Baking with Sorghum

I started thinking about flour as a flavorful ingredient a few years ago when I noticed that some of my favorite bakeries in Brooklyn, like Knead Love and 7 Grain Army, were gluten-free. What was that underlying layer of flavor, apart from the sugar or chocolate or mix-ins, that made each bite so satisfying?, I wondered. It was the taste of grains, of course. Though I had no particular attachment to a gluten-free diet, I appreciated that these bakeries were working with flours that were anything but all-purpose, and using the flavors of grains and pseudo-grains like corn, teff, buckwheat, oat and sorghum as central components in their baked goods.

I was hardly alone in my revelation. Alice Medrich coined the term “flavor flours” with her book in 2014, and there’s a lineage of fantastic wholegrain bakers publishing recipes that embrace the flavor and unique characteristics of different flours. I began to follow the work and recipes of Sarah Owens in Mendocino and Dawn Woodward in Toronto. After meeting Brooke Singer and learning about her work with sorghum right here in my new Hudson Valley home, I became even more excited about marrying my baker’s interest in working with flavorful flours with my activist’s interest in using ingredients that benefit my local ecoystem and economy. Brooke connected me to Sarah Magid, who started Knead Love, and Katie Phelan, a pastry chef most recently at the Baking Innovation Lab, both of whom have upcoming sorghum workshops in Brooklyn. We spoke at length about the local grain movement (which might make its way into a future essay) and working with sorghum flour in particular.

Quick note because someone asked: I’ve been baking with Bob’s Red Mill sorghum flour because it’s the most available. You can also find it labeled “jowar” in Indian markets. Sometimes it’s called “milo” (apparently in Australia). But, as my last post detailed, what would be most exciting is for the market for sorghum flour to be strong enough that it would make sense for small farmers to grow and process. Keep an eye on Carbon Sponge!

A sorghum brown butter cake, guarded by cat

Sorghum’s Flavor

“It has, like, a little bit of a creamy flavor to it. And so if it's too heavy in the recipe, I find that I have to balance it with vanilla or something. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's like a very creamy, sweet flavor, which can be strong, especially when it's freshly milled,” said Sarah when I asked her to try to describe sorghum’s flavor. We don’t have a good vocabulary for talking about flour flavors, the way we do for wine or coffee. But I know what she means — something about the flavor makes sense in cakes or buttery cookies. “We have a confetti cookie, which is [made with] organic maple syrup, sorghum flour, a little bit of oat, coconut milk, coconut oil. The sorghum flour really lends a tender flavor profile. We also use it in our bagels. I like to use it in sweeter-natured baked good. So we don't use it in the breads. But we [use it in a] cake that we make with maple syrup.”

“I would say it has a little bit of bitterness, sort of grassy…I'm using a lot of butter in my recipes, so that kind of rounds out any of the sharper edges of it,” said Katie. Her workshop on March 16 will focus on sorghum in pastry, and when we spoke she was experimenting with a buttery Pâte Brisée tart dough. One of my earliest experiments with sorghum flour was in a brown butter cake, which was delicious. Even when I’m not using butter, other fats like ground pecans, peanut butter, and olive oil seem to work well.

Sorghum’s Texture

Sorghum is gluten-free, so it doesn’t work as a 1:1 substitution in any recipe where flour is providing a lot of the binding or structure. It’s “smooth, sweet, and velvety,” according to Roxana Jullapet in her book Mother Grains. It’s quite fine and it doesn’t clump, making it useful in tender doughs or crispy cookies. It behaves a bit like rice flour, and so can be used in similar applications — in a batter for deep-frying, for example. Nora Allen of Mel the Bakery in Hudson uses sorghum as a dusting flour, since it doesn’t get sticky the way a wheat flour would.

“There's no speckles in it, like buckwheat or oat. It’s a very fine powdery flour, which is nice for treating it like a pastry flour,” says Sarah. "I feel like sorghum absorbs [water] really quickly for the recipes we've used. So we've had to reduce the liquids a little bit or increase the thickeners, like ground flaxseed meal or psyllium husk. I always call it a ‘thin’ flour, unlike oat which has a lot of body." Sorghum flour’s water absorption rate is much higher than all-purpose flour, and can be more or less than oat flour depending on various factors. In general, substituting a wholegrain flour in a recipe that calls for all-purpose means that you should increase the amount of liquid as well.

Pastries made with sorghum flour “tend to be a little bit more delicate,” says Katie. In a chiffon cake, she found that, “it's just a more delicate crumb. It didn't rise as high as ones I've made with pastry flour in the past, but it had a wonderful texture.” She was using egg to help bind the dough, which can make up for the lack of gluten in the flour.

