Kodo millet grains and how I might eat them

Ohhh bother!

I have eaten two meals of kodo-and-sorghum mix at this point, as I write this on Saturday morning. The reason I mixed kodo and sorghum was...I was fairly certain the kodo might be on the less-edible side seeing as very few people have recipes of it online despite the 5k year-old history of the grain across the world. I soaked the grains for about a day, and then cooked them in the rice cooker for an hour. They were quite crunchy still, so added lots more water and let 'em cook for another hour.

The kodo was still quite crunchy. On the first meal, I ate it like rice, with tama and achar, and maan it was hard to swallow, for sure. I didn't even finish the small bowl I ate from, and uhh let's just say the hunger didn't go away very far. And the following day, hmmm how shall I put it, let's just say it's unclear to me how much of the grains got actually digested, or if they just assisted in digestion. I mean, it would make the perfect grain for people who are on a limited caloric diet, as they would get very limited calories by eating millet...the food would exit the body looking quite similar to when it entered.

Earlier today, I put in a bunch of things into a 'bowl' so this was a more 'modern' interpretation with soy sprouts, veggies of different kinds, oils, and spices. This experience was a hundred times better. Which suggests that kodo is better as a 'salad' addon, than a base rice. The sorghum has pretty decent texture and neutral flavor, I can't really say anything beyond that because it was fine. The crunchy nature of the kodo grains felt a bit weird at first, but that's because I didn't know what to expect.

Next project will be cooking the crap out of a mixture of both the grains in the pressure cooker, for way longer than I cook anything else, and seeing where we are with that. The hope is that the grains surrender to the high heat and pressure of the cooker, and turn into a more pliable, and digestible material. Even if that doesn't happen, kodo is a solid fermentation raw ingredient, I can see how it would make for a brilliant tongba. Need to get started on my fermenting projects now it's almost summer.

A pretty reasonable and worthy experiment, this has been. A work in progress, check these pages for more updates!