Buckwheat, black wheat: discovering this pseudo-cereal

Often called black wheat for its dark color, buckwheat is a pseudo-cereal grown all over the world. Gluten free and particularly appreciated for its nutritional richness, buckwheat grain has recently returned to the forefront. Like barley, buckwheat interested us at Maison Aimi because it is grown in France as well as in Japan, which allowed us to develop a Japanese drink, sobacha, with local resources. In today's article, we invite you to discover this cereal with surprising properties.

SUMMARY

Presentation of buckwheat

> Buckwheat in a few words

> The history of buckwheat cultivation

> Buckwheat cultivation

> Buckwheat processing

Buckwheat, black wheat and wheat: what are the differences?

Before going further into the uses and nutritional properties of buckwheat, let's start with a presentation of buckwheat: what is this cereal, what does it look like, how it was originally cultivated...

Common buckwheat ( Fagopyrum esculentum in Latin) is a species of annual flowering plant, of the Polygonaceae family (like rhubarb and sorrel), cultivated for its seeds. It is the latter that are mainly used.

Buckwheat is commonly called “black wheat”, but has many other nicknames: depending on the region, it is called “carabin”, “beaucuit”, “bucail”, “barbary wheat” or even “black wheat”.

🌾 Although it is often called “black wheat”, buckwheat is a plant that does not belong to the genus Tritium (unlike wheat, barley or oats), nor even to the grass family. Buckwheat is often considered a cereal although it is not one: it is called a pseudo-cereal and used as such.

Buckwheat, a flowering plant

Buckwheat is an annual plant (in other words, it is a plant that has a lifespan of one year and must be replanted each year) with an erect stem, 20 to 70 cm high, and flowers.

Buckwheat leaves are heart-shaped and rather soft. The lower leaves of the plant have a fairly long petiole (tail), while the upper leaves of buckwheat are called sessile: they are attached directly to the stem.

Buckwheat flowers, on the other hand, are small, white or pink, and are grouped in tight clusters. They appear once a year and produce fruits, called achenes, which are pyramidal in shape and contain a single seed – the famous buckwheat seed. They mature over a long period, which makes harvesting rather tricky. In France, the harvest takes place between the end of September and mid-November.

The structure of buckwheat seed

Let us also focus more specifically on the buckwheat seed. It has a characteristic shape of a small pyramid with three angles and a gray or blackish color. Its size measures approximately 5 mm. The buckwheat seed contains three distinct elements: the husk, or “husk” or “shell”, the albumen and the germ.

When buckwheat seed retains all its layers, it is called whole, while you will also find hulled buckwheat seeds on the market. This is the case of our sobacha offer , a buckwheat infusion of Japanese origin, which is made from hulled seeds. Whole buckwheat is more interesting from a nutritional point of view than hulled buckwheat but it is more difficult to digest and takes longer to prepare in this form.

🌾 Buckwheat hulling, the step that involves removing the hull from the buckwheat seed, is particularly difficult to do–it takes a long time to do manually and few machines exist. This partly explains why this pseudo-cereal is less cultivated than wheat, for example.

Originating in northern China, archaeological evidence shows that buckwheat was cultivated in these regions as early as 2600 BC.

Contrary to what its name, “sarrasin”, homonym of the Saracens (the Arabs in the Middle Ages) might suggest, buckwheat did not arrive in Europe via the Arabs but via Russia. Around the 14th century, it gradually spread across Europe, from north to south, from Poland to Spain via France. Its presence was established in Spain in the 17th century.

Buckwheat can be grown in regions with poor soils and grows more widely in countries of the northern hemisphere. It is grown in poor and acidic soils in Northern Europe, Poland, Russia, North America, Japan and in France (in Auvergne, Brittany, Limousin, Normandy, the Pyrenees and Rouergue).

The largest producer of buckwheat is Russia, France ranks 7th on the world market. The war in Ukraine, also a producer of buckwheat, has had an impact on the production and imports of buckwheat in the world.

Buckwheat cultivation in Brittany

The case of Brittany, where buckwheat is particularly consumed in buckwheat pancakes, is a bit unusual. Widely cultivated in the 1960s, buckwheat cultivation was a victim of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and declined sharply to the point where buckwheat consumption was supplemented by imports of Chinese, Polish and Canadian buckwheat. It increased again under the impetus of the Association blé noir tradition Bretagne (created in 1987), which brings together more than 800 producers and around ten millers to promote the use of Breton flour. The areas cultivated in Brittany now range between 3,000 and 4,000 hectares (compared to only a few hundred in the 1980s).

Buckwheat cultivation figures

In terms of quantity, compared to the wheat or barley market, the buckwheat market is very small: 1.8 million tonnes produced in 2020 .

In 2022, 27,000 tonnes of buckwheat were collected in France for an area of ​​44,000 ha . The latter has doubled in ten years. France does not export buckwheat but imports it, particularly from Russia, Canada and Poland.

