Food, cooking, eating, and me

Well, not really just one more time, as far as cooking is concerned. When I decided to do an article on buckwheat pancakes again, I wanted not only to have a tasty recipe for you, but also to be able to show you what they look like when you use different amounts of dark and white buckwheat flour.

I ended up making many recipes of buckwheat pancakes in my quest for good photos and good taste quest. This was not an issue for me, as now I have a huge bag of frozen buckwheat pancakes I can thaw and eat in the mornings.

I took some pretty good pictures with my cheapie camera, so you can see for yourself. If you’re looking at this article as a single post, check out my previous entry More About Buckwheat so you can see the raw ingredients I’m working with.

But in the end, I found after all the measuring and pancake-making, there’s not all that much difference in eating quality between pancakes that have mostly dark buckwheat flour or mostly white buckwheat flour, provided you have sifted it to remove large hull particles. Buckwheat being a gluten-free grain means baked goods make with it won’t tend to get quite as fluffy as wheat.

I find most people aren’t adventuresome at breakfast. While I wouldn’t mind eating buckwheat pancakes that were as dark as devil’s food cake, any wussy eater will stamp his or her little foot and sniffle sniffle snuffle snuffle. Looking at the top picture, you can see that 25% is a little darker than whole wheat. In the bottom photo are pancakes made with no dark buckwheat flour, 12.5%, and no white buckwheat flour.I found that adding 25% sweet rice flour improves the texture greatly. This is cheapest at an Asian grocery, where I find it for .79 a pound in sealed plastic bags. If you’re gluten intolerant, you shouldn’t be buying it in the bulk bin at a natural food store. They rotate those bins from product to product, and people use different scoops.

You can also save the batter in the refrigerator for a day and still have the pancakes cook up equally well.

Buckwheat pancake Recipe

There’s a lot of information out there about buckwheat. For instance, I’ve heard it said that it’s not a grain (so far so good), but a fruit?? Just let’s use a wee bit of logic here, folks. Buckwheat is the seed of an herb, not a fruit. It’s also not even remotely related to wheat. Therefore, there is no gluten in it and it should be safe for celiacs.

In fact, it’s a triangular sort of a seed that is ground for flour or cooked into a pilaf called kasha - which I will soon post my favorite recipe for. As you can see in this picture, the whole seeds, also called groats, are greenish when raw and tan when toasted. I prefer the toasted flavor. I was previously able to buy mine pre-toasted, but they were never toasted dark enough for me, so I do my own, stirring over a low flame in a frying pan.

It is also possible to buy them coarsely ground for kasha, but I’ve never purchased them, so I can’t comment on it.

The seeds are also available with the hard black hulls on for sprouting. I tried sprouting buckwheat years ago, when I was in my al natural mode. I vaguely recall that the hulls remained hard after sprouting and were difficult to remove. I’d have included this in the photo, but I was unable to find a sample. Maybe nobody else liked it, either.
Most buckwheat flour I have seen is ground from whole unhulled seeds. Looking at the photo to the left here, you can see how dark the hulls make the flour. Most dark buckwheat flour I have used is full of gritty hull particles, and I find it an unpleasant feeling on my teeth. Very fine sifting can remove the coarse ones, but this takes a fair amount of time.

I buy white buckwheat flour and add a small amount of the dark flour for color and flavor. You’ll see when I put up photos of pancakes how dark a little bit of dark buckwheat flour can make the pancakes. Back when I used to make pumpernickel bread with rye, I used half buckwheat and half whole rye, and the bread was almost black, without any coloring added.

Next: kasha with sausage and onions, or buckwheat pancakes…