The ployes came out better this time

My second batch of ployes (Acadian buckwheat pancakes) came out better. I used a nonstick pan with a thicker bottom, which might have helped me managed the temperature. I didn't thin the batter as much this time, and I made each pancake larger. 

I prefer a savory ploye to treating it like a breakfast pancake, so even though it's morning, I'm enjoying my ployes with hummus. The buckwheat cake is not unlike a soft pita or that Ethiopian bread served to scoop from the communal platter, so it works. 

Of interest to buckwheat growers

This site lets you register your garden or yard or community garden plot as a place where bee-friendly crops like buckwheat are grown. 

The Ploye Project, Day One. I used the brochure which came with my gift set of regular and wholewheat mix bags of ploye flour. 
 

The ploye "flour" is not just the buckwheat, but it includes baking powder and salt. The baking powder must be what gives the buckwheat pan bread the bubbly texture. 

The brochure which came with the package told me to mix the mix and water in a ratio of 1 to 1, then to add another 1/3 cup or so of water to the batter after it had sat for about five minutes. 

The instructions said that ploye would stick if the pan wasn't hot enough. I started out with a cast iron skillet with a thin coat of vegetable oil in it. It was plenty hot (the oil smoked) but the ploye stuck anyway. So i switched to the pancake griddle and that worked better. 

I made the batter thin and I liked the result of that. But I could also tell I'd never made ployes before. On the blog page I made for this site which has buckwheat recipes from around the world, there's a link to a YouTube video where a woman demonstrates her mother's method of making ployes. I'm going to watch that in detail and follow the instructions on the video and see if my second batch is a little better.

But I got the bubbles on the underside of the pancake, so I'll give myself points for that. 

Backpacking with buckwheat

This person on YouTube does a demo on cooking buckwheat porridge over a protable camp stove. It's a nice how-to without either verbal instructions or canned instructional-video music -- just lovely bird songs.


Looking for more detailed info on buckwheat? Take a look at the Pages Menu at the right. 

Of course there's pumpkin spice buckwheat. . .

. . .because there's pumpkin spice everything, right? 

Here's the recipe. There's actual pumpkin in it, which is a nice touch. 


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Week -by-week development of buckwheat crop

Cornell University has a nnice chart showing the stages of development in a crop of buckwheat. 

There's also some good basic info on the Cornell site about what helps/hurts the plants' growth.

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Is my buckwheat too pooped to pop?

SPILLED KERNELS

I've seen several articles online about making buckwheat popcorn. This one seemed promising, so I tried to do what the author did. And my buckwheat kernels didn't do anything but sit there in the hot pan. 

I don't believe every single how-to thing I read on the internet, but in this case, I do believe
I used ten kernels for the first test, in a nonstick pan. I tried ten more kernels ina metal pan. In both cases, I got the pan hot enough for a drop of water to sizzle, but not so hot that the pan smoked. The first time, using the nonstick pan, it's possible that I should have waited a little longer to add the kernels. Maybe it doesn't work if the kernels roast a bit while the pan heats? But the second pan was definitely hot when I added the kernels. It was starting to smoke a little so I turned the burner down a bit, and I also dropped in a few drops of water to make sure they'd sizzle and evaporate. And they did. 

So I have set aside the twenty kernels from the first two tests, and tomorrow I think I'll try a few kernels from another bag of buckwheat I bought from a different seller. And maybe a few kernels from this year's buckwheat crop here at home. 

I believe this author popped the buckwheat, along with other grains which were also given the pop test. I did learn from looking at the photos that it was regular unhulled buckwheat and not the hulled groats. I wasn't sure on that so I appreciated having that information.

I like the idea of buckwheat popcorn. I have read articles by experienced poppers that they get a fair number of "duds." Still worth doing, I think. I'm also wondering if I killed the buckwheat kernels in the hot pans. I may try germinating them to see. I'll report back on that and on a pop test for the other two buckwheat selections. 
  
Looking for more detailed info on buckwheat? Take a look at the Pages Menu at the right.

Source for photos:  https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/how-cook-any-whole-grain-popcorn.html

"Buckwheat" as a color

As you might imagine, I check auction sites to see what kind of buckwheat-related stuff is for sale, and I've noted the trend of comparing the color of something to buckwheat. This vintage scarf is typical. The hue does resemble untoasted buckwheat groats.

Then I saw this ad for a car seat cover and I was confused.

I thought "Is that leather "shell" supposed to be the color of toasted buckwheat groats?" 

Then I read the description and saw it was filled with buckwheat "shells" (hulls). To quote Emily Litella. . .

