Sourdough Buckwheats

For many years, my mother was a huge fan of the cooking newsletter, Simple Cooking written and produced by John Thorne and his wife Matt. My mom had almost all the issues from #2-94 (1981-2012), missing just a few at the beginning, neatly stored in two 3-ring binders. When she was moving out of her house of 45 years, she gave them to me. I have been reading through them, enjoying them tremendously. Thorne has a very engaging style writing about interesting topics in cooking; usually 1 or 2 subjects per issue, along with book reviews, adorned with period drawings and illustrations.

A recent issue (i.e. an old issue that I read recently), included a pancake which, apparently, Mainers call “buckwheats.” Also known as "ploys", they are sourdough buckwheat pancakes. The story was fun, and the recipe intriguing. I like pancakes, sourdough and buckwheat, so a sourdough buckwheat pancake is a beguiling idea. Such a pancake with an interesting history is even more attractive. But, it is a pancake for which you need to plan the morning before you want to eat them. So, I didn’t get around to trying a batch for quite some time; after all, how often do I know I want pancakes tomorrow, and how good could a sourdough buckwheat pancake really be? How good? How good? How good, you ask? Unbelievable.

The sourdough plays off the buckwheat in an indescribable way. And the smell – oh the smell. Magic. Buckwheat and molasses with a hint of ferment. Adding butter and maple syrup (as Thorne suggests) takes it to a whole other level. You must try these pancakes. They are that good. I don’t care if you want pancakes tomorrow or not, you have to make them (and, as I discovered, you can make the starter a couple days ahead and hold it in the refrigerator if necessary.)

Side Note: As it happens, when I first made these I was out of buckwheat flour, and due to COVID-19, specialty flours were hard to come by. But I did have buckwheat groats and a flour grinder. Subsequently I used high-quality commercial buckwheat flower. Using store-bought still made and excellent pancake, but that freshly ground buckwheat flour made these pancakes even more special. Note that unground grains keep better than flour, so I have taken to keeping products like buckwheat, Kamut, and the like, whole, grinding as needed.

Side Note 2: These pancakes don't include eggs, milk, or butter. They are, in fact, vegetarian (and if you accept yeast, then they are vegan.) This is unusual for a pancake. A search online finds versions of buckwheat pancakes made with eggs, milk, buttermilk and/or butter. However, all recipes for "ploys" are void of any of these products. Perhaps Thorne was unaware of the appellation, "ploy", and its sparse ingredients, when he wrote that issue of Simple Cooking. It is also worth noting that in the original, Thorne suggests greasing the griddle with bacon fat. I have not tried that, and have left it out of these instructions.

I have since tried adding egg and/or dairy to the batter. As far as I am concerned, it didn't improve them at all, and doing so meant that any leftover batter would spoil. Without animal products, leftover batter can be saved an reused.

So, without further ado, here is my annotated version of John Thorne’s Sourdough Buckwheats:

Total time: ~24 hours. Active time ~30 mins.
Makes 24 3” pancakes.

The morning before you will be enjoying your buckwheats, make the starter as follows:

• 6 Tbsp (3 oz) warm water (about 110°F)
• 3 Tbsp unbleached white all-purpose flour
• 3 Tbsp buckwheat flour
• a generous pinch active dry yeast

[Note: yes, technically this is not a sourdough, because it uses commercial yeast and a chemical leavener (baking soda - see below). Technically this is just a pancake with a preferment. According to Thorne, Mainers would have had buckwheats every morning for breakfast, and would have kept their starter going indefinitely. Using yeast and baking soda is a cheat.]

Mix the ingredients in a small bowl. Cover loosely with dish towel or plastic wrap and place in a warm, draft free location. Signs of bubbling should occur within a few hours. Check and stir occasionally. Note: if you should discover that you aren’t going to be able to enjoy pancakes the next day, simply put the bowl of starter in the fridge. Remove the evening before you plan to cook.

The night before making your pancakes, make the batter:

• ¾ cup unbleached white all-purpose flour
• ¾ cup buckwheat flour
• 1 ½ cups warm water (about 110°F)
• the starter (preferment)

Before going to bed, sieve the flours together in a large mixing bowl. Whisk in the water gradually to make a smooth batter. (Note: You really need to do this. Just stir in the flours tolerably well. It will all absorb water and be easy to thoroughly mix with a spatula in the morning.) Stir in the starter. Cover and place in a warm draft free location overnight to ferment.

