Whatcha Cooking today?

[worth1]

I had a brand new jar of molasses and can't find it.
I had just enough for last night in another jar and I found it with my curing supplies.
Obviously I'm keeping overflow of supplies all over the place because my pantry isn't big enough for anything.

[pepperhead212]

You'll have to buy it in larger containers, so you can't lose it. I buy the blackstrap in gallon containers, because I use so much of it in bread.

[JRinPA]

I don't use much.... I don't want to look at the price nowadays. A couple months back I opened the last quart I had in storage. Golden Barrel, unsulfured Blackstrap, $3.19. That was bought at swann's pantry in Quakertown, and that place went under due to covid. It has been in storage quite a while.

A note on that butcher shop venison scrapple. I thought it tasted like a lot of pork in it. Well, the vac seal bag has soft fat residue in it. Any deer fat would harden up at room temp. So that stuff had to have a lot of pork in there. Interesting, the price list for that butcher shop has pork scrapple at $3.50 a pan and vension scrapple at $6.25. Sneaky sneaky.

Their bag baloney is pretty good but they do add beef to it. The Ring Bologna has pork in it, way to...slick feeling. The scrapple is not great. But their sweet sticks, oh my those are superb. I need to figure out how to make them. They don't list the sweet stix as having beef or pork mixed in, but I thought maybe beef trimmings or fat, and maybe some high temp cheese.

[worth1]

Well I bought regular molasses, black strap molasses and another can of Steens cane syrup even though I had an unopened can.
Lean salt pork and soaking a pound of navy beans in salt water.
I imagine I'll run across that other jar of molasses anytime soon.
Now I have to decide which pot I want to cook the beans in.
As a wee child navy beans were my favorite bean.

[karstopography]

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Sous Vide the beef tenderloin this evening. Decided to use dried principe borghese and black cherry tomatoes instead of Peruvian blueberries, good call. Greek sheep’s milk feta was awesome. So was the the filet reverse seared after spending about 1.5 hours at 128° in the sous vide water. So were the dried tomatoes. The experience reinforces the desire to dry more tomatoes in 2024.

[Uncle_Feist]

We don't use molasses around here, all of our recipes call for sorghum.

[bower]

I've never seen a recipe with sorghum! Nor even the product on the shelf. Up here it's all molasses, and they used it for everything from beans to figgy puddings.

Pork chop for supper tonight - fried with onions and seasoned with jalapeno and garlic. Sheet pan vegs and spuds on the side.

[karstopography]

There’s also sorghum honeydew honey. The bees feed on the secretions of aphids that feed on sorghum and make honey from those secretions. The honey captures that distinctive sorghum flavor. Walker honey farms here in Texas sells or did once upon a time sell sorghum honeydew honey.

Endless fields of sorghum are a very common sight here in the summer.

[worth1]

I haven't seen sorghum syrup in a coons age.
Where I used to live there was always someone making locally.

I've got my pound of soaked navy beans on the stove cooking to get ready to make baked beans again.
I had leftover baked beans last night for supper and cleaned the bowl out with a slice of bread.

[worth1]

Black gold and I haven't seen one person use this stuff in baked beans much less anything else here in the US.
It's apfelkraut I made a few years ago by reducing a few gallons of apple cider down to a little over a quart.
I don't remember how many gallons it took maybe three.
And it takes forever.
I used 1/2 cup of it to replace part of the molasses.
There is no refined sugar in this batch of baked beans all.
I used twice the amount of salt pork but I parboiled it a little to remove some of the salt.
About a pound.
Two big strong onions because they didn't have the modern sweet onions back in days of old.
4 cloves of sliced garlic.
1 teaspoon allspice.
Two tablespoons of dry mustard.
1.5 teaspoons of black pepper.
1/2 cup full flavor molasses.
1/2 cup Steens cane syrup.

Black gold apfelkraut and salt pork cut up before parboiled.

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[worth1]

Finally getting around to eating my half baked cauliflower broccoli cheese thing I made awhile back.
It's been in frozen storage for today and it's delicious.

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[worth1]

Around 8 hours or so at different temperatures it's ready and they are delicious.
That's a puya chili on top.

