Inspired by a dog biscuit recipe that’s suitable for dogs on a renal diet,1 I’ve started baking with buckwheat flour. Buckwheat is naturally gluten-free, but as with any food product, it’s ultimately only as GF as the equipment it’s processed on.
My usual go-to brand for baking ingredients is Bob’s Red Mill, which I like because it’s employee-owned and reliably high in quality. Bob’s buckwheat flour isn’t labeled as being GF, so I’ve been purchasing Arrowhead Mills’ instead; it’s both GF and organic.
In addition to Missy’s biscuits, which she adores, I’ve twice made brownies, once with a hint of cardamom, and three times made chocolate chip blondies, once with walnuts, once with hazelnuts, and once without nuts. I’ll share my thoughts on the recipes below.
First, though, let’s talk about buckwheat. Here are some buckwheat facts I cribbed from this highly informative page on the Artisan Grain Collaborative’s website:
- It’s a complete protein, meaning it contains substantial amounts of all nine amino acids the body can’t synthesize and so must be obtained from food sources.
- It’s high in fiber.
- It’s not considered to be a grain because it’s not part of the grass family, Poaceae.
- Instead, it’s a pseudocereal grown from a broadleaf plant that’s related to rhubarb and sorrel.
- It’s native to China.
- Buckwheat flour is dark in color because buckwheat typically isn’t hulled before being ground.
Buckwheat flour has a distinct flavor that’s grassy, nutty, and earthy. I often like it better when it’s blended with flours that have less-assertive flavors, like white rice and oat, but it worked great on its own in my first batch of powerfully chocolatey brownies.
I found my initial recipe for Missy’s biscuits—the one that started me down the baking-with-buckwheat-flour path—at PawsomeOldies.com. I prefer this recipe from Fanny Urbanhomesteader on YouTube. The dough is easier to work with, and the end result seemed more like a traditional dog biscuit to me. But it’s a bit more work, stamping out the biscuits with a cookie cutter and rerolling the leftover dough to make additional biscuits. (I actually didn’t use a roller; I just pressed the dough with my lightly flowered hands.)
If you read the comments on Fanny’s recipe, you’ll see two from me. One is in response to an assertion by another commenter that pumpkin purée is “very high in sodium,” which is ridiculous. The other is in response to what I believe was a legitimate concern about using baking soda in a renal-friendly dog treat. I suggested substituting sodium-free baking powder for the baking soda and baking powder because it had worked for me. Baking soda and baking powder often aren’t interchangeable—for reasons outlined very well here by baker and photographer Sally McKenney and here at Bob's Red Mill's website.2
I also mentioned replacing the whole wheat flour with a blend of 1 cup white rice flour, 1/2 cup gluten-free oat flour, and 1/2 cup GF buckwheat flour. That was the second time I made them. The first time, I used only buckwheat flour.
I didn't mention it, because I feared wearing readers out with too much talk of substitutions, but I also replaced the water with store-bought chicken broth that's free of added sodium. (Some commenters do go on about replacing four, five, or six different things and then have the nerve to complain the recipe sucked. That takes chutzpah.) We've also been giving Missy two servings of broth a day to keep her hydrated. She loves her some flavored water.
I got 70 biscuits out of the recipe. I placed the unbaked cut-out biscuits tightly on two half sheets because I wasn't concerned they would spread out and meld together.
The enlarged image above shows the recipe I used for the brownies. It's on the back of the Arrowhead Mills buckwheat flour bag, and let me tell you, those fractions are tiny in real life. Even with my reading glasses on, I wasn't sure I was seeing the right numbers.
My first batch followed the recipe exactly except for substituting coconut oil for the butter.
For my second batch, I got the idea to insert a note of cardamom into the chocolate from this buckwheat brownie recipe3 created by Chicago-based baker Greg Wade. I incorporated 1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom into the dry ingredients, and that turned out to be a good amount. The cardamom was tangible but not intrusive. I also used 1/4 cup of white rice flour in place of an equal amount of the buckwheat flour.
That's the recipe I used for the nut-free blondies; it was also on the bag of buckwheat flour. (These recipes aren't available on Arrowhead Mills' website.)
Because it's a drop cookie recipe, I had to convert it to a bar cookie recipe. Thankfully, 4 King Arthur Baking Company—which, by the way, is, like Bob's Red Mill, employee-owned—has a handy-dandy guide to doing just that.
