When I started this buckwheat adventure, my purpose was to get more familiar with our December Grain of the Month. I wanted to explore the flavor of this nutritious whole grain, to learn all that it can offer in a dish. As I explained in the first Buckwheat Three Ways posts, my buckwheat experimentation began with a recipe that just wasn’t all I thought it could be. I wanted to use that as a jumping off point, to illustrate a few simple ways you can tweak a recipe to make it your own, and then go all out and essentially create a recipe that was 95% made up out of thin air.
But really, the center of this whole effort is buckwheat itself. For the sake of full disclosure, I should confess that I didn’t know all that much about buckwheat as an ingredient when all this began. I like buckwheat pancakes, and I’ve made simple kasha as a side dish, but beyond that, I never really cooked with it. Since we’re being honest, this “I don’t know what I’m doing but let’s go for it!” approach to cooking is fairly common in my house. The Man and I are somewhat notorious for throwing dishes together with little more than a craving for flavor and a handful of ingredients. When we improv together, we rarely fail, but it gets a little scary when you’re standing in the kitchen on your own with a package of buckwheat groats sitting on the counter and almost no idea what to do with them.
Since I started with a casserole, I knew I wanted to finish with another baked buckwheat dish. I wanted to move away from savory, but how far could buckwheat take me? Could I make a baked buckwheat dessert? Would this nutty little grain play well with sugar, or would I fumble at the end of this project and close with a colossal fail?
To read the rest of this story please go to: Whole Grains Council, Oldways Preservation Trust
