Skip to main content
Main

Buckwheat Cakes

A batter of buckwheat flour, molasses, water, salt, and yeast is fried into pancakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Mix molasses and lukewarm water in a bowl until well combined.

  2. Sift salt into buckwheat flour and add to the molasses mixture.

  3. Dissolve the yeast in a little water and add it to the mixture, then beat thoroughly.

  4. Let the mixture rise overnight.

Cook the pancakes

  1. In the morning, dip by the tablespoonful from the edge of the bowl without stirring.

  2. Fry the cakes like griddle cakes.

  3. If the batter is heavy, add a little white flour.

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. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Molasses + buckwheattop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together199 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Buckwheat flour
Forms the main body of the pancakes and gives them their earthy flavour.
Compressed yeast
Ferments the batter overnight, producing bubbles that lighten the pancakes.
Molasses
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and a deeper, darker flavour.

The step that matters

Dipping without stirring. Stirring the risen batter knocks out the gas bubbles the yeast has built up overnight, so the pancakes come out flatter and denser.

Swap the buckwheat

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, flour. 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.

You might also like

Molasses SauceMolasses Sauce32 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes