Buckwheat: Everything You Need to Know

Anyone who's never seen a buckwheat plant is usually amazed. It looks nothing like wheat; it has no ears, but small white flowers, and it's a herbaceous plant. It belongs to the Polygonaceae family, which also includes rhubarb and sorrel, better known as wild sorrel. However, buckwheat has a characteristic no other species in its family possesses: its achenes (small, single-seeded, triangular fruits, brown in the photo below, taken in the Modena Apennines in the Filiera AmoreTerra fields) can be ground to produce a flour with nutritional characteristics similar to those of wheat.

What is buckwheat?

As for its classification, Fagopyrum esculentum (this is its scientific name) can easily be defined as a cereal. This term, in fact, identifies any species whose seeds or fruits can be ground. Compared to wheat, the most important difference is that buckwheat is gluten-free , which puts it similar in its uses to grains such as millet and sorghum, which are also gluten-free.

The story

Because of its nutritional properties, it has been called "wheat" since its first appearance in Europe in the 15th century. This plant, originally from Asia, arrived in Europe via the Black Sea coast, spreading especially in some regions of Germany. Unsure what to call this new species, which resembled wheat in its uses, the term "grain of the pagans " (today's heidenkorn, formerly heenisch) was chosen because it was imported from the East. The following century, it also reached Italy, primarily in Valtellina, where it took the name frumentun (an augmentation of frument , wheat, probably due to its higher yields), but the equivalent of the name chosen by the Germans, which is still used today, soon gained popularity: buckwheat.

The origin

Buckwheat's origins are actually more distant, spanning Siberia, the Himalayas, and Manchuria (it's still unclear). It has spread successfully throughout Russia and Europe, where it's grown primarily in parts of Germany and France. In Italy, it's deeply rooted in northern culinary tradition and is grown in the provinces of Sondrio and Bolzano, but not only there.