In the morning (can't you just taste them already?):

• fermented batter
• 1 ½ Tbsp unsalted molasses
• ½ tsp kosher salt
• ½ tsp baking soda dissolved in a little water

The batter should be bubbling and fragrant. If it’s not, don’t bother. Something went wrong. Try, try again. Stir in the molasses, salt, and baking soda. The first time I did this, at this point I was heartbroken. The batter had been beautiful and fragrant, but, after adding the molasses, it was brown and just smelled like molasses. Fear not! It comes out great. Let the batter sit for a few minutes. I found that leaving it for 10 or 15 minutes produced really beautiful large bubbly holes in the pancakes. If you want fewer, smaller holes, let it sit a shorter time, or not at all. Heat a griddle and grease it well. Use a 1/8 cup measure to scoop out batter for each pancake. Turn each as soon the batter is set.

Beautiful buckwheats on the griddle. For this
batch the batter had only sat a couple minutes

A second batch from batter that sat while waiting for me to eat the first batch.
Check out them bubbles!

Serve with butter and maple syrup. Enjoy!

The Sigal Music Museum

My father had an extraordinary avocation; he collected and restored antique musical instruments. Over roughly 50 years of collecting, he amassed an astonishing number of pieces, a remarkable expertise, and worldwide recognition as an authority on early instruments and music.

His collecting began with keyboards, starting with a broken pedal organ that his father got somewhere and gave to him with the instruction, “if you can fix it, you can have it.” It turns out that he could fix it, and so began this lifelong interest.

Eventually his collection drove us out of my childhood home and into a much larger house with what seemed like plenty of room. But as the space increased, so did his appetite. It took a couple of decades, but he managed to fill the house. There were keyboard instruments in bedrooms, in the dining room, in his study, in the family room, in the “music room”, in the front hall, stacked coffin-like in the basement, and eventually unceremoniously filling the back recesses of the warehouse at his factory.

It was around this time that he began collecting blessedly smaller woodwind instruments. Yet over the ensuing years, it was beginning to become hard to find places to put even one more piccolo, with all manner of antique woodwinds not only in display cabinets and specially made drawers, but also stacked on top of the ubiquitous pianos.

Eventually, at the request of many in the early music world, he produced a beautiful catalog:

One thing he didn’t do was to make any real plan for what he wanted to have happen to the collection after his death. He had left letters, unsigned wills, and varying codicils to his one official will. He also told me at the hospital, a few days before he died, what he would like to have happen to all these instruments. After he passed and I read through his papers, I found none of these documents, formal or informal, agreed with each other, nor did they agree with his verbal instructions to me. But there was one thread that remained constant; if possible, he would like the collection to stay together, and to be made available to the public for education, appreciation, and research.

It turns out that giving away hundreds of antique instruments is not as easy as it sounds. Keyboards in particular take up a lot of space – something of which the family was painfully aware. Moreover, many of the instruments were made of wood, with bits of leather and other temperamental materials thrown in. These ancient ingredients require a lot of care and feeding to make sure they don’t degrade. As if that weren’t enough, many of them contain ivory (for example, the keys of the pianos). Though it was 100% clear that the animals had died hundreds of years in the past, the current regulations from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) make any transportation or sale of ivory of any vintage difficult, if not impossible. If that wasn't enough, some of the instruments contained bone, or other material that looks like ivory, and thus would require DNA testing to prove that it is not ivory before being transported in or out of the country.

I won’t bore you with the details of the search for a home for the collection, except to say that we spent months talking to representatives of various museums and universities, had them come and visit the collection, and listened to their proposals. The family had endless conversations, wrung our hands, and bit our nails. I went so far as to research the elevations and distance inland for the various institutions in consideration of how climate change and rising sea levels might impact the housing of the collection into the unknowable future.

After months of conversations and negotiations, we chose to give the collection as a whole to The Carolina Music Museum, in Greenville, South Carolina, along with a gift to help with the care and maintenance of this trove of material. In recognition of this, and my father’s contributions to the world of musical instrument preservation, the museum changed its name to the Sigal Music Museum.

The name was officially changed in mid-2019. However, due to the installation and removal of existing exhibits, the effort in moving the collection from Boston to Greenville, COVID-19, and other things, the name change wasn’t publicized until now. The new signage is up on the building, labeling is changed, t-shirts are printed, and the new website is ready… and it looks wonderful.

The Sigal Music Museum website is beautiful (and I'm not just sayin' that.) Check it out at https://sigalmusicmuseum.org. Plans for the "Sensational Sigal" exhibit are going full speed ahead. None of us can wait until my father’s collection is unveiled to the world in its new home - which, pandemic willing, will occur later this year.

Please do check out the web site, and if you are in the Greenville area, go to the museum itself. Online you will find a terrific series of videos that have been done by the curators, showing off the several collections that are in the museum’s charge. These can be found on SigalMusicMuseum.org, YouTube, and Instagram.

My whole family is exceedingly proud of the collection and the work done by the Sigal Music Museum to preserve and display it. We are thrilled that our hand wringing and brow furrowing decision making process paid off in the selection of a most excellent new home for my father’s legacy. I'm sure he would be pleased.