Home › Bread, Biscuits, Muffins and Waffles › Buckwheat Cakes
Buckwheat Cakes
Sift one pint of buckwheat flour and two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, and add a tablespoonful of brown sugar with enough water to make a batter. Beat but lightly and bake at once on a hot griddle.
A stripped-down quick version of a batter that was traditionally raised overnight with yeast. It works, but the details matter because there is almost nothing here to hide behind.
- A pint of flourDry goods were commonly measured by volume in the same pint cup as liquids, so read this as 2 cups of buckwheat flour, roughly 8 oz / 225 g. Scoop and level rather than packing.
- "Enough water"Aim for about 1½ to 2 cups, added gradually, until the batter pours in a thick ribbon and spreads on its own. Buckwheat drinks liquid unevenly; add the last half cup slowly. Buttermilk or milk in place of water gives a softer, browner cake, though the original calls only for water.
- Beat but lightlyThis is the hinge. Buckwheat has no gluten to develop, but hard beating knocks the air out and the cakes turn dense and gummy. Stir until the dry flour disappears and stop.
- Bake at oncePeriod baking powder was largely single-acting, releasing its gas on contact with liquid rather than in the pan. Even with modern double-acting powder, buckwheat batter thickens and goes flat if it stands, so have the griddle hot before you mix.
- A hot griddleHot enough that a drop of water skitters. Buckwheat browns faster and darker than wheat, so the cakes look done before they are; give the first side two to three minutes until the surface bubbles set, then a minute more after turning.
- GreasingThe recipe says nothing about greasing. On a well-seasoned iron griddle a scrap of fat or a thin film of neutral oil wiped on with paper is enough; too much fat fries the edges into lace.
- YieldRoughly a dozen to sixteen four-inch cakes, depending on how thin you pour them. The batter does not keep, so mix only what you will cook.
Buckwheat is not wheat, or even a grass, but the seed of a plant related to sorrel and rhubarb, and it grows fast on poor, cold ground — which is why it took hold in the northern states and among Dutch and German settlers in Pennsylvania and New York. Buckwheat cakes were a winter breakfast staple, and the traditional method was slow: a crock of batter set with yeast or a saved portion of the previous day's leaven, left overnight by the stove, with part of it held back to start the next morning's batch. Some households claimed to keep a crock going all season. This version does away with the crock entirely, substituting baking powder for the ferment — the tangy, sour depth of the overnight batter traded for something a novice cook could put on the table half an hour after getting up.