Cereal might be the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about sorghum, but one New Jersey-based food developer found a way to make it work.
Robert Harris, chairman of Silver Palate Kitchens, was trying to come up with another healthy food item. Harris, who developed Smart Balance butter spreads, sold Smart Balance in the late ‘90s, joining his son Peter at Silver Palate.
“In 2001, we introduced a new line called Grain Berry,” Harris said. “Which is based on cereals and other grain based foods such as mixes—like pancake mixes, cookie mix and crackers and so forth, where we use whole grain oats or whole grain wheat as a base, and then we add high tannin sorghum.”
Contracted growers produce the sorghum near Plainview, Texas, and Dodge City, Kansas. However, it’s not your normal sorghum. It’s a black sorghum that is especially high in tannin.
“It’s a black sorghum and it’s a natural hybrid,” Harris said. “By doing that, they were able to achieve a very broad range of antioxidants more than either one of those varieties can offer alone.”
Black sorghum
The Onyx sorghum developed by Texas A&M AgriLife researchers has been a decade-long process, Bill Rooney, regents professor and AgriLife faculty fellow, sorghum breeding and genetics, at Texas A&M University, said. There was some interest in the black sorghum in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he said, mostly for its antioxidant value and its natural color.
“We started looking at this one (Onyx) and asking whether sorghum fit in to those categories these black sorghums were,” Rooney said. “The high tannin sorghums as well were very unique in they had very high antioxidant capacity and they had very unique color attributes and so that got us interested in working towards something more commercial.”
Rooney said the breeding process for the Onyx hybrid was a traditional process of developing the inbred lines to produce the hybrid that was black in color.
“That process of the breeding itself actually took about 10 years,” he said. “But it was just traditional sorghum breeding.”
During his 20 years as a sorghum breeder, natural variation in the sorghum within the AgriLife program was there for grain color.
“Black was one of the genotypes that we had and so we were working with it just for more or less at that time 20 years ago as a novelty thing,” he said.
The black color of the sorghum is a genetic trait. How the color develops is a reaction to sunlight.
“So there are genetic factors controlling its response to that, but in simple terms it’s almost like a suntan,” Rooney said. “If you cover a panicle of this black sorghum with a paper bag, it doesn’t turn black. It stays red. A dark red.”
Rooney said the plant has to have the right genotype conducive to this and it requires exposure to sunlight in order to get full color development.
“We don’t know exactly what the genetics or what the physiological factors are causing it but we do know how to select for it and find environments in which it’s fully expressed,” he said.
The Onyx hybrid is contract grown with licensing exclusively to Harris and his company. Rooney said even though this hybrid produces enough grain for what its grown for, it’s ultimately not competitive with other commercial grain sorghum hybrids.
“To produce it, anyone that wants this product is going to have to pay producers premiums—compensate for the reduction in yield relative to a traditional grain sorghum hybrid,” Rooney said. “There’s a yield cost to get this product, and it’s not going to be just widely grown and thrown into a commercial production system. It’s going to be very much a contract grow type of situation.”
Onyx was offered to the industry several years ago, Rooney said, with Harris’ company negotiating successfully with Texas A&M to get the license.
“His company has exclusive rights to produce and process and use the grain from the Onyx hybrid,” Rooney said. “We don’t provide seed to other folks.”
Rooney said researchers are continuing to evaluate black sorghum hybrids and have newer versions they are working on that have higher contents of colorants or antioxidant content—or even keeping those two things constant and trying to increase yield.
“Those things are continuing as just part of the breeding program,” Rooney said.
Cereal making
Once the sorghum is harvested in the Plainview and Dodge City areas, it is sent to the ADM Milling plant in Dodge City, Kansas.
“They either grind it or take the outer layer off the berry and we use that as bran,” Harris said. “We use a high tannin bran to fortify the oats or the wheat. Doing that, we go beyond whole grains because it’s very high in antioxidants and other bioactive ingredients.”
The bran flake cereal has whole grain plus the high tannin sorghum, increasing the natural antioxidants and bio actives. The case is the same with the toasted oats as well, Harris said.
“We add high tannin sorghum and Onyx and no other cereal can match it for antioxidants—naturally grown antioxidants plus the valuable whole wheat,” Harris said. “In the case of toasted oats, it’s the same thing. We use whole grain oats and then we add this blend of high tannin sorghum and Onyx, and no other oat cereal, including Cheerios, can touch it in terms of total nutritional value, antioxidants.”
Harris said Silver Palate is also going to be introducing Onyx as a food additive called Grain Berry Onyx. It can be added to various foods like soybeans, yogurt and eggs, soups and salads as well as baked goods in order to increase the antioxidants and fiber of the foods that people eat.
“It’s particularly valuable to gluten-free people because most gluten-free foods are low in fiber and antioxidants,” Harris said. “By using Onyx as an additive to those gluten-free foods, they enrich those foods and make it much higher in fiber and antioxidants.”
Healthy benefits
Harris said he believes antioxidants can help with overall health, and it pushed him to develop the Grain Berry product lines after selling Smart Balance. His Smart Balance product, a buttery spread, was one of the first to come out without trans fats.
“We used palm oil a natural saturant instead of an artificial saturant. Hydrogenation is a synthetic-hardened oil, and it was found those synthetically hardened oils were deadly,” Harris said. “So we used natural saturants. Mainly palm oil, combined it with soybean oil.”
Harris aims to be innovative when it comes to making healthy foods.
“I sold it (Smart Balance) when it got to be too big and I started Grain Berry—another healthy food to offer antioxidants to fight cancer, diabetes, obesity and other problems because the antioxidants in high tannin sorghum and onyx sorghum were able to neutralize,” he said.
Harris has sent Grain Berry to a lab to be evaluated, and said the high tannin and Onyx sorghum was found to help a couple of things.
“It was found they neutralize a whole range of what they call free radical chemicals,” Harris said. “Free radicals are things that come from either your metabolism or from your digestion, from the sun, from radiation, automobile exhaust and the antioxidants they fight the free radicals and keep them from getting into the cells of the body.”
Rooney agrees with the health benefits, and sees an increase in the need for sorghums that fit specific markets such as the food avenues.
“I think that market has grown phenomenally as well,” he said. “I would say when you talk about the food grades or the white sorghums primarily, there’s enough commercial hybrids of white sorghum out there that those are met by commercial grain growers contract growing existing hybrids produced by companies to meet the demand that’s out there now.”
It’s certainly increased in the last five to 10 years, Rooney said. And the market for other food options has pushed breeders to find solutions.
“It’s been driven by a little bit different market dynamic,” he said. “Right or wrong it’s been driven more I think, by gluten intolerance than anything, and maybe a little bit of reaction to GM crops.”
Sorghum is naturally gluten-free with non-GMO properties, according to the National Sorghum Producers.
For more information about the Grain Berry lines, visit www.grainberry.com.
Source: Black sorghum finds its fit in cereal line – High Plains Journal: Crops