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.