Alright, I’m kind of tired of oatmeal creme pie attempts for now. That said, I’ve got some concerns that are becoming more pressing.

The short version: I’m moving to Richmond in July, which is wonderful and going to be fun and great. The hard part is that I need to move or get rid of all my possessions by then. For one, I’ve gotta drink 1.2 beers per day on average to deplete my beer supply before moving. That’s a challenge I’m willing to accept, since if I can’t meet that goal, I probably have no business moving to Richmond in the first place. But in addition to that, I’ve accumulated a whole lotta different kinds of flour to experiment with - different kinds of rye, nut flours, cake flours, different gluten free mixes, and the like.

It’s not as heavy as beer, but flour is pretty heavy. So I gotta start figuring out what to do with it.

Taking inventory, it the thing I have the most of is buckwheat flour:

It’s time for a lightning round of buckwheat recipes.

There’ll be a little less experimentation and more doing in these next few posts, since we’re on a timeline to bake through all this stuff! Today, we’ve got waffles, brownies and cookies. Those on the box list will get brownies and cookies.

Buckwheat Waffles

Probably the most straghtforward thing to do with buckwheat flour is make waffles or pancakes. I’ve gotta get milage out of Alex’s fancy waffle maker while I have it, so waffles it is.

The recipe’s here. It seemed like a lot of baking soda and powder at first, and the batter definitely poofed up as dry ingredients were mixed with wet.

But it’s hard to argue with the results.

These were a pretty great recipe - made a very crispy, tasty waffle.

Double Chocolate-Walnut Brownies

Next up, a brownie recipe! Gluten free brownies are something I’ve wanted to start trying out - all sane folks know Ghiradelli box mix is unbeatable, but it’d be good to start playing around with gluten free brownie recipes.

This recipe is from Joanne Chang’s Pastry Love. I made two versions: one basically by the book, and one substituing Bob’s Red Mill egg replacer.

right after placing in the oven

Interestingly, the two batters looked very different. The egg-based batter was more liquidy/goopy, while the batter with egg substitute was much thicker. Both were pretty thick batters.

The differences carried through post-bake:

note the chocolate chips on top that I forgot to add in the batter…

It’s worth nothing that I baked these for longer than stated in the book, and they probably ended up overbaked. It seemed like the batter was not cooked at the stated time, but it probably was.

Both are good, but seemingly the egg-free batch was more resilient to overbaking - it ended up denser and fudgier, while the batch with eggs was cakier.

They don’t quite stand up to Gregory Ghiradelli yet, but that may be partially due to the overbaking.

Salted Chocolate Buckwheat Cookie

Finally, since I don’t think I’m legally allowed to make a post without a cookie in it, so this recipe comes from Food52.

I, uh, attempted to make these by the recipe exactly, but a couple odd things happened:

The cookies ended up being quite a bit bigger than I would have thought, given the picture on the link.

this is a half sheet pan, not a quarter sheet pan

Second, they ran out everywhere and all into each other.

wheeee

Thankfully, they stayed distinct enough to be their own cookies, though they are pretty comically shaped.

I suspect this is because I didn’t chill them long enough - I chilled the dough for an hour in the fridge, but when I got it out it didn’t seem quite as cold as necessary.

In Summary

Now I have not quite as much buckwheat flour (I worked through maybe about 1/3 to 1/2 of the flour reserve), but instead I have too many brownies and cookies. Thankfully, that’s more easily addressable. :)