From cornbread sop to fine cuisine: Sorghum is finding its way onto gourmet Ky. menus

What do you get when you mix sorghum, stale cornbread and buttermilk? Famed chef Edward Lee says a jerky-making friend of his in Louisville “called it, simply, breakfast.”

Without a doubt, that’s old-style sorghum cuisine, the kind that never made it into cookbooks much less mixologists’ concoctions, white-tablecloth restaurant menus or, God forbid, the pages of “Saveur” and “Food & Wine.”

But Lee — who owns three restaurants in Louisville, is the culinary director of two in the Washington, D.C., area, a regular TV personality and author of two books on food culture — is part of a wave of chefs, farmers and others who believe sorghum has a lot to offer modern consumers.

His book, “Smoke and Pickles, Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen,” includes sorghum in Darkly Braised Lamb Shoulder, Bacon Pate and his own version of the Hot Brown, among many others.

“The main reason it didn’t catch on with the mainstream is that cane sugar was the cash crop,” explained Lawrence Weeks, executive chef at Ouita Michel’s Honeywood at the Summit. When America’s obsession with crystalized sugar, took off sorghum lost out because it doesn’t boil down into a crystallized form.

Too bad, Weeks said, since sorghum is not only better for you but a better sweetener. “It’s my favorite because it offers that light sweetness but has the background notes, it’s a lot more complex.” Weeks sees sorghum as a way to gain sweetness — but not too much — and the texture that comes with glazing and carmelizing with bonus of additional flavor. Sorghum, like wine, reflects the soil where it was grown.

That richness and complexity will be evident in the sorghum-brined pork chop Weeks is planning for the menu that will debut in March. But sorghum appears regularly on specials there, too, including a duck special he ran one weekend in November.

A lot of the sorghum used in Michel’s restaurants comes from Country Rock Sorghum, a three-time winner in a national sorghum contest.

Randall Rock, a partner in the business, started growing the crop and making syrup in 2000. A soil scientist, he said that most of the flavor in the finished sorghum syrup comes “from the particular place where you grow it.”

That place doesn’t need to be too special, Rock said. Sweet sorghum “is a pretty forgiving crop.” It needs heat and soil and rain but that’s about it. Sorghum doesn’t need rich soils and most pests don’t like it. That means no fertilizers and almost no pesticide. Just buy $8 worth of seed per acre, manage weeds and watch it grow for about four months.

When it’s ready, Rock cuts the cane and lets it dry in the field for a couple of days then squeezes out the juice by running the stalks through a mill that’s about 100 years old and looks a lot “like an old wringer washer.”

Although many producers cook the juice right away, Country Rock cools it for two or three days at about 40 degrees, allowing impurities and starch to settle out. Then they preheat it, yielding a green foam (chlorophyll) that is scraped off (it will make the sorghum bitter if it stays in.) Finally, they cook the juice until it reaches about 232 degrees and gains the consistency of syrup.

Typically, 100 gallons of juice yield about 15 gallons of sorghum. Rock grows three to four acres of sorghum each year and winds up producing about 500 gallons of syrup. That puts Country Rock in the mid-range of producers, he said with many smaller and some much larger producers, like Townsend’s in Jeffersonville, and others in states further south.

Country Rock sells gallons to Michel, to the Vinaigrette Salad Kitchen for its blackberry sorghum vinaigrette dressing and the Louisville Vegan Jerky Company (yes, it’s real.) Occasionally there will be a surprise like when Brooklyn Brewery bought 15 gallons for a special brew.

Most people buy it in pints to put on biscuits or cornbread and there’s the occasional adventurous customer, like actor Bill Murray who recently picked up a gallon at Woodford Reserve.

And then there was the the 2018 Woodford Reserve $1,000 mint julep.

“It had my sorghum in it,” Rock said. That’s a long way from stale cornbread and buttermilk.

This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 8:57 AM with the headline "From cornbread sop to fine cuisine: Sorghum is finding its way onto gourmet Ky. menus."