I had a concern about the article's mention of having to multiply baking time by 3 when your dough is "around or over 3/4" thick" when pressed into a small pan. That's because 3/4" to 1" thick was given as "the general rule of thumb" for how thick your dough should be at the start of the article. Read my comment and the response from King Arthur's Barb and let me know whether you think my concern was valid and expressed well. Maybe I should have mentioned I was assuming the baker in question would be using only one small pan and all of the dough they had created?
Because I've twice mentioned this issue before on the blog, including once in a post about a blondie recipe, I won't make a big deal out of how the ingredients appear in different orders in the list of ingredients and the recipe instructions.
I liked these blondies better than Tony did. He found them to be too soft.
I made these gluten-free blondies from The Bojon Gourmet twice, first in a 9-inch-square pan, and then, after I’d bought two 8-inch-square pans, in a pan that size. Tony raved about the first batch, which contained walnuts. We liked the second batch even better; that batch is the one pictured above, with toasted hazelnuts that were a little too toasty, just before the pan went into the oven.
The Bojon Gourmet's Alanna Taylor-Tobin says in the directions that the final amount of cookie dough doesn’t look like enough to make a pan of blondies, and that's accurate and the reason I bought the 8-inch-square pans: It really didn't look like enough dough in the larger pan. But this recipe works like a charm and will probably become a staple in our home.
On another TBG page, about GF flour options, I found a suggestion to substitute arrowroot, which I always have on hand for my Vegan Frozen Desserts, for tapioca flour, which I don’t often keep in the pantry, so next time I’ll use 2 tablespoons of arrowroot instead of the 2 more tablespoons of white rice flour I went with in place of the tapioca flour. I used buckwheat flour in place of the oat flour.
You may have noticed that none of these recipes called for xanthan gum, which is often crucial for holding together GF baked goods, but I agree with the recipe creators that none of them really needed it.
My last bit of questionable fun with fractions involves my remaking the Blueberry-Lemon Pie that was Tony's favorite pie from last summer. Last time I made it, I followed the filling recipe exactly except I omitted the two pats of butter, and in place of a homemade, buttery double crust, I used a store-bought GF and dairy-free crust on the bottom only. I found when I put the filling in the thawed crust that it was disconcertingly high and likely to bubble over a good deal without the top crust to contain it. I removed about a cup of the filling, and the pie turned out great.
This time, I purposefully went with only 5 cups of blueberries in the filling, as shown above. Since I'd reduced the volume of blueberries by one-sixth, I did the same with the other filling ingredients.
To find out how much less sugar I needed, I divided 3/4 cup by 6. That's the same as multiplying 3/4 x 1/6, which comes out to 3/24, which can be reduced to 1/8 cup. To find out how much sugar I needed in total (minus that 1/8 cup), I subtracted 1/8 from the equivalent of 3/4 cup in eighths, which is 6/8 cup. 6/8 - 1/8 = 5/8, so I had to use 5/8 cup of sugar, which is equivalent to 1/2 cup (4/8 cup) plus 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup).
To figure out how much less cornstarch I needed, I first converted 5 tablespoons into 15 teaspoons. Then I divided 15 by 6: 15 ÷ 6 = 2 3/6, which reduced to 2 1/2. To determine the new amount of cornstartch, I subtracted 2 1/2 from 15: 15 - 2 1/2 = 12 1/2 teaspoons. That's equivalent to 4 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon.
Although I don't exactly miss word problems from elementary school math class, I felt a sense of accomplishment from solving that real-world math problem. But I enjoyed eating the pie more.
1 Our Missy was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease in September. She's been doing well on her two blood pressure medicines and a low-sodium, -phosphorus, and -protein diet.
2 I might have suggested using sodium-free baking soda too. And maybe also some sodium-free salt, based on what the Bob's Red Mill page says. I'm glad the recipe worked out OK without all of that extra fuss.
3I have a quibble with the image for this recipe: It shows a design on top of the brownies, which was probably made using powdered sugar and a stencil or a doily. (Does anybody have doilies anymore?) The recipe doesn't say how to make that design, so I think the photo should have been of unadorned brownies.
4 Thankfully acts as a sentence adverb in this sentence. That means it's an adverb that applies to an entire sentence, not just a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.