Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Does anyone have any experience with buckwheat flour? i know it is supposedly GF so maybe?

i made my own buckwheat (soba) flour yesterday to make noodles. The recipe calls for maybe a 1:3 ratio of white to soba flour to make it glutinous enough to roll out (i think). The dough wouldn't hold together, i added more water, my recipe was very vague and unhelpful, and once i got the noodles to the machine (yes, i know, sacrilege) they crumbled, and i had a conniption.
Has anyone made noodles out of soba? interwebz tells me vague orientalistic shiitake about needing a lifetime of practice but is extremely thin on data.
or if not, have you worked with soba flour? is there any way to make it less crumbly? or more importantly, is there anything i can do with this shitload of buckwheat flour i now have? (all i can think of is pancakes- can i use it instead of white flour?)

Buckwheat is great in pancakes and waffles. The buckwheat waffles in the Brunch book are great. My sweetheart often mixes some buckwheat flour into his breads. Generally you can't just use it instead of wheat flour- you need to blend them or follow a gf recipe.

How did you make the flour?

I once use a grain mill (good one with stones) to make buckwheat flour and it somehow did not work out. The flour was too grainy/not fine enough/kinda weird and my attempt to make buckwheat blini with it was a complete failure (did not hold together etc., similar to what you described). So maybe that is the culprit?

I also have no idea whether for commercial buckwheat flour actually the whole grain gets milled or whether there is some kind of 'hulling'-step to reduce the fibers and increase the proportion of starch vs. fiber, which would probably make a flour stick together better as well.

i blended it, and then sifted it. it was extremely fine, looked like oat flour. from what I gather from dr google, the hulling removes the outer black hulls (which i know as buckwheat hulls for the garden or for stuffing cushions). after that, it's pretty much it, i think.

i was thinking the whole time "this stuff smells like peas" (not the filter, like green peas), which i don't remember ever thinking about soba before. i threw the whole mess down in despair and i just realized Mr Torque balled up the dough and put it in the fridge, so maybe i will get another shot. i know that using the pasta machine is totally not recommended, but i'll be damned if i am going to roll all that shiitake out superfine and chop it with the fancy knife and all that.

I think commercial soba often has a higher proportion of wheat to buckwheat. Wheat is usually the first ingredient, so more than 1:1.

But traditional handmade soba was between 60% and 100% buckwheat. Using more wheat flour would be easier to work with, I'm sure, but less authentic.

I've never gotten around to making soba (been on my to-do list for too long) so I can't really help.

This guy seems to know what he's doing:




I like this gf pumpkin pie recipe that uses buckwheat.

I've got a whole bag and 7 weeks to use it - help! (I'm moving as little food as possible.) Needs to be gluten-free. I also have xanthum gum and a tiny bit of chickpea flour. I could buy more gf flour of some kind but I'd rather not.

I bet you could easily veganize this pancake recipe: http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/break ... ancake.htm

It's just buckwheat, no other flours needed

I love the Vcon buckwheat crepes. I also made muffins with it a few times, but don't remember the recipes. The crepes were the most successful buckwheat item; for savory dishes, I actually prefer them.

Buckwheat crepes are great with spicy stews, especially Ethiopian in my experience. I like it better in savoury dishes too.

I've made soba before and it was 80% soba flour to 20% white wheat. However, this was under the tutelage of a soba master in Japan so he obviously knew what he was doing. I'd love to know if anyone has success with a homemade recipe because I miss good soba and would like to try again by myself.

Could you add something sticky to it, to help bind it together?

I've never made anything with buckwheat, but last night I had some buckwheat and sweet potato noodles that were really good. The texture was just like regular wheat noodles.

We tried making our own gf soba noodles once. They absolutely did not work in the (borrowed) pasta machine, so we did the rolling and slicing by hand. Rustic! Artisanal! It was a whole lot of work though and we have never done it again. I do recall that we made one batch where I threw in a flax egg to give the dough a little more stick-togetherness. It worked pretty well, but the noodles obviously came out with weird little flecks in them.

My friend who lived in Japan for some years says that apprentice soba makers start out with a lot of wheat flour and as they get more advanced, move up to pure buckwheat. I guess that's why pure buckwheat noodles at the store are always so much pricier.

One last thought--I've seen some soba at the Asian market that has "yam starch" in the ingredients. Could you try mashing a baked sweet potato into the dough for some extra moisture and stickiness?

thanks guys!