Skip to main content

Buckwheat Cakes

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Wheat and buckwheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 113 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Buckwheat Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water.

  2. Sift the wheat flour and salt into a bowl.

  3. Add molasses, lukewarm milk, and the dissolved yeast to the flour.

  4. Beat the batter until smooth.

  5. Set aside in a warm place, free from drafts, to rise for about 45 minutes.

  6. When light, the batter is ready to bake.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Wheat + buckwheattop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together113 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Flour + buckwheattop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Buckwheat + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the buckwheat

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, flour, milk, molasses):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Buckwheatthe original
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, flour, milk, molasses. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like