Busy bees on a stalk of California buckwheat

https://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/28594174/list/great-design-plant-california-buckwheat-pleases-pollinators

Pink buckwheat in Bhutan

http://www.francesschultz.com/10644/

Thrift store coffee grinders as grain mills

Whenever I see a coffee or espresso grinder at a yard sale or thrift shop for $5 or less, I buy it. One never knows how much life there is in it, but if it whirrs when it's plugged in and the button is pushed, and I don't see any visible nicks in the blades, then it'll do.

If you have one which has a damged lid or no lid at all, you could put a plastic bowl upside-down over the grinder, or even slip a zip-lock bag over it.

This video shows someone gridning emmer wheat into flour. Buckwheat has a tough hull but a coffee grinder will do a good job. I recommend sifting the flour before adding it to your pancake mix, which will keep small bits of hard hull from surprising your dental fillings in mid-chew. A regular mesh st

A decent mesh shtrainer is about three bucks online.

rainer works great for this. Just dump in the ground buckwheat and shake the strainer over a bowl.

Chocolate + buckwheat

A nice YouTube chef took a blog recipe she saw and adapted it. This recipe for chocolate-date-coconut-buckwheat granola looks really good.

Checking for buckwheat sensitivity

As has come up in previous posts, I'm an advocate for introducing buckwheat into the diet a bit at a time. For instance, by adding a half-cup of buckwheat flour into a bread recipe, and using 2 1/2 cups of regular flour with it.

I'm usually thinking about digestive adjustments when the idea of gradual introduction comes up. People who eat a low-fiber diet may find buckwheat flour is too much for their GI tract if they have a lot all at once.

But buckwheat's also one of many substances which cause a small number of people to react. And people who are allergic to wheat or other gluten foods may be prone to allergic reactions in general. The reactions people have with buckwheat range from full-on allergic response, requiring an Epi-pen or a trip to the ER, to milder signs of sensitivity like feeling a bit dizzy or short of breath for a little while.

As a person who's allergic a lot of stuff -- both natural substances and additiives and colorants and clarifiers which don't bother other people -- I often try just a little bit of a new food to see what my body will do with it. If I'm sensitive to it, I'll quickly know that and the mild symptoms will go away pretty quickly.

This article goes into this topic a bit more deeply.

Buckwheat as a soil improver

This website has good information about how even a single crop of buckwheat will improve the soil quality in your garden or landscape bed. The site's also where I found this awesome pic of a bee busy at a buckwheat blossom. 

The Buckwheat Boyz

 You knew "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" would show up here eventually, right?

Here's the dancing banana video

Colors of honey, including buckwheat honey

These, apparently, are all the colors honey comes in.

This chart comes from the website  of a Unkrainian company which exports honey to the US, both multi-floral (wildflower) honey and honey based on bees collecting pollen from specific blooms, including on buckwheat plants.

HuffPost goes all buckwheat

In 2016, there was a short period where people were pretty excited about bucckwheat, as ths Huffington post article shows.

Baby food, rainbow zebras, and tobacco in a pouch -- and buckwheat

The word "buckwheat," many sources say, comes from a Dutch phrase which means beech wheat. I did a little deeper digging, and I'm actually not so sure about that. Might be a German word, actually. But whatever the source, the idea is that a

buckwheat kernel looks like a beech nut.

Buckwheat seeds

 

There's a beech nut in the center of the opened hulls.

Reading up on this made we wonder about the Beech-Nut brand.  I remembered that there's Beech-Nut baby food. . .

And there was a TV commercial in the sixites for Beech-Nut fruit stripe gum, and the cartoon zebra in the ad had stripes that looked like the colorful stripes on the gum wrappers. . .

And because my mother family were farmers and I grew up in soybean country, I knew that Beech-Nut was also a brand of chewing tobacco, which comes in a pouch. . .

And I wondered if the baby food, chewing gum, and chewing tobacco were all made by the same company. . .

Turns out the baby food and chewing gum are made by the same company, which specialized in the early 20th century is packaging, like vacuum sealed jars that kept baby food safe, and foil that kept gum from going stale. But the tobacco company is a different manufacturer, as a 1927 TIME magazine article tells us. . .

But here's the puzzlement: The Beechnut tobacco pouch in the photo above is vintage. Here's the modern pouch design:

Now compare the logo on the old and new tobacco packages to the logo on the fruit stripe gum package. The old tobacco pouch logo is a red oval like the "Beech Nut Brand" logo, and the new tobacco pouch logo has the beech nuts on stems. I know the tobacco pouch logo has two nuts and the gum has one, but the similarity seems more than accidental. And I thought, from the TIME article and other sources, that the food was Beech Nut or BeechNut with no hyphen and the tobacco company had a hyphen. . .

