One of the food trends that jumped out at me as I tasted my way through nearly six football fields worth of products at the Specialty Food Association’s Summer Fancy Food Show in New York this year was buckwheat. The whole grain is hardly new: It’s been cultivated for thousands of years and is the base of many traditional foods throughout Asia and Europe, such as soba noodles, crepes and kasha. But at the show, I saw it used in new and exciting ways.
Two that stood out were the buckwheat granola from For Good Granola and the snack puffs from Diggables. Thinking about it, I should not have been surprised to see this ancient grain trending. It checks several hot-list boxes: Buckwheat is gluten-free (despite the name it’s not a type of wheat – it’s a seed that is used like a grain); it’s sustainable, used as a cover crop to help prevent soil erosion; and it’s rich in fiber and protein.
Plus, buckwheat’s dark color gives whatever you make with it a distinctively chic flair. In the spirit of innovating with buckwheat, I used it in the crust for this rustic tomato tart. Because buckwheat has no gluten, which normally holds such a crust together, it needs to be combined with regular flour for elasticity.
In testing, I found a 3:1 ratio of wheat flour to buckwheat flour made the dough easy to handle while still yielding the desired nutty-tasting, dark crust. (To keep it gluten-free, a cup-for-cup gluten-free flour blend can be substituted for the wheat flour.) The cru.