Buckwheat Pancakes

A great way to start a winter day

Waking up on another frigid mid-winter morning puts me in the mood for something comforting, something sweet, and something delicious to start the day. Nothing warms the body and soothes the soul quite like buckwheat pancakes. The steaming buttered stack—topped with maple syrup and blueberries—nourishes and connects me to local farms and forests, a historic mill, climate change impacts, and to the generosity of a berry-picking friend.

Buckwheat. Not wheat, but a welcome and nutritious opportunity

The first ingredient listed for Birkett Mills buckwheat pancake mix is, no surprise, buckwheat. Despite its name, buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), is not wheat. It’s considered a “pseudo” cereal—putting it in the same club as quinoa and amaranth. Pseudocereals are both processed (ground into flour and other products) and used in much the same way as true cereals, such a wheat. Interestingly, buckwheat is related to rhubarb, sorrel and knotweed.

Known as kasha in Eastern Europe, buckwheat is an ancient crop which has long been grown in East Asia and the Himalayan region and is thought to have been first cultivated in southeast Asia thousands of years ago. From there the crop spread to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Today the major producers are Russia, China and Ukraine. Together the three top buckwheat producers harvest over 1.5 million tons annually (current war-constrained production not withstanding).

In the United States, buckwheat is considered a minor crop. Still, our country has 192,742 acres of farmland in buckwheat and the U.S. annual yield has hovered around a not-too-shabby 80,000 tons for nearly two decades. The top buckwheat producing states include North Dakota, Minnesota, New York, and other parts of the Northeast.

As climate change impacts on Northeast agriculture become clear, more and more grain growers are starting to view buckwheat as an opportunity to both improve their bottom line and to enhance sustainability. Klaas Martens, who has farmed organically in Penn Yan, NY since the 1990s, sees reviving this once prominent crop (U.S. land in buckwheat peaked in the early 1900s at close to a million acres, over five times today’s level) as an important and potentially lucrative climate change adaptation. With a warming climate, Martens realized that buckwheat can be put into his crop rotation as what’s called a “double-crop.” He reports the first frost can hit up to six weeks later than when he first starting farming. Instead of seeding only an overwinter cover crop right after the wheat harvest, a longer growing season means he can shoehorn buckwheat in as a second crop. Buckwheat, which has a short growing season and likes cooler nighttime temperatures, is quite happy with this arrangement.

So is Mr. Martens, who is assured income from an additional crop for which there is robust public demand. Buckwheat also has many proven benefits for farms and home gardens alike. It improves even poor soils—by increasing organic matter, enhancing soil structure, boosting phosphorus and nutrient availability, and decreasing erosion—and is an effective weed suppressant. Buckwheat attracts pollinators, including honeybees, and beneficial insects. In organic systems beneficials are considered nature’s first line of defense against pests. Beneficial insects such as hover flies, predatory wasps, minute pirate bugs, and insidious flower bugs are attracted to the nectar in buckwheat blossoms and will attack or parasitize aphids, mites and other pests that would otherwise damage the plant. Since flowering may start within three weeks of planting and continue for up to 10 weeks, buckwheat can be well-defended and protect other nearby plants for an extended period.

On top of that, buckwheat adds beauty to any field or garden thanks to its profusion of lovely little white flowers which give rise to buckwheat’s colloquial name, “snow in summer.” Martens has found that an overwinter cover crop (such as rye, pea, or clover) can be planted right along with the buckwheat, ensuring—without an additional planting—that the soil is protected throughout the year.

Birkett Mills in Penn Yan, NY is one of the region’s few remaining mills. It was founded in 1797 as a water driven mill at the outlet of Keuka Lake, one of the eleven Finger Lakes. The mill is one of the world’s largest producers of buckwheat products with a shop that offers much more than buckwheat pancake mix: best sellers include buckwheat flour, groats, kasha, and cream of buckwheat cereal. Other buckwheat products are available elsewhere including beverages such as gluten-free beer, buckwheat whiskey, buckwheat tea, the Japanese distilled drink, shōchū, and soba noodles.

Fun fact: On September 27, 1987, Birkett Mills made history when nearly 40,000 people arrived to witness the making of the world’s largest pancake. With the Mill’s eye-popping 28-foot griddle, that to this day is proudly displayed on the mill’s south wall, a large crew cooked and flipped the flapjack that broke the Guinness record for the World's Largest Pancake. The record-breaking 28’ buckwheat pancake was large enough to feed 7,200 people and topped with 15 gallons of syrup and a 68-pound ‘pat’ of butter. Penn Yan held the record until 1994 when it was bested by a group in Rochdale, England that succeeded in making a pancake measuring 49 feet 3 inches in diameter (oh, come ON!) and one inch thick.

