Foragers' Favorite

Breakfast perfection

Autumn has come to New Jersey, making me realize that frost, and the end of growing season, is imminent. Now is the time to pluck the last tomatoes and corn, harvest apples, haul squashes into the root cellar, dig pungent horseradish roots, and gather sweet, abundant fall red raspberries. And of course it's also the season to forage mushrooms. Porcini are up. So are Hen-of-the-Woods, Sweet Tooth, Gypsy, Agaricus, Grayling, and many other delectable edibles.

The mushrooming club to which I belong, The New York Mycological Society, meets for a fall fling in a few weeks. We rent a house in the Catskill Mountains and fan out into the damp forests. Evenings are filled with culinary wonder - and learning. There are so many species out there!

And then comes morning. Every Catskill weekend for the past 5 years (And every July Chanterelle weekend too), I've prepared buckwheat pancakes for the group.

Buckwheat pancakes from my mother's family's recipe (see the index card from her collection, below) were a cold-weather staple of my childhood. The batter was always fermented in the same stone bowl. When I'd come home from school and see it on the kitchen counter, I knew the next several days would begin with delicious hot breakfasts. She'd serve those buckwheat cakes with molassas and maple syrup, bacon on the side, and she'd save leftover batter to use as a starter. Eventually the output became sourdough buckwheat. It was my first taste of sourdough; the experience destined to become a passion. 

Fast forward to 2002 and my diagnosis of Celiac Disease. Mom's buckwheat pancakes, I feared, were one more food I'd never eat again. But then I discovered that 100% buckwheat flour could make a batter that held together nicely. It did not need gluten. What I needed was to replace the taste of wheat with a parallel mouth experience. Enter unbolted buckwheat - flour that's ground to random amounts of fine-ness, then not sieved to be consistent. It's chewy and crunchy, but at the same time, smooth. Because the grains of buckwheat are broken in different amounts, unbolted buckwheat flour develops a long range of flavors as it ferments.

Mom's buckwheat pancakes - which are now gluten-free and also happen to be egg-free and dairy-free - are totally easy to make. Time does the work: you mix a batter with a bit of yeast and sugar and let it ferment overnight. In the morning, add brown sugar, oil and baking soda and fry away. (Recipe below)

Caramelized berries and melting butter ... YES!

The hard part is finding unbolted buckwheat flour. Shortly after discovering that I could make gluten-free buckwheat pancakes I learned that my unbolted flour source, an historic water-powered mill in Youngstown, Ohio, ground wheat and rye flours in the same room as buckwheat. When I Elissa-tested my batter it ran off the charts. I searched far and wide for substitutes and found none. Eventually I decided to grind the grain myself. Lucky for me it made a superior bread mix - Bold Buckwheat Premium - as well as terrific pancakes.

I've packaged freshly-ground, organic, unbolted buckwheat flour in half-pound re-sealable bags and sell these for $2.25. You can find them in the Accessories section of my website, or just click HERE.

The first time I made these cakes for my New York friends I was a bit intimidated. Buckwheat cakes are rustic food, and these were New Yorkers - foodies to boot. They not only loved the cakes, they demanded I make them for every weekend getaway. That's why I call them Foragers Favorite.

A note: Foragers Favorite Buckwheat Pancakes are superior when made with walnut oil, but any kind of oil, including melted butter, will work. I like to up the taste ante by tossing a few chopped walnuts in the griddle and then pouring the batter over them. The walnuts caramelize and soak up cooking oil and get wonderfully crunchy and tasty. And then there's those seasonal red raspberries. They're a perfect add-in for richly flavorful buckwheat.

Forager's Favorite Buckwheat Pancakes

yield: 10 - 12 cakes each @ 1 1/2 Oz. (40 grams)

Ingredients

1 1/4  cup coarse buckwheat flour
1 1/2 cup lukewarm (body temperature) water
1/2  tsp granulated sugar
3/4  tsp instant yeast
1/4  tsp salt
2  tsp dark brown sugar
1  tsp oil (walnut oil works best) or melted butter
1/4  tsp baking soda
oil, bacon fat or butter for griddle

You will also need:

A large stoneware, glass or stainless steel bowl
Stirring spoon
Measuring cups and spoons
Griddle or skillet
spatula

Method:

The night before you are going to make the pancakes, measure the water and place in a large bowl. Add sugar and yeast and stir well to dissolve both. Add and dissolve the salt. Add the buckwheat flour and stir until batter is smooth.

Let batter stand at room temperature overnight. Batter will swell - sometimes to the point of overflowing the bowl - then fall back.

In the morning, heat a griddle to medium, or just below the smoke point of whichever oil you are using. To the batter, add brown sugar, oil and soda and stir until well incorporated and batter is smooth. (It may be necessary to add water if the night was dry and the batter has lost some moisture).

