Buckwheat Bread
Daniel | May 30, 2008
I was down at my local “scratch and dent” grocery shop, and came across a few packages of organic Buckwheat flour. It was past it’s “good til” date, but since there were no additives to go bad and the package seemed intact, I decided to take a chance - as you can see, I got a great price on it. When I opened it up, it still smelled fresh and the batch of buckwheat pancakes I made with it came out great, so I decided to give buckwheat bread a shot.
I used my basic honey whole wheat bread recipe, and started with 2 cups buckwheat flour and a cup and a half of unbleached, unenriched white flour. I was overboard on the amount of buckwheat flour - it’s very flavorful, but it’s also a very fine texture, which means it doesn’t absorb the wet ingredients very well. I ended up having to add another cup or more of white flour and another three quarters cup of the buckwheat flour to get it to the right consistency. Kneading was also an issue because the dough kept getting stickier than it should have been.
As you can see in this picture, it has a distinct color. The darker parts are the buckwheat flour, and the light parts are the regular, unbleached white flour. Buckwheat is not wheat. It’s not even a grass, which most (if not all) other types of wheat are. The part of it we use when we grow it as a crop is more similar to sunflower seeds than to wheat. Buckwheat isn’t used much in the United States, but it’s still fairly common in eastern Europe and parts of Asia. It’s also often used for kasha. Because it isn’t a grass, buckwheat contains no gluten. This makes it good for people with gluten allergies, but it also makes it difficult to work with for some applications - and accounts for the issues I had kneading it. If I’d done this part of the research first, I’d have known not to use so much of it to try and make bread!
In addition to being sticky to knead, it was also a low riser:
In the end, it came out just fine. It’s a bit on the heavy side for a bread, and it needed an extra 5 or 6 minutes in the oven. It has a slightly nutty flavor to it, and it’s very moist. The weight and texture reminds me more of a sweet bread, like banana bread or pumpkin bread - which isn’t what I was shooting for, but I’ll happily eat. I’ll try it again with more white or whole wheat flour, using the buckwheat more as a flavoring, and see if I can’t get more of a bread style loaf out of it. I may also try it again with more buckwheat flour and less white flour, but I’ll also add more honey and less oil, and perhaps some strawberries, and make it a genuine sweet bread.
That pretty well wraps up today’s installment of “Dough!”. I hope you enjoyed it. I believe I’m going to go see if this makes good toast, and have a cup of coffee!
