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Buckwheat Cakes

Buckwheat cakes are thin batter fried pancakes made with buckwheat flour, baking powder, salt, and lukewarm water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine buckwheat flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Gradually mix in lukewarm water to form a thin batter.

Cook

  1. Rub a frying pan with grease and heat it.

  2. Drop batter in quantities to cover an ordinary breakfast plate.

  3. Cook until golden, then flip and cook the other side.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with butter, or with treacle or syrup if preferred.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Buckwheat flour
Forms the bulk of the batter and gives the cakes their nutty, earthy flavour and structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cakes rise and become light and airy.
Lukewarm water
Hydrates the flour to form a thin batter that spreads and cooks through.

The step that matters

Cook until golden, then flip. The batter must be cooked long enough to set and brown on the first side before flipping, so the cake holds together and does not tear or stay raw in the middle.

“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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