Mature sorghum
Due to its excellent drought resistance, it has been widely cultivated in North China. Especially in the arid Loess Plateau region, sorghum was once cultivated as a staple food. According to archaeological findings, sorghum has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years, and for the inhabitants of the northern region, sorghum was still used as a staple food until the last century. Mo Yan's novel Red Sorghum also uses sorghum as a crop as an image.
However, most young people have not eaten sorghum, especially in our Hunan region, and have not even seen it. Why did sorghum disappear from everyone's table? Aside from yield issues and the reasons for advances in agricultural technology, sorghum it is really not tasty. Compared with rice and wheat, the taste is too far away, and sorghum is naturally suitable for sorghum wine
The grains of sorghum are called sorghum rice after they are shelled, and they can be directly cooked into rice and eaten. But according to the elders, sorghum rice is the most difficult staple food, far inferior to small rice and rice. Even the rice cooked with wheat grains is better than it. Wouldn't it be nice to grind it into a noodle? It's not good to make.
Sorghum noodles
Sorghum noodles are also called red noodles because of their dark red color. It is astringent, lacks stickiness, and is a bit like sand that is scattered when it meets water and cannot be directly made into pasta. In order to make pasta, a part of the elm bark (flour made from elm bark can also be eaten) is added to the red noodles to increase the stickiness. The taste can be imagined. In cereals, sorghum protein has the lowest content of lysine, so the quality of protein is also the worst; sorghum niacin content is not as much as corn, but it can be absorbed by the human body, in addition, sorghum rice contains tannins, has the effect of astringent and solidification, patients with chronic diarrhea often eat sorghum rice porridge, has obvious curative effect.
The only sorghum I've ever eaten is the rod, my Hunan, what kind of sweet sorghum I eat. When sugar cane is chewed, sorghum ears are the material of choice for brooms on our side. I still remember a college classmate in Anhui who told us that when he was a child, he ate sorghum rice with pickled radish strips for three years, whether it was dry rice or porridge, the taste was similar to eating sand, and even thought that concrete would taste better than sorghum rice. And that stuff is nutritionally unbalanced, and most of the students in our school have mouth ulcers and mental weakness and other vitamin deficiencies. Since then, seeing sorghum rice has been regurgitating.
Eventually, with the development of agriculture, sorghum gradually left the table and was mainly used for winemaking, no longer as a staple food. The story of eating sorghum has gradually become a legend.