Use a 1/4 cup measure to pour batter into cakes on a greased skillet. Add nuts or fruits ad lib. Fry until edges start to dry and the center bubbles, then flip and cook the other side. Serve warm, preferably with maple syrup and molasses.

Farmhouse style: My mother and father both swore that their parents claimed the best way to eat buckwheat pancakes was with beef brisket gravy. Mom never made them like this this for us, but supposedly this is the most authentic serving mode.
Have a great week, and happy (GF) dining!
Charles Luce
  

Legacies

New Italian bread. Legacy-worthy?

So here it is July 1 and no bread business yet. I’m getting closer, but nothing is showing. At least not in the facility I’ve rented - which sits waiting in the summer sun for the township building department to cough up a permit for my three-part sink. Once they do, things should move. And show. And if you like photos of plumbers at work, I’ll have some.

In the meantime you’ll hopefully content yourself with a look at my updated website: HERE. As you can see I'm trying to keep things simple - bread mixes and nothing but, and just two, at least for the time being. 

There’s one thing troubling me. It should be the same thing troubling anyone starting a gluten-free business:  What if the whole gluten-free diet craze collapses before my business gets off the ground.

A morning's work.

It’s a reasonable fear. That the GF diet has “craze” or “fad” elements is, I think, beyond dispute. Recently I saw a study that indicated only 10% of shoppers buying GF goods had celiac disease or gluten insensitivity. When 90% of buyers are purchasing foods that have no proven benefit, it’s a fad. 

To misquote Andy Warhol, fads have a life span of only 15 minutes. With consumers spending about $6 billion in gluten-free goods in fiscal 2011, my guess is that we’re well past minute 7.5. Which means, the fad is on its way out.

You can see this already in the fringes. The hair shirt crowd has decided that giving up gluten isn’t enough, and are demanding their followers give up all grains. (They call this the Paleo diet. Mastodon for dinner, anyone?) And sugar - “usual suspect” #1 whenever a pleasure-giving substance needs beaten up - is re-appearing in TV shows and web blasts as Evil Incarnate, shoving gluten aside. 

So why, given this trajectory, go into a gluten-free business at all? My answer: legacy. 

The ultimate contribution we in GF foods will make is not health but the introduction of new and wonderful flavors to the world’s palate. 

micro-pies with rice-flour-almond crust

I know this is hard to believe. GF has the (well-earned) reputation for producing foods that only a desperate soul would consume. Anyone who received a celiac disease diagnosis 5 or more years ago is familiar with the genre. Crackers that punished the teeth. Door-stop bread. Cakes that dissolved into powder. 

These products linger, but they’re now the minority. We who must eat gluten-free have as many tasty, healthy and easy-to-find dining options as those with normal digestive systems. Some baking and cooking professionals have even risen to that old art-school slogan, “Good Enough Never Is” and decided that “As good-tasting as wheat” is not what’s needed; gluten-free must be more.

Beyond the tired old ways of making things with wheat flour, gluten-free is inspiring new options, new tastes. Consider: before the GF craze, who outside of Ethiopia had ever heard of teff, let alone tasted it? Has any wheat-flour baker tweaked spicy flavors from pie crust, without adding spices? We who are gluten-free can smilingly say, “We have!” 

Wheat-based bakers primarily rely on three grains. Gluten-free bakers use at least eight (millet, sorghum, corn, buckwheat, rice, teff, amaranth, quinoa), and that’s not counting the varieties within each family (ie: dark teff, ivory teff, red teff). Plus we augment our flours with many starches. In both categories we’ve introduced flavors previously unknown in our cultures. 

Not wheat but sourdough nonetheless. Whole grain and good!

Our legacy is with breads that are astonishingly good and taste nothing like wheat breads, in cakes and cookies and pies that delight the tastebuds with lush and interesting new flavors, in crackers with luscious chew and flatbreads that combine crunch and moist in unexpected yet wonderful ways.

Which is why I’m opening my gluten-free business. I think my breads will fill the bill. Egotistic? Perhaps. But I won’t claim to be the only one inventing legacy foods. Next time you’re the supermarket, pick up a bag of Bob’s Red Mill quinoa flour and try the chocolate cupcake recipe on the back. If those aren’t gluten-free cakes worth legacy status, I don’t know what is.

And for those of you with a love of experiment and a family willing to lap up your trial recipes, here’s two ideas I’m sure can be molded into legacies. I’ve put them aside in favor of breads, but I know that someone - maybe YOU, gentle reader - can do wonders with them.

Fresh red raspberries and buckwheat kernels, ready for the kitchen.

1) Buckwheat and raspberries

2) Ivory teff and seafood.

And there, I’m out of ideas for another round of writing. When next I sit at this keyboard I hope to have business progress to report. In my world the installation of a three-part sink is the most yearned-for of events.