With all this going for it, little wonder that buckwheat production is on the rise in upstate New York and other suitable areas of northern states. Because it contains no gluten, those intolerant or sensitive to gluten have a nutritious alternative in buckwheat. In addition to being gluten-free, buckwheat adds diversity to the diet and unlike common cereal grains, which are deficient in lysine, the quality of protein in buckwheat is excellent, containing all eight amino acids we humans need to obtain from food. Buckwheat provides several bioactive compounds and is so rich in diverse antioxidants (mainly the flavonoids rutin and quercetin) that scientists consider it a “functional” pseudocereal. Its generous resistant starch content makes it potentially useful for improving insulin sensitivity, lowering blood sugar levels, and reducing appetite. According to USDA’s National Nutrients Database buckwheat provides meaningful amounts of several vitamins and minerals.

Maple Syrup. Ancient tradition meets modern technology

Once the hot stack is off the griddle and on the plate, I drizzle generously with a warmed mixture of maple syrup and local blueberries in roughly equal portions.

Maple syrup fascinates me. Who would walk up to a tree and think to insert a tap, or spile, into it in the first place? And then, noticing a clear liquid dripping out, taste it? And finally, decide to boil it and reduce it into a syrup?

Perhaps it happened when woodland natives of the Great Lakes region took note of the original tree tapper—an enterprising yellow-bellied sapsucker pecking its precise rows of perfect circular holes into the bark when the sap was flowing. “They must be on to something,” observant humans may have thought.

Another plausible explanation can be found in legend. Sue Denholm, a former naturalist with the Aldo Leopold Nature Center in Monona, Wisconsin, tells the Haudenosaunee story of how a tribal chief, Woksis, and his wife, Moqua, were the first to discover that maple trees produced sap that could be cooked down into a sweet syrup. After a day of hunting, so the story goes, Woksis would return and bury his hatchet in a tree for safe keeping—high enough to be out of his young childrens’ reach.

Moqua would have spent her day tending the fire, tanning hides, keeping the children away from the fire and going to the stream to get fresh water. Late one day, distracted by her many tasks, Moqua realized she hadn’t made time to get to the stream for water. As luck would have it, her makuk—a birch bark vessel made by Woodland peoples of the Algonquin language group—was sitting at the base of the tree. From the gouge left by Woksis’ hatchet, the tree had been dripping what looked like water right into the Moqua’s makuk. She spotted a potentially easy solution to her dearth of water. After all, the liquid looked like water, dripped from a trusted tree and, as she soon determined, tasted like water.

She poured the liquid over some leftover moose meat started to cook it down. What greeted Woksis as he got close to home was the aroma of gamey moose meat infused with the rich caramelly smell of reducing maple syrup. Woksis declared the sweetened slow cooked meat concoction (could this have been the original barbecue?) the best moose he’d ever tasted.

Whether or not it happened this way, Native Americans have for centuries been masters at making maple sugar and syrup. Caleb Musgrave, an Anishinaabe woodsman demonstrates the traditional way to tap trees and make maple syrup. A flat cedar spile whittled to the approximate length and width of a modern-day paint stir stick is used to guide the sap. The tapered end would have been tapped into a cut made in the tree at an angle just right for the sap to flow into a makuk placed on the ground near the spile’s end. Small batches of sap would then be boiled down in wooden troughs into which scorching hot stones were placed.

The process of making maple syrup has evolved substantially over the centuries to the point that production today bears little resemblance to the traditional Anishinaabe way in scale, materials and technology used, and energy required. European settlers arrived and first adopted then adapted Native American methods. Arriving as they did with metal technology these early settlers were able to easily drill into the trees. Then the spiles fashioned from hollowed out elderberry branches would have been inserted quite easily into the drilled holes to guide the flowing sap into wooden buckets. Iron kettles were introduced to boil and concentrate the sap. In the 1800s wooden spiles were replaced by metal ones (from which metal collection bucket were hung) and sap was boiled flat pans which, by increasing the surface area, decreased the evaporation time. The early 20^th century saw the introduction of stainless-steel evaporators—a series of broad pans over a firebox that allowed for faster processing. More recently plastic spiles and tubing create a fully enclosed system that is central to the latest changes in this on-going evolution.

Aaron Wightman, New York’s Statewide Maple Specialist and co-director of the Cornell University Maple Research Program, manages the maple lab at the Arnot teaching and research forest and is an expert on modern day maple sugar and syrup production. A sugar bush (stand of sugar maples) occupies 430 acres, a tenth of the forest’s total area. In early January he and his team start tapping trees. By the end of the month, they will have tapped 6,000 trees.

