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Buckwheat Cakes

A buckwheat cake made with flour, salt, water, yeast, baking soda, sugar, and boiled water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat buckwheat flour and salt in a jar with cold water until smooth.

  2. Add the yeast cake and mix well.

  3. Cover and let stand in a warm place overnight.

Finish and bake

  1. Dissolve baking soda in boiling water and add to the batter with sugar.

  2. Beat the mixture and 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. Buckwheat + flourtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Buckwheat + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together198 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Buckwheat flour
Forms the body of the cake and gives it its earthy, nutty flavour.
Yeast cake
Ferments the batter overnight so it becomes airy and bubbly.
Baking soda
Reacts with the fermented batter to add lift and open up the crumb.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness to balance the buckwheat.

The step that matters

Letting the batter stand overnight in a warm place. The yeast needs time and warmth to ferment the batter. Without enough fermentation the cake will be dense and flat, since the rise depends on the yeast's gas production.

Swap the buckwheat

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

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

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

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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