Rich in its interesting nutritional values ​​and increasingly consumed in France due to its gluten-free grain, buckwheat is used commercially in different forms: flour, buckwheat flakes and buckwheat seeds, hulled or not.

Buckwheat seed thus enters into many industrial transformation processes similar to other cereals ( grinding, crushing, extrusion-expansion, cooking-gelatinization, etc. ). Its particularity is its decortication – in other words, the mechanical removal of the buckwheat husk.

Buckwheat hulling

Hulling consists of removing the buckwheat husk to preserve the seeds without the husk. This step is not mandatory – buckwheat can be consumed in its whole form – but it is particularly difficult to do and to industrialize, which partly explains why buckwheat is a pseudo-cereal with still limited production (hulling represents a brake on its production). Hulling can be manual or industrialized using machines. There are two main solutions:

• The projection of seeds against the wall of a centrifuge, which breaks the envelope;
• Expulsion of envelopes by ventilation.

Often called “black wheat” because of the blackish color of its grain, buckwheat is not really wheat. Here are 9 reasons why wheat and buckwheat are different and why you should give buckwheat a chance in your daily diet .

1. Different origin: if buckwheat is native to northern China, wheat would be native to the fertile crescent (Middle East) and we find traces of its cultivation in ancient Egypt for example;
2. Different color: while wheat seeds have a golden yellow color, buckwheat seeds have a grayish/black color. It is this particularity that gave buckwheat its name “black wheat”;
3. Different plant: Wheat is part of the grass family, like barley, oats and millet, while buckwheat is part of the Polygonaceae family;
4. Different plant needs: wheat can adapt to all types of soil but requires a lot of water to grow, while buckwheat adapts to very poor soil and requires very little water;
5. Different harvest period: in France, wheat is harvested in June-July while buckwheat is harvested between the end of September and mid-November;
6. Higher wheat yield: The main reason that can explain why wheat was preferred over buckwheat is the crop yield… The yield of wheat is 73 quintals/hectare, while the yield of buckwheat is about 10 quintals/hectare (the yield can drop to 5 q/ha depending on the irrigation of buckwheat crops).
7. Different taste: the tastes of wheat and buckwheat are very different... You only have to eat a buckwheat pancake (buckwheat) and a sweet crepe (wheat) one after the other to realize this;
8. Different nutritional characteristics: consumed as a cereal, buckwheat is not really one… which leads to strong differences in nutritional characteristics compared to wheat! Rich in vitamins, antioxidants and a particularly low glycemic index compared to wheat, buckwheat is worth discovering!
9. Presence of gluten: buckwheat, unlike wheat, barley or millet, does NOT contain gluten. This makes it a perfect ally for those wishing to follow a gluten-free diet.

Although buckwheat cultivation is local and rather confidential, particularly compared to wheat or barley ( 1.8 million tonnes of buckwheat produced worldwide per year compared to 650 to 685 million tonnes of wheat and 148 million tonnes of barley ), it is mainly geared towards human consumption. At the same time, there is a limited use in animal feed and other even more limited uses.

Buckwheat is mainly used in human food. While buckwheat has long been adopted for the diet of poor populations, it is now popular with populations wishing to diversify their diet with other cereals than wheat – in particular to limit gluten and move towards foods with a lower glycemic index. In other words: buckwheat has become trendy!

Particularly appreciated in Russia and Ukraine where it is eaten boiled with vegetables (Kacha) or in porridge (grechka), it is also found in Japan in the form of flour, pasta (sobas are buckwheat noodles) and infusion (sobacha), but also in Brittany where it is eaten in pancakes (buckwheat pancakes).

Buckwheat is also used in animal feed, in livestock farming. Its nutritional qualities and in particular its richness in vegetable protein are appreciated for livestock nutrition.

It is most often mixed with other cereals (notably barley). This is particularly because of fagopyrism: this is a skin condition (increased photosensitivity of the skin) which occurs in animals receiving a ration containing too high a proportion of buckwheat and exposed to light.

In addition to human and animal nutrition, buckwheat has other functions.

• Honey production: Buckwheat is a melliferous plant. To allow the pollination of buckwheat and the birth of seeds, buckwheat fields require close proximity to beehives… which led to the creation of buckwheat honey. Originally from the United States, buckwheat honey is now produced in many buckwheat-producing countries, including France;
• Auxiliary plant: Buckwheat can be used in agriculture as an auxiliary plant, that is to say a plant that is grown in addition to another plant in order to promote its growth. Buckwheat is thus a cleaning plant that limits the presence of other plants by occupying the soil. It can accompany the early planting of clover, alfalfa, or even rapeseed.
• Buckwheat husks: Traditionally, especially in South Korea and Japan where buckwheat cultivation dates back to at least the 14th century as in Europe, buckwheat husks are collected and cleaned after the seed has been hulled. They are used as pillow stuffing. They can also be found as mulch for flower beds in horticulture.

Buckwheat is a cereal of destination or pseudo-cereal - it is a seed with properties and uses close to cereals. For a long time dedicated to the food of the poorest people, its nutritional richness has brought it back to the forefront very recently, particularly in the context of veggie and/or healthy food regimens.

