Harvesting and Making Sorghum Syrup
Ripened Coral Sorghum. Above photo by Maya Marie S. Other photos in this post are by Maya Marie S., Corey Blant, and Maggie Paradis. Do not use photos without written permission.
This past Saturday we had the loveliest participants join us for the two remaining sessions of our Sweetness of Sorghum offering in partnership with NYRP up at the Riley-Levin Children’s Garden.
We started off on a beautiful Saturday afternoon with a brief review of what we covered about sorghum during our May session, and then got right into revisiting the sorghum beds in the garden.
In August NYRP had harvested the earlier varieties (Korjaj and Black African/Salt + Pepper), so folks would be tasked with harvesting the remaining bed of Sugar Drip and Coral. Folks observed and we discussed sorghum’s botanical features before getting into demonstrations on testing our brix levels, harvesting and pressing the cane, and harvesting the infloresence (a.k.a. a cluster of flowers) for seed and grain.
Folks broke out into teams to get the stalks harvested and pressed for juice, and prepared the tops for drying to store as seed or grain by threshing and winnowing them in baskets.
The next day we began the sorghum syrup cooking process. All of the juice we’d pressed the day before would be cooked down into a syrup. As the sorghum juice slowly transformed before us, we did in exercise in tasting a variety of sorghum syrups to explore the differences in terroir and flavor: one from Townsend (Tennessee), farmer and seed saver Chelsea Askew (Georgia), Deep Routes ENYF 2025 harvest (East NY Brooklyn), and NYRP’s 2025 harvest (Inwood, Manhattan)
After our tasting, we continued to allow the syrup to simmer and dove into some cooking demonstrations of sorghum-forward dishes for participants to work together on: sorghum + sweet potato salad, sorghum bbq chicken and mushrooms, and sorghum fritters! There was also a surprise sorghum ice cream waiting in the freezer.
Together everyone helped cook up the different components and towards the end of the session, everyone huddled inside to enjoy the dishes and reflect on the experience before we wrapped up. The sorghum syrup still needed about an hour or so to complete (and cool!), but the NYRP team is gonna make sure folks get a taste of all their hard work!
Big thanks to everyone who joined us for this process from across the boroughs, whether you came in the spring to sow seeds, harvested and processed, cooked and tasted, or all three; thank you for bringing your curiosity, spirit, and love of sorghum to the series.
Even bigger shout out to the NYRP crew for supporting this kind of work and making each session seamless and full of love.
