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Buckwheat Griddle Cakes
2 cups buckwheat (pure) 1 cup white flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Enough milk to make thin batter 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Sift buckwheat flour, salt and baking powder thoroughly. Add milk enough to make thin batter. Bake as for Bread Griddle Cakes.
A quick baking-powder buckwheat cake from a Calumet promotional booklet, meant as a same-morning substitute for the older overnight yeast-risen buckwheats. It comes together in the time the griddle takes to heat.
- Mix the white flour in tooThe ingredient list calls for 1 cup of white flour but the sifting instruction names only the buckwheat, salt and baking powder. Sift both flours with the salt and baking powder together; buckwheat has no gluten, and the wheat flour is what keeps the cakes from falling apart on the turn.
- Buckwheat flour today"Pure" buckwheat meant unblended flour, as opposed to the cheaper mixes sold pre-cut with wheat. Light buckwheat flour gives a milder cake; dark or whole-groat flour is more assertive and thirstier, so expect to add more milk.
- Baking powder amountFour level teaspoons for three cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice. Modern double-acting powder at 3 teaspoons for this quantity is closer to standard; more than that can leave a soapy edge.
- "Thin batter"Aim for something that pours in a ribbon and spreads on its own, roughly the consistency of heavy cream. Expect somewhere around 2 1/2 to 3 cups of milk depending on the flour. Let it stand five minutes and check again, since buckwheat keeps absorbing liquid.
- Bake means griddle"Bake" here is the older usage for cooking on the griddle top, not in the oven. Medium heat, lightly greased: buckwheat browns faster and darker than wheat, so the visual cue for turning arrives sooner than you expect.
- When to turnTurn once, when the surface has lost its wet shine and the bubbles at the edge stop closing over. Buckwheat cakes are fragile before that point and will tear. Do not press them down after turning.
- YieldAbout eighteen to twenty cakes of four inches, enough for four people. The batter does not hold well overnight once the baking powder is in, so mix only what you will cook.
Buckwheat cakes were the standard cold-weather breakfast of the northern United States through the nineteenth century, and traditionally they were leavened with a batter left to ferment overnight in a stoneware crock, a portion of which was held back to start the next morning's batch. Chemical leaveners collapsed that ritual into a matter of minutes, and recipes like this one, printed in a booklet issued to sell Calumet baking powder, were part of the argument for the change: the manufacturers had every reason to show housewives that the crock on the back of the stove was no longer necessary. Buckwheat itself is not a wheat or even a grass but the seed of a plant related to sorrel and rhubarb, which is why its flour carries no gluten and why nearly every recipe pairs it with white flour for structure.