Buckwheat can be consumed in several forms. In this comparison, we will focus on two forms: hulled buckwheat grains (without the husk) and whole buckwheat flour (crushed, with the husk).

Hulled buckwheat grains (cooked, 100g)

In this form, buckwheat can be eaten roasted or boiled. It does not require soaking and generally requires 15 minutes of cooking.

Whole buckwheat flour (100 g)

Whole buckwheat flour allows you to benefit from the vitamin richness of the seed husk. It can be used like any other flour although, like all flour, it has its own particularities (absence of gluten which limits its stickiness, for example). If you use it in baking, take a suitable recipe and do not replace wheat flour with buckwheat flour.

Long consumed by the poorest populations who cultivated buckwheat for their own consumption, buckwheat has earned its letters of nobility and is acclaimed for its many benefits.

Buckwheat, consumed as grains, flakes, flour or even – to a varying extent – ​​as an infusion:

• is rich in vegetable proteins (13 g per 100 g) and amino acids necessary for the proper functioning of the body;
• slows down digestion (and therefore promotes it): like barley, buckwheat is rich in soluble fiber and complex carbohydrates. This accelerates the feeling of satiety, slows down digestion and facilitates intestinal transit;
• helps regulate blood sugar levels: buckwheat contains D-Fagomine, a molecule similar to glucose that greatly slows down the absorption of sugars into our blood. It therefore has a moderate glycemic index (40) and helps prevent glycemic peaks, making it suitable for diabetics;
• contains antioxidants: buckwheat is rich in phenolic acids and flavonoids. The latter have anti-inflammatory effects and help to strengthen cardiovascular health. Buckwheat also contains an antioxidant called “rutin” which protects blood vessels;
• reduces the feeling of stress and anxiety thanks to its richness in vitamin B;
• contains many minerals: buckwheat contains a large amount of magnesium and is full of other minerals such as calcium, zinc or copper;
• is gluten-free: its flour is therefore not suitable for bread making and you will need to think about specific recipes to use it BUT buckwheat will therefore be very well tolerated by people who are gluten intolerant.

👉 Also read: our article dedicated to the benefits of sobacha, our buckwheat infusion .

Aside from buckwheat pancakes, you may not be used to eating buckwheat. If you want to incorporate buckwheat into your diet and eat it more regularly, find out how to choose your buckwheat, store it and consume it.

France is a producer of buckwheat (the seventh largest in the world to be exact) and that is why we can only recommend that you turn to French buckwheat. For even more pleasure, choose organic and bulk: the planet will thank you 🌏.

That being said, you may struggle to find French buckwheat in stores because a lot of buckwheat sold in France is imported. Maison Aimi uses European buckwheat for its sobacha, having not (yet) found a dedicated producer. If this is the case, go for European buckwheat instead to limit the environmental cost of transport, not to mention that European agricultural standards are cleaner than those of a majority of countries in the world.

To prevent your buckwheat grains from sprouting, it is important to store your buckwheat seeds in an airtight container, cool and away from sunlight. Glass jars with seals are perfect for this purpose.

You can consume buckwheat:

• in grains, like wheat berries: the advantage of buckwheat over other grains (especially barley) is that you don't have to soak it. Bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes. You can then eat it roasted, boiled or as porridge;
• in flakes , like oatmeal : the advantage of this consistency is that you will have no difficulty in implementing it into your diet if you already eat oatmeal. You can make porridge, muesli or in a cereal pancake ****;
• in flour to make pancakes and different recipes. Buckwheat does not contain gluten, so it will be important not to adapt recipes based on wheat flour to avoid unpleasant surprises;
• in drinks: Maison Aimi is a company that specializes in the creation of drinks from Japan and created from French harvests. It thus offers buckwheat infusion , sobacha.

Let us conclude this article with two points that we feel are important to share regarding the consumption of buckwheat. What are the limits to its consumption?

Buckwheat food allergy has been known since 1909 and the presence of powerful allergens in buckwheat has been demonstrated. Buckwheat allergy is thought to affect 2.2 to 3.6% of food allergies (also affecting children under 2 years old) and it is estimated that in the general population the incidence of severe reactions including anaphylaxis is of the order of 0.1 to 0.01 cases per 100,000 subjects per year. People with celiac disease are also more likely to be allergic to buckwheat.

Buckwheat does not naturally contain gluten. Buckwheat seeds and products made from buckwheat flour may therefore be of interest to people with gluten intolerance or coeliac disease. Be careful, however: processed products made from buckwheat (buckwheat flour and flakes in particular) may sometimes be processed in companies that also work with wheat, barley, etc., so you may sometimes find traces of gluten in buckwheat-based products.

Although buckwheat has long been associated with the food of poor people, it has recently been brought back into fashion and is now widely acclaimed as part of a varied diet. It has many nutritional virtues compared to wheat, in particular. Its cultivation in France is however quite limited, as is the yield of plantations, leading to the need, sometimes, to obtain supplies from Europe.