Following up on Esther's and Joshua's posts (concatenated below) regarding recipes, here's a question and a thought concerning sorghum and bajra (using here a common name in India for pearl millet). How often are broken sorghum or broken bajra used in recipes? (Broken as in grits or polenta, but not milled to a flour). It seems to me that there is potential for these "major millets" (sorghum and bajra, which are larger than the "small millets") in this form for the North American, or at least US, market.
Joshua, do any of your sorghum recipes use broken grains?
Esther, in perusing the list of recipes at the site you shared, I note that the recipes for sorghum and bajra mostly use flour, and sometimes the whole grains, cooked and mashed. There is also something called "rawa," which from a search online may refer to cracked grains?
My personal exposure to broken grains of sorghum or bajra was in Mali (where bajra / pearl millet is called saɲɔ or sanyo in Bambara and gawri in Fula). Broken or cracked white sorghum can be cooked as "broken rice" (ɲɛɲɛkini or nyenyekini in Bambara), and eaten with a sauce. Literal broken rice is eaten the same way.
Bajra, on the other hand, is ground (or typically pounded) into somewhat finer size for one kind of porridge (called seri in Bambara). Finer still, it can be steamed as couscous (basi in Bambara, lacciri in Fula).
As far as I know, the small millets don't seem to get this treatment anywhere - their being used either as whole (hulled) grains or as flour.
Anyway, might there be a market in North America for hot cereals from cracked sorghum or bajra - along the lines of steel-cut oats or Wheatena? I tried milling whole sorghum in a blender to a kind of polenta, and cooked it mixed with rolled oats in a hot cereal - nice flavor. Could cracked sorghum be marketed as a rice alternative? Could a West African couscous product made with bajra be developed for sale?
Will leave it there, with the thought that there is a lot of potential with the range of millets that could be explored. Expanding for a moment on that thought, a very different example from the site Esther shared is a "barnyard millet milk"-is there something about the flavor of that particular millet (Indian barnyard) that makes it an appealing beverage? Never would have occurred to me...
Don
Don Osborn, PhD
(East Lansing, MI, US)
North American Millets Alliance
Hi all,
Many of you may know this already, but thought I'd share this info for those who may not, especially since we were talking about recipes.
India has a research institute for Millets
https://www.millets.res.in/
Published recipes involving millets here:
https://www.millets.res.in/m_recipes.php
Thanks,
Esther
Esther Shekinah, D. PhD
Research Agronomist /Program Director (WiWiC)
www.michaelfields.org
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