Foodie Friday: Buckwheat Pancakes

Staff of Life
By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / December 12, 2008

I have been cooking pancakes a lot lately. Really, you need them every meal if you are avoiding wheat flour bread from the Evil Empire. Last Sunday night, these buckwheat pancakes were a great hit, served to arriving guests on a plate I kept refilling with fresh pancakes. I could make about eight 4 or 5 inch pancakes at a time in a lovely very heavy skillet. Accompanied by shredded roast chicken in a beautiful bowl, chopped green onions and with both Hoisan and salsa on the side, arriving guests ate the pancakes almost as soon as they hit the platter. No washing necessary afterwards as they had also eaten their plates! Buckwheat pancakes are thin and flexible and delicious, like corn tortillas used to be. This of course was before Nixon re-engineered the farm program to maximize bushels, accidentally minimizing taste, destroying the protective lands along the rivers, and totally eliminating nutrients from half the food supply.

Remember when Mexican restaurants gave out corn tortillas instead of chips?? Back then, tortillas were delicious They were still delicious in Mexico for awhile after that, before we also drove their farmers and their diverse corn crops off the land as they could no more compete with the billions of dollars in federal subsidies our industrial farmers receive annually, anymore than our own farmers could.

So I am cooking with the ancient grains that have proven their worth over time. Not the recently developed ones whose only achievement is large numbers of bushels per acre, combined with an almost total lack of any benefit to human consumption, beyond calories. And in this country, even the poor do not need calories.

Remember, an excellent buffet needs a fresh hot bread. The crowning touch.

Buckwheat Pancakes

• 2 cup buttermilk
• 2 eggs
• 6 tablespoons butter, melted
• 2 teaspoons maple syrup
• 3/4 cup sorghum flour
• 3/4 cup buckwheat flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking soda

Directions

1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, eggs, syrup and melted butter.

2. In another bowl, mix together sorghum flour, buckwheat flour, salt and baking soda. Pour the egg mixture into the dry ingredients, holding back a few dry tablespoons to make sure you get a thin batter as flours vary in absorption.

3. Stir until the two mixtures are just incorporated. Add a little more flour mixture if it needs it.

4. Heat a griddle or large frying pan to sizzling, and place 1 tablespoon of butter, margarine or oil into it. Let the butter melt before spooning the batter into the frying pan, form 4 inch pancakes out of the batter. Once bubbles form on the top of the pancakes, flip them over, and cook them on the other side for about 3 minutes. Continue with this process until all of the batter has been made into pancakes.

5. Then sit down and have a lovely meal.

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