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Buckwheat Griddles

A batter of buckwheat flour, water, yeast, sugar or molasses, baking soda, and butter, baked on a hot griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Buckwheat and walnut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Buckwheat Griddles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine warm water, salt, sugar or molasses, and compressed yeast.

  2. Gradually add buckwheat flour until you achieve a thin batter.

  3. Cover and let the batter rise in a warm place overnight.

Finish and cook

  1. In the morning, add baking soda and melted butter to the batter.

  2. Test the batter; if it's not sweet and light, add more baking soda.

  3. Preheat a griddle until smoking hot.

  4. Bake the batter.

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 + walnuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

What each ingredient does

Compressed yeast
Ferments the batter during the overnight rise, producing gas that makes it light and airy.
Buckwheat flour
Forms the body of the batter, providing the structure of the griddle cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the fermented batter to add lift and open up the texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing tenderness and browning on the griddle.
Sugar or molasses
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds sweetness to the batter.

The step that matters

Adding baking soda to the risen batter. Baking soda needs an acid to react and release gas. The fermented batter provides that acidity, so adding soda too little or too late leaves the griddle cakes flat and under-leavened. Tasting and adjusting, as the record directs, helps catch this.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Milletfits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Cashew nutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, buckwheat, flour, butter. 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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