Sorghum

Sorghum bicolor

Sorghum is a warm-season grass with distinct grain, sweet-stem, and forage types. Grain sorghum is often called milo; sweet sorghum is grown for the sugary juice in its stalks. That split matters because one plant can point either toward porridge and fermentation or toward syrup and molasses-like sweeteners.¹²

The crop originated in central and southern Africa, spread early into India and China, and became important wherever heat, drought, or poor soils ruled out fussier cereals.³ McGee notes that the grain is boiled, popped, milled into porridges and flatbreads, and fermented into beer across warm dry regions.³ In the American context, sweet sorghum also developed a strong syrup tradition: Deborah Jean Warner describes how nineteenth-century growers treated it as a practical northern and western alternative to cane sugar, especially for home syrup production.²

That history only partly overlaps with the Northeast. UMaine treats sorghum as a genuinely warm-season crop and recommends waiting until soils exceed about 65°F, usually around early June, before planting.¹ In other words, it can be grown here, but it does not behave like oats, rye, or barley. Part of the point of using it in this notebook is precisely that tension between a heat-loving grain and a colder regional pantry.

Sorghum also has one memorable bit of food chemistry attached to it. Young, stressed, or germinating material can build or activate dhurrin, part of a cyanide-generating defense system.¹³ That is mostly a forage-management warning rather than an everyday kitchen hazard, but it does explain why sorghum is a poor candidate for the kind of sprouting that works well with other grains. Even as a dry grain, though, it brings something useful: a sturdy, slightly mineral flavor and a structure that often benefits from cracking, milling, or other processing before enzymes can really get to work.