From seed to table: buckwheat pancakes
According to the column in Agricultural research from September 1974, “buckwheat has an amino acid composition nutritionally superior to all cereals, including oats”, due to its high lysine content.
What’s more, nutritious buckwheat pancakes are just as tasty, if not tastier, than those made with wheat flour. So what are you waiting for? Let’s make pancakes!
Below is an excerpt Growing grain on a compact scale by Gene Logsdon. It has been adapted for utilize on the Internet.
Planting buckwheat
Buckwheat has few disease and insect problems, which is another plus for organic growers. It can be planted by scattering the seeds onto a prepared seed bed. There is no need to till in rows to grow weeds; you don’t actually want to. Constant stands of buckwheat will more than compete with most weeds. Simply rotate the crop, scatter the seeds on the ground and loosen them slightly again. A seeding rate of about 1 1/2 bushels per acre is appropriate.
I grew buckwheat in the garden after early peas and got a good stand. One year, to test the claims of buckwheat lovers, I tried a hillside bed where the clay was as tough as leather. In July, in very dehydrated weather, I planted buckwheat there without any fertilizer. With a little rain, the buckwheat grew luxuriantly. We collected some, the birds ate some, and so much fell to the ground that I was able to give myself another position.
Harvesting
Buckwheat is best harvested with a combine harvester using the same adjustments and sifters that you utilize for oats. If you do not want to windrow dehydrated, wait until frost has damaged the plants and the more mature seeds have had time to dehydrated. This usually means harvesting at about 17 percent moisture and then drying the seed to the necessary 12 to 13 percent using artificial heat or spreading the seed very thinly in a dehydrated environment.
Compact amounts in the garden can be harvested by hand.
Cut off the stems with a scythe (or a sickle mower), tie them in bundles, leave them to dehydrated under cover, and then proceed as if threshing wheat by hand. Buckwheat threshes easily. Once they are dehydrated, you can shake most of the seeds out of the bunches. You can also slide each bundle over the edge of a bucket or the edge of a pickup truck. You can also place the bundle in a bag and trample or flail it as previously described for wheat in Chapter 3. Winnowing should then be done to separate the husks and pieces of stem.
With a garden buckwheat bed, you can harvest a cup or two from standing plants for breakfastusing your fingers, remove the shadowy brown, pyramid-shaped seeds from the stems below the still-flowering tops of the plants.
Chickens like buckwheat. Rabbits are like that too. I just feed them plants, with the grain intact. The harvest will by no means be wasted, because if the unharvested plants survive the winter, wild birds will have a feast.
The tastiest is buckwheat honey. Nectar is especially beneficial for bees because it is available even in autumn, when they have to hunt flowers more intensively.
Processing buckwheat for the table is not an basic task. A buckwheat grain that looks like a petite beech nut (from this word, beech, buck words buckwheat incidentally) it’s mostly the hull. The flour inside is almost completely white. Ground hulls are good fiber, but like oat hulls, too much means less flavor.
I like whole wheat pancakes, but I prefer to have most of the husks removed. This is not a problem with a commercial sheller, but at home, using a blender or kitchen grinder, shelling is more tough. We used our blender to grind all the grains (but it will wear out quicker) and found that if we lightly toast the buckwheat before grinding, or at least dehydrated it well while scorching, the hulls will break down better, and many of them can be sifted through a flour strainer. It’s worth it.
Buy real maple syrup and good homemade sausage for buckwheat cakes. Instead of eating this breakfast right after waking up, go outside first and do some work. Then you’ve set the stage for a truly wonderful food adventure.
Buckwheat hulls make a good mulch, but they are costly to purchase. Unless you’re growing a enormous field of buckwheat, you won’t get enough hulls to make mulch. However, there is always a chance that some inventive grower will see an opportunity to seriously get into the business of putting buckwheat biscuits on every breakfast table, or at least on most breakfast tables in his area. If that person is you, be sure to include additional income from hull sales.
Let’s think about this for a moment. A bushel of buckwheat weighs 48 pounds, or about 30 pounds of flour and 18 pounds of hulls when separated. One hundred acres of buckwheat producing a conservative 25 bushels per acre equals 2,500 bushels, or about 75,000 pounds of flour and 45,000 pounds of hulls. Now multiply these numbers by the price of a pound of buckwheat flour at your local grocery store and the price for a 50-pound bag of buckwheat hulls at your local gardening store. Need I say more? Of course, a commercial sheller and mill would be needed. However, it is possible to make profits from investments.
If you think I’ve exhausted all the nice things to say about buckwheat, here’s one more. Buckwheat is a good source of rutin, a substance with medicinal properties used in the treatment of certain types of hemorrhage. One million rutin tablets can be obtained from a ton of buckwheat plants.
Buy Buckwheat Groats (Pancakes)
Yield: 8 to 12 pancakes
Ingredients
- 1/4 cup skimmed milk powder or soy milk powder
- 1 cup of water
- 2 teaspoons of dehydrated yeast
- 4 yolks
- 1 teaspoon of honey
- 4 tablespoons of oil
- 1 1/2 cups buckwheat flour, sifted
- 4 egg whites
Procedure
- Combine skim milk powder or soy milk powder with water using a wire whisk. Heat over medium heat until bubbles appear on the sides of the pot. Remove from heat and nippy until lukewarm. Add the yeast and mix until it softens.
- In a mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks until fluffy. Mix the yeast mixture with the beaten egg yolks. Mix honey and oil.
- Sift the buckwheat flour and gradually add it to the dough, mixing thoroughly.
- Set the bowl over a pot of sultry water, cover, and let rise until doubled in size, about 11/4 hours.
- Beat the egg whites until tender peaks form when you lift the beater. Mix gently but thoroughly into the dough.
- Heat a lightly oiled frying pan over medium heat until scorching. Using 1 tablespoon of batter for compact pancakes, 2 tablespoons of batter for medium pancakes, and 3 tablespoons of batter for larger pancakes, fry in the pan until bubbles form on the edges and the pancake is golden brown; Turn the pancake and bake 2 minutes longer. If the pancakes start to stick to the pan, lightly grease it again.