottle should be cleaned of drips after each use. Some sorghum syrup may crystallize in storage, but this causes no harm and it can be reliquified as you do honey, by placing the container in a larger container of hot water until it has melted.
Sorghum sweetened many foods for American pioneers for whom white sugar was a rare and expensive commodity. Around the end of WWI refined sugar products became more readily available and less costly, thus causing a decline in the use of sorghum as a sweetener. A traditional autumn activity, old-fashioned sorghum production was quite labor intensive. Hand harvested, leaf-stripped sorghum canes were fed into a mule-powered grinder, which squeezed the juice out of the stalks. Once the liquid was extracted from the stalks, it was slowly cooked down, impurities skimmed off the top of the boiling juice and after 8 hours a rich, incomparable syrup remained.
Richard Wittgreve of Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin was nostalgic for the sorghum of his Iowa childhood and started his own mill in 1985. Today, Rolling Meadows Sorghum Mill is one of four fully mechanized sweet sorghum operations in the U.S. and skillfully processes 75 to 80 per cent of this state’s total sorghum syrup production. Mr. Wittgreve’s pure sorghum syrup can be locally obtained at both Outpost stores, the South Shore Farmers’ Market (from Drewry Farm) and directly from Rolling Meadows Sorghum Mill in Sheboygan County."
From:
Richard Wittgreve at Rolling Meadows Sorghum Mill
N9030 Little Elkhart Lake Rd., Elkhart Lake, WI 53020
920-876-2182,
sorghum@excel.net
www.slowfoodwise.org
