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Dessert

Quick Buckwheat Cakes

A quick batter of buckwheat flour, baking powder, salt, sugar or molasses, and cold water cooked on a griddle.

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 ↓

Quick Buckwheat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine buckwheat flour, baking powder, salt, and brown sugar or molasses in a bowl.

  2. Mix the dry ingredients well.

  3. Add cold water gradually to form a batter, stirring gently.

Cook

  1. Preheat a griddle and pour the batter onto it.

  2. Bake immediately until golden brown.

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
Provides the main structure and the nutty, earthy flavour of the cakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, making the cakes rise and turn light and airy.
Brown sugar or new orleans molasses
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown during cooking.

The step that matters

Add the cold water gradually and stir gently. Overmixing a flour batter develops gluten and gums it up, while buckwheat has little gluten anyway. Stirring gently keeps the batter loose so the cakes stay tender rather than dense and rubbery.

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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