Buckwheat Flour

Let's talk about buckwheat flour, and let's start by clearing something up: buckwheat is not wheat. It isn't even a cereal. It's a pseudocereal, a seed from a plant related to sorrel and rhubarb. That's why it carries no gluten — there's no web of elastic protein to trap air and stretch. A dough made only from buckwheat flour won't rise like wheat dough and won't hold a chewy structure. It falls apart unless you help it with eggs, a binder, or a partner flour.

Choose it by smell, always. Good buckwheat flour smells nutty, roasted, almost like toasted seeds. If it smells flat, dusty, or faintly sour, it's old — the natural oils in the seed have turned. Colour tells you the type, not the quality: pale flour comes from hulled seeds, dark greyish-brown flour keeps the hull. Both are fine, as long as the smell is right.

Now, the misconception. Some people say buckwheat flour makes bread "denser but still bread." No! Without gluten, it makes pancakes, blini, galettes — flat, tender things, not loaves. That mistake sends the dough into the oven expecting a proper rise, and the baker ends up with a heavy, cracked brick, blaming the flour for their own wrong expectations. A hundred grams gives you 335 kilocalories, 12.62 grams of protein — good, honest food. Just don't ask it to be wheat.