The Sweetness of Sorghum in Inwood
Group Photo #1 with the Sorghum stalks before we transitioned to processing demos and broke folks up into teams. All photos in this post are by Ann-Sophie Fjelløe-Jensen, thank you!!!
We kicked off the second half of this year’s Soul of Food session in partnership with NYRP up at the Riley Levin’s Children Garden where we planted a bed of sorghum (Coral, Red Sugar Drip, White African [Salt & Pepper] and Della) in one of their beds at the start of May, just a week after planting our sorghum in Deep Routes’ ENYF beds.
A beautiful group of participants joined us from the Inwood community as well as from other parts of the city to honor this stunning plant that hails from East & West African regions (specifically Sudan and Chad) and has been stewarded for it’s sweet juice, nutrient dense seed heads, and spiritual significance for centuries. We started off the day with some stretches before heading over to the bed to go over the plant’s origins, life cycle, botanical features and cultural significance in the African diaspora. Maya demonstrated using a brix refractometer to compare the sugar content differences between the sorghum varieties and then went over how to harvest the sorghum depending on whether your aiming to collect syrup, grain, or a little bit of both.
Then we headed back over to the main demonstration area for a walkthrough of how to use the sugar cane presser to extract juice from the stems, go over a simulation of the sorghum syrup process (because we wouldn’t have time to do that during our short session), and went over food preparation for our collective meal of sorghum grains, flour (from Sweet Freedom Farm), and syrup (from Townsend).
Once folks were familiar with the different sorghum activation stations they got to harvesting, pressing, cooking, and getting to know each other alongside the plants. It was a bustling afternoon of sweet and herbaceous flavors that culminated in a “gallery of tasting” the Summer Sorghum Salad, Sorghum Fritters, and fresh sorghum juice.
Big shout out to everyone who came out to participate, the NYRP crew for supporting this kind of work, NYRP’s photographer Ann-Sophie Fjelløe-Jensen for capturing the day, and to the National Black Food Justice Alliance’s creative team member Shakiel Greeley for bringing free copies of the latest volume of The Land Food Freedom Journal to the event for participants to take home.
The tops of the sorghum heads covered in mesh baggies to protect them from the greedy birds.
Harvest, Juice Pressing, and Culinary demonstrations
Maya walks through a flow of the sorghum syrup production process (which is included in the For the Love of Grains book coming to the Deep Routes shop this September 2025!!)
Food Prep Team Cooking up the Sorghum Fritters & Summer Sorghum Salad
Harvesting the Sorghum Stalks
Processing the Sorghum Stalks for Juice
Group Photo #2!!
Serving Up the Food!!
Thanks NYRP’s agriculture crew (Lateshia Peters, Mario Fong, Corey Blant, and [not pictured below] Genevieve Harding) for all your support in all the seen & unseen labor of making this session happen.