Sorghum flour can also leave a starchy or sandy aftertaste in the mouth, which I found in one of my early tests of a cake made with 50% sorghum and 50% all-purpose flour. I didn’t mind this as much as my partner did, but as my recipe evolved, I added more ground nuts to the batter to balance that starchiness. Using a lot of butter or eggs can improve the texture as well, but if you’re trying to bake vegan, you might want to include other ingredients that break up the texture — crunchy things like nuts or ground cornflakes, or mashed/grated fruit or vegetable like banana or carrots.

Another approach to sorghum’s texture comes from Indian treatments of it: when used in roti, sorghum (jowar) is blasted with hot water that gelatinizes the starch and helps it form a dough that can hold together without gluten. The resulting flatbread doesn’t get hard or chewy the way wheat-based roti can. Working off this principle, I’ve tried using sorghum flour in tangzhong roux — the East Asian method of pre-cooking a small portion of flour to make the baked good softer and stay fresh longer. Though the amount of flour used is so small that it’s hard to detect the sorghum flavor, sorghum can definitely be used this way, and its starchiness avoided.

I made these milk bread-style buns using both sorghum and high-extraction bread flour in the tangzhong roux — I’d say they came out about the same

How To Get Started

“I would say whenever you’re experimenting with something new, just go in gently,” says Katie. “Start off with a 25% [substitution]. See how that reacts with the recipe. See how that reacts with your taste…Try it with a recipe that you make on a regular basis, something you have a lived experience with. My first go-to is usually shortbread cookies, because you're really going to taste it and see the difference.” In Roxana Jullapat’s Mother Grains, almost all of the sorghum recipes use a 1:1 sorghum:all purpose flour ratio.

“Success with gluten-free baking is never just about one flour,” says Sarah. “There's always a blend of flours, but you sort of highlight one.” Typically a gluten-free flour mix combines a “heavier” flour, like brown rice, almond, buckwheat, or teff, with a “medium” flour, like oat, millet, or sorghum, and a starch, like tapioca, cassava, or potato starch (sometimes it also includes a gum, like xanthum gum, for extra binding).

Below, I’ve written in-depth about some particular baked goods where the properties of sorghum flour work well for the finished product. But if you’re baking up something else, from a bread to cake, it makes sense to do as Katie and Sarah recommend — substitute it for a portion of flour in a recipe, and make sure you have enough binding agents like gluten, eggs, or psyllium husk.

Where It Can Shine!

In a soft cookie, blondie, or brownie

Baked goods that are dense and fudgy rather than fluffy and lofty can generally handle the substitution of a gluten-free flour well. I’d already found in my favorite brownie recipe that a gluten-free flour like oat or coconut creates a soft bite that’s more pleasurable than the chewiness that comes from wheat flour. I added more fat to this recipe for these peanut butter sorghum blondies so that there’s no starchiness. Anything similar, like a peanut butter or chocolate chip cookie or rich brownie, could easily balance the flavor and texture of sorghum flour.

In a crumbly biscuit or cookie

In textures that are already “short” (crumbly and flaky due to a high fat content and low gluten), sorghum’s texture makes a kind of sense. Digestive biscuits are one of my favorite snacks, and since they’re expected to be crumbly, a little bit of sandiness doesn’t feel out of place. Similarly, Katie’s shortbread cookies and tart crust are meant to have that “melt-in-your-mouth” quality that comes from a high-fat low-gluten dough.

In applications similar to cornmeal

A slightly different direction in the “crumbly” category of treats would be things made with cornmeal, like cornbread or corn cookies. Again, as long as there are enough binding agents, sorghum can be substituted for a portion of the cornmeal or another flour in the recipe. It’s compatible enough with the cornmeal texture that it should blend in. King Arthur has a recipe for sorghum corn muffins that I made last year — they were pretty good.

In a textured cake

To balance the starchy texture of sorghum, I’d steer around simple cakes, unless the sorghum is balanced with other flour and perhaps eggs and butter. The best cake I made with sorghum flour was a European-style torte — filled with ground toasted pecans that added richness and a pleasant kind of graininess. The only two recipes included in Mother Grains that use 100% sorghum flour are cakes that similarly depend on other ingredients to break up the texture — a carrot cake and a brown butter cake that also uses ground hazelnuts.

That said, the Knead Love maple cake that Sarah describes is fairly simple and I bet it’s amazing — my birthday is at the end of May if you want to send me one ;)