An intricate system of plastic tubing—a total of 60 miles worth—has been semi-permanently* installed in the sugarbush to collect the sap and channel it to the sugar house. The tubing is attached to each plastic spout or spile—one in every single tree—that is replaced every season. Instead of gashing a groove into a tree with a hatchet as Woksis did, today electric drills bore a clean innocuous hole. The spile is tapped into the hole and the tubing is attached. When the sap starts to flow, it runs downhill through the secure closed network right to the sugar house. No trudging through the woods jostling buckets of sap for the modern-day syrup maker. Once in the sugar house the sap is pumped into one of eight 2,000-gallon storage tanks outside the sugar house. Aaron said his team “can expect up to 2 gallons a day per tap during a good sap run. Over the course of the entire season, we expect each taphole to produce about 20 gallons of sap.”

Another recent industry-changing innovation is the use of reverse osmosis (RO) to remove most of the water from sap, thus saving time. Under high pressure the sap is forced through filters with holes so small that only water can pass through. One RO machine can squeeze about 1,000 gallons of water out of the sap every hour. “This is a very efficiently use of electricity,” says Wightman. “It would take a long time to do this by boiling off the water”. RO shaves 80% off the total time required to get enough water out of the sap to yield syrup.

Soon, the sap should be flowing again here in the northeast. We’re nearing the time of year when temperatures toggle between below and above freezing and weeks before the last dip below freezing. Andy, a farmer friend of mine, is delighted with winter this year in the northeast. “For the past few years, I haven’t gotten enough sap from my maple stand to make [and sell] syrup. But this year, it’s looking great for syrup production.”

Andy’s experience of uncertain sap flow is increasingly common in the northeast. Instead of the opportunity being created by climate change for growing buckwheat in the region, a warming climate threatens the future of the spring ritual of making maple sugar and syrup that has been valued for thousands of years for its health, cultural, social and economic benefits. Jeremy Solin, Maple Syrup Project Manager, University of Wisconsin Maple Syrup Program describes three impacts of climate change on maple sugar and syrup production: a northward shift in the range of sugar maple trees and exclusion in the southern edge; inconsistency in the maple season causing a decrease in sap sugar concentration; and an increase in invasive species that threaten the health of the trees.

Blueberries. Because, why not?

While the pancakes are cooking, I open a bag of frost-covered blueberries picked by my friend, Donna. Thanks to her generosity, I’m instantly connected to the bountiful summer fruit production in upstate New York. The blueberries came from a local farm that offers a you-pick (“U-Pick”) option. Otherwise known as Pick-Your-Own (PYO), this type of farm gate direct marketing has customers doing their own harvesting. It’s a great way to get fresh, ripe delicious, organic fruit, to have a farm experience, and to save a few bucks at the same time: the price at a U-Pick is often half to two-thirds the price found at a grocery store. Cooperative Extension associations in many counties in New York (like here in Tompkins County) list U-Pick blueberry farms and I imagine similar directories are available throughout blueberry-growing areas of the country.

According to the Highbush Production Blueberry Production Guide (1992), blueberries along with cranberries “are the only two commercially cultivated fruit crops native to North America alone.” Blueberries can do well in poor soils thanks to a symbiotic relationship the shrubs form with fungi that inhabit the roots and aid in the plant’s water and nutrient uptake. Blueberry bushes grow well all over the United States. Farmers produce blueberries commercially in 26 states, but most of that production—over 98% of it—happens in just ten: Oregon, Washington, Georgia, Michigan, California, New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida, Texas and Minnesota.

Because the blueberries my friend shared were picked at their peak ripeness—when at their maximum flavor and sweetness—and frozen as soon as possible after harvest, all that delicious goodness was preserved to be enjoyed smack dab in the middle of winter.

What’s not to like about blueberries? They’re sweet, nutritious, and easy to find. Blueberries are considered among the most nutrient dense fruits thanks to their substantial contribution of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and fiber, all in low-calorie, beautiful blue round packages. Heated up with some precious local maple syrup they are truly divine.

I love how the mild sweet taste of the blueberries marries with the sugary burst of the maple syrup. I heat the mixture of about 1/3 cup each of the berries and syrup for a buckwheat pancake breakfast for two.

Well, it’s another frigid day with a fresh dusting of snow and I’m ready to dig into some buckwheat pancakes!

Thank you for reading. Share if you wish.

*Aaron Wightman reports the tubing can last up to 20 years, which is good, but still, it’s another source of plastic waste in the food system. “Plastics are certainly a topic of concern in maple production due to the fossil fuel inputs in the manufacturing process, the waste generated as some plastic components like spouts are replaced annually, and the possibility of microplastics in syrup.”

Acknowledgment: Much gratitude to Ashley Miller for her careful proof-reading and editing, and for her deep food and agriculture knowledge.