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Buckwheat Cakes

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Buckwheat and flour work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 660 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Buckwheat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine buckwheat flour, cornmeal, salt, and yeast.

  2. Mix in warm water until the batter is the consistency of muffin batter.

  3. Beat the batter well for 15 minutes.

  4. Cover and let it rise in a warm place overnight.

  5. Preheat a griddle before baking the cakes.

  6. If the batter is sour in the morning, dissolve 1 teaspoon of baking soda in warm water and stir it in without beating.

  7. For an improvement, add 2 beaten eggs to the batter the night before.

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. Buckwheat + flourtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Buckwheat + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together224 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 (flour, egg):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Buckwheatthe original
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Nutmegfits less well

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

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