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[AKgardener]

https://pin.it/6kBODzMYs
I use bow tie pasta this is amazing I make it a lot I buy the sun dried tomatoes in a jar with the oil and add that to the mix .. taiste as you go add cheese as you like and if it’s not thick and creamy enough it’s ok to add a dash of corn starch to some chicken stock then add it to the sauce ,, you won’t be disappointed

[Sue_CT]

Looks delicious!

[Uncle_Feist]

@bower Let me rephrase my statement above..

We substitute sorghum syrup for molasses in any recipe calling for molasses. There are some recipes that specifically call for sorghum syrup, but I'm sure that molasses would be a good substitute for sorghum as well.

We do have a pretty popular cookbook around these parts called "Sorghum Treasures" that has some great recipes for using sorghum syrup.

[bower]

@Uncle_Feist a friend of mine just started trying out a gluten free diet. She had a recipe book and sorghum flour is a popular ingredient she says works well. Actually she made a half dozen kinds of treats Christmas time, and I have to say every one of them was over the top delicious and great textures. I was blown away because I have had the pleasure of some gluten-free 'treats' before which were mostly pretty flat and not moreish. IDK which treat had sorghum in it but they were all great.
It's too bad sorghum likes a long warm season. I have some seeds that came to me in Nicky's swap, but haven't tried. I noticed a few earlier types are being grown by Annapolis now in Nova Scotia, and an early one at EFN. Maybe a future experiment.
I hear the sorghum is a great chicken feed as well if you can grow it. Lots of bounty in the right climate.

[worth1]

According to the Texas department of agriculture we grow 1.8 million acres of sorghum that comes under different names.
I drive by the fields all the time.
The US grows more sorghum than any other country in the world and was domesticated in the Sudan around 5000 years ago.
That's about 5000 years after wheat.
Corn/maize around 9000 years ago and rice 13,500 to 8,200 years ago.

[karstopography]

https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-produ ... h%20Dakota.

Kansas is the top state for sorghum production, followed by Texas.

I see fields of sorghum growing around here. People sometimes confuse it with corn. There are now strains of sorghum being cultivated that lack bitterness to appeal to American tastes. The US is the world’s biggest producer of sorghum.

[worth1]

I found my other jar of black strap molasses today.
It was under the sink.
Glad I didn't open the new one.
Old guy from the next farm down road from us used to make sorghum syrup with a mule and a three cylinder mill out in the front yard.
That was in Southeast Oklahoma.
Our friend came to see us from Texas and he bought a bunch.
That was in 1977.
In the middle 80s he gave me a couple of quarts and I used the last of it around 2006 or 7.
30 Year old sorghum.
That's the honest truth and a testament as to how long this stuff will last.
The friend that came to see us came to Texas as a little boy in a covered wagon.
We used the live next to each other in Lampasas Texas where I was born when I was a little kid.
He and his wife considered my mom the best cook on earth.

[Uncle_Feist]

@Uncle_Feist a friend of mine just started trying out a gluten free diet. She had a recipe book and sorghum flour is a popular ingredient she says works well. Actually she made a half dozen kinds of treats Christmas time, and I have to say every one of them was over the top delicious and great textures. I was blown away because I have had the pleasure of some gluten-free 'treats' before which were mostly pretty flat and not moreish. IDK which treat had sorghum in it but they were all great.
It's too bad sorghum likes a long warm season. I have some seeds that came to me in Nicky's swap, but haven't tried. I noticed a few earlier types are being grown by Annapolis now in Nova Scotia, and an early one at EFN. Maybe a future experiment.
I hear the sorghum is a great chicken feed as well if you can grow it. Lots of bounty in the right climate.

A decade or so back I ground some sorghum grain from the crop I grew that year and made some pancakes from the flour. It was a white seeded variety called "Topper" if I remember correctly. Those sorghum pancakes were delicious topped with butter and smothered with the syrup made from the juice of the same crop!

But sadly, I haven't grown any sweet sorghum since. I do buy or barter for a gallon or 2 of sorghum syrup every fall, though.