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Dessert

Buckwheat Cakes

Buckwheat cakes made with yeast, baking soda, and buckwheat flour, baked on a greased griddle.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Dissolve the yeast in a little warm water.

  2. Add the dissolved yeast to the tepid water.

  3. Stir in buckwheat flour until a batter of usual consistency is achieved.

  4. Add ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt and beat thoroughly.

  5. Set the batter in a warm place overnight.

Finish and bake

  1. Dissolve 1 teaspoon of baking soda in 1 tablespoon of hot water.

  2. Add the dissolved baking soda to the batter and stir well.

  3. Bake on a hot greased griddle.

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

Yeast
Ferments the overnight batter, producing gas that makes the cakes light and airy.
Buckwheat flour
Forms the batter and provides the main structure and nutty flavour of the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the fermented batter to add further lift and a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Setting the batter overnight in a warm place. Yeast needs time and warmth to ferment the batter. Too cool or too short a rest leaves the cakes dense, because there is less gas to make them rise.

“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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