From Seed to Table: Buckwheat Pancakes

According to a column in Agricultural Research from September 1974, “buckwheat has an amino acid composition nutritionally superior to all cereals, including oats,” due to its high content of lysine.

Not only that, but hearty buckwheat pancakes are just as tasty, if not tastier, than those made from wheat. So what are you waiting for? Let’s make some pancakes!

The following is an excerpt from Small-Scale Grain Raising by Gene Logsdon. It has been adapted for the Web.

Planting Buckwheat

Buckwheat has few disease or bug problems, which is another plus for organic growers. You can plant it by broadcasting the seed over a worked seedbed. No need to grow in rows for weed cultivation; in fact, you don’t want to. Solid stands of buckwheat will more than compete with most weeds. Simply rotary-till the soil, scatter the seed over the ground, and till lightly once more. A seeding rate of about 1 1/2 bushels per acre is adequate.

In the garden I have grown buckwheat after early peas and gotten a good stand. One year, to test the claims of buckwheat devotees, I tried a patch on a hillside where the clay was leather-tough. In a very dry time in July, I planted the buckwheat there without fertilizer of any kind. With a little rain, the buckwheat grew luxuriantly. We harvested some, the birds ate some, and enough fell to the ground to give me another stand.

Harvesting

Buckwheat is best harvested with a combine using the same adjustments and screens you use for oats. If you don’t want to dry it in a windrow wait until after frost has killed the plants and the more mature seeds have had time to dry. This usually means harvesting at about 17 percent moisture, then drying the seeds down to the necessary 12 to 13 percent with artificial heat or spreading out the seeds very thinly in a dry environment.

Small amounts in the garden can be harvested by hand.

Cut the stalks with a scythe (or sickle-bar mower), tie them into bundles, allow to dry well under cover, then proceed as with threshing wheat by hand. Buckwheat threshes easily. You can shake much of the seed out of the bundles when it is dry. Or rap each bundle over the edge of a bucket or the edge of a pickup truck bed. Or put the bundle in a sack and trample or flail as described earlier for wheat in chapter 3. Winnowing must then be done to separate out the chaff and stem bits.

With a garden patch of buckwheat, you can gather a cup or two at a time for breakfast from the standing plants, using your fingers to strip the dark brown, pyramid-shaped grains off the stems below the still-blooming tops of the plants.

Chickens like buckwheat. Rabbits do too. I just feed them the plants, with the grain still intact on them. A crop will not go to waste in any event, because, if you let the unharvested plants stand through winter, the wild birds will have a feast.

Buckwheat honey is most delicious. The nectar is especially beneficial for the bees because it is still available in the fall when they have to hunt much harder for flowers.

Processing buckwheat for table use is not so simple a task. The buckwheat grain, which looks like a tiny beechnut (from which word, beech, the buck of the word buckwheat derives, by the way) is mostly hull. The flour inside is nearly pure white. The groundup hulls are good fiber, but like oat hulls, too many means less tastefulness.

I like whole-buckwheat pancakes, but I prefer to have most of the hulls removed. With a commercial huller this is no problem, but at home, using a blender or kitchen mill, hulling is more difficult. We have used our blender to grind all grains (it will wear out sooner, however) and have found that if the buckwheat is toasted a wee bit or at least heat-dried well before grinding, the hulls will shatter off better, and many of them can be sifted out in a flour sifter. Well worth the trouble.

Get some real maple syrup and some good homemade sausage to go with your buckwheat cakes. Instead of eating this breakfast when you first arise in the morning, go outside and work awhile first. Then you’ve set the stage for a truly great adventure in eating.

Buckwheat hulls make a neat mulch, but one that’s expensive to buy. Unless you grow a large field of buckwheat, you won’t get enough hulls to do you any good for mulch. But there’s always a chance that some imaginative grower might see an opportunity in going seriously into the business of putting buckwheat cakes on every breakfast table, or at least most breakfast tables in his locality. If that person is you, don’t forget to figure in the extra income from selling the hulls.

Let’s muse on that awhile. A bushel of buckwheat weighs 48 pounds, or about 30 pounds of flour and 18 pounds of hulls when separated. A hundred acres of buckwheat producing a conservative 25 bushels to the acre equals 2,500 bushels, or approximately 75,000 pounds of flour and 45,000 pounds of hulls. Now multiply those figures by the price of a pound of buckwheat flour in your local grocery store and the price per 50-pound bag of buckwheat hulls at your local garden store. Need I say more? Of course, you’d need a commercial huller and a mill. But the possibility of profiting from the investment is there.

In case you think I’ve run out of nice things to say about buckwheat, here’s one more. Buckwheat is a good source of rutin, a substance with medical value in the treatment of certain types of hemorrhaging. A ton of buckwheat plants makes one million rutin tablets.

Buckwheat Blini (Pancakes)

Yields: 8 to 12 pancakes

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup nonfat dry milk or soy milk powder
• 1 cup water
• 2 teaspoons dry yeast
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 4 tablespoons oil
• 1 1/2 cups buckwheat flour, sifted
• 4 egg whites

Procedure

1. Combine nonfat dry milk or soy milk powder with water, using a wire whisk. Heat over medium heat until bubbles form on sides of saucepan. Remove from heat and cool to lukewarm. Add yeast and stir until softened.
2. In mixing bowl, beat egg yolks until thick. Blend the yeast mixture into beaten yolks. Stir in honey and oil.
3. Sift buckwheat flour and gradually blend it into batter, mixing thoroughly.
4. Set bowl over a pan of warm water, cover, and let rise until double in bulk, about 11/4 hours.
5. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form when beater is raised. Fold gently but thoroughly into batter.
6. Preheat a lightly oiled griddle, over medium heat, until it is hot. Using 1 tablespoon of batter for small pancakes, 2 tablespoons batter for medium pancakes, and 3 tablespoons batter for larger pancakes, cook on the griddle until bubbles form on the edge and the pancake is golden brown; turn pancake and bake 2 minutes longer. If pancakes begin to stick to the griddle, oil it lightly again.

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