Grains have been a limiting factor for us in eating a totally local diet. While we do enjoy a good bit of our corn and we've grown wheat, we still buy in a hefty amount of oats, wheat, millet and buckwheat each year for ourselves. We were excited to discover, therefore, that homegrown buckwheat is a very doable endeavor. We've grown buckwheat as a cover crop in the gardens for years. This year we harvested a couple quarts of the buckwheat after the flowers had gone to seed. These seeds we winnowed, then ran through our mill, hull and all. When you buy whole buckwheat groats, they are often dehulled. But we've discovered that buckwheat flour must be milled from the whole grain, giving it the characteristic dark flecks from the hull. We did sift the flour we ground through a coarse sieve to get out the largest flecks of hull. From there we fried up a delicious batch of buckwheat pancakes for breakfast topped with our Jersey butter and sorghum syrup from a friend. Eating local doesn't taste any better than this!
No comments:
Post a Comment