A Beautiful, Serendipitous Mistake

Yesterday the sorghum came down.  By successive whacks of the corn knife the seven-foot stalks were relieved of their seed heads and then, with the loosening help of the broad fork, were uprooted and stacked.  It has been a small stand -- less than half of a long row on the east side of the garden -- but it's outsized height flanked the garden shoulder with Beefeater stateliness.

And it had all been a serendipitous mistake.

The plan for sorghum had revolved around making our own syrup -- that molasses-like nectar favored in certain parts of the country for drizzling over hot biscuits.  With only the thinnest background on the subject, I knew only enough to seek out seeds for the sweet variety rather than that destined for animal feed.  I planted in the spring, waited, watched and industriously weeded.  I was some distance down the row one early day in June before I realized that the encroaching grass I was meticulously pulling up was in fact the first expression of the very sorghum I had planted.  Thankfully, my “meticulous” is not ultimately that thorough.  Enough survived to lead to my next misunderstanding.

By August the stalks were towering over the other crops, crowned by seed heads like finials on a flag pole.  With anticipatory foretastes of sweetened biscuits playing over my tastebuds, I thought to start reading up on how to convert those bronze grains into syrup.  That's when I realized I should have started reading months earlier. It isn't, it turns out, the grains that are ground or cooked or fermented into goodness; it's the stalks that are pressed -- squeezed -- like sugar cane to extract the resident liquid. 

“Idiot,” I thought to myself.  “Now what am I going to do with this stuff?”

In dutiful due diligence I researched presses, only to confirm my guess that we would not be interested in making that level of investment. Meanwhile, we had secured a bag of hard red winter wheat seeds that we planned to sow in late September for harvest in early summer with an aspiration to grind our own flour for bread.  I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to break out of my compartmentalized myopia and make the tentative connection, but finally the cylinders clicked.

“I wonder if there is such a thing as sorghum flour?”

To abbreviate the story I’ll just say that the answer is an ancient “yes” with multiple nutritional and culinary assets to its credit.  Having already figured out the end-game of grinding, my next step is seeing what I can learn about those other ancient practices of “threshing” and “winnowing” this beautiful grain I now have in hand.

All that, and then inviting my taste buds down a completely different trail of anticipation -- no longer of a drizzled ambrosia from a jar, but a bready aroma of heaven wafting from the oven.

There is a country song I love that pays grateful tribute to "the trains I missed."  Standing here looking over my sackful of misbegotten sorghum, I'm thinking this looks like a pretty appealing platform at which to be left standing.