The further I go down this rabbit hole, the more confused I feel, and I still haven't even figured out if "boek-weit" is really a word in Dutch.

Banish beriberi. . .and maybe leg cramps too

"Beriberi" used to be a joke with me because I didn't know what it was. I thought, from the sound of the name, that it was some kind of tropical ailment that could only be caught on a desert island with a palm tree in the middle. But actually beriberi is a condition that weakens people due to a lack of thiamine, Vitamin B-1. 

 

Happily, buckwheat has significant amounts of Vttamin B1. Soba noodles add thiamine to the Japanese diet, filling in the gap left by white rice, which is deficient in the vitamin. A delicious bowl of soba noodles now and then = no beriberi.

Buckwheat's not the only food which has thiamine in it, of course, but its' so easy to add a cup of buckwheat flour when, say, making pancankes from ready-made mix, as I did this morning. I'm one of those people who occasionally gets leg cramps at night, and some of the B vitamins, including B1, can hrlp prevent neuromuscular misfires which can lead to tingling and/or cramping in the feet or legs.

Buckwheat pizza crusts

We have a new pizza pan at our house so we were talking about making homemade crust. That got me wondering if there was such a thing as buckwehat pizza crust. And there is! Thank you, Internet. 

One option is to make a gluten-free crust, avoiding wheat altogther. The result is thin and crispy and it looks delicious.

 

I personally can tolerate gluten and I like a thicker crust under my pizza toppings, so I looked for options where I could add buckwheat flour to wheat flour.  Turns out it helps to look for "whole grain" recipes which include buckwheat. Otherwise all the searches gave me only gluten-free options. 

I think I'm going to try this one today because it looks pretty darn good. 

Buckwheat popcorn

I have not tried popping buckwheat seeds like popcorn but apparently it's A Thing. I'll have to try it over the winter when I have fewer garden chores and fewer opprotunities to go look at the ocean.

Charming young cook demonstrates how to make buckwheat pocorn

Buckwheat flowers

One of my favorite things to do is to look for shareable / copyright-free / fair-use imagery of buckwheat. If there's a link to a blog or website I try to include that here on the blog. This pretty image is from the Creative Commons option list. Don't have any info on the photographer. The image is titled "Japanese buckwheat flower."

Gluten-free buckwheat flour

Buckwheat, since it is a seed rather than a grain, makes a nice gluten-free flour. I find that its texture is closer to wheat flour than some of the other alternative flours, like sorghum flour or rice flour. 

Google searches, Eddie Murphy, and racism

Many, if not most, nternet searches for 'buckwheat" are done by people who aren't looking for the food product, crop, or source of pillow filling hulls. Very common searches are about the character Buckwheat from the vintage comedy shorts featuring "The Little Rascals," and/or the version of Buckwheat played by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. 

I've put together a page about the child actor who played Buckwheat on "The Little Rascals," but today's post is about why the character continues to trouble anyone with any kind of cultural sensitivity. 

For me, it's about the hair. 

 

I bought these bargain DVDs because the illustrations tell the story. We're supposed to think that both Buckwheat and Alfalfa have equally funny hair. Alfalfa's hair is funny because he parts it in the middle, and there's a stalk of hay-like hair sticking up at the back. But Buckwheat's hair is supposed to be funny because the stereotype of African-American people is that they are afraid of ghosts, etc. and that's why Buckwheat's hair stands comically on end. Not the same kind of joke, right?

Some days it's not very comfortable when people ask what I do and I list blogging about Buckwheat and their minds immediately go to the character in "The Little Rascals." But whatcha gonna do?

 

 

Frozen buckwheat waffles

I asked my daughter, who conveniently enjoys foods with buckwheat flour in them, to try these "Nature's Path" Wildberry buckwheat waffles. She liked them so I tried one myself this morning.

They are a little sweeter than I expected before i read the ingredients list, but I think they'd be a good way to help get family members to accept buckwheat in the daily diet. Some people find buckwheat's characteristic tang flavor a little sour or bitter, thought it's a quality I really like. And most people find that the healthy fiber in buckwheat is easier to adjust to if the buckwheat flour is mixed with another flour (in these waffles, the manufacturers use rice flour).

Buckwheat pita bread recipe with simple ingredients

Most of us associate buckwheat flour with pancakes, but it makes many kinds of foods, including savory ones like pita bread. 

Click here to watch a YouTube tutorial on making buckwheat pita.