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2025 Author: Bailey Albertson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2025-01-13 07:40
Mysterious buckwheat: how it grows and turns into cereal
Many people love buckwheat. It is useful in traditional dishes. I wonder what plant and how buckwheat is obtained?
How buckwheat grows
Sowing buckwheat (edible, ordinary) is a plant colloquially referred to as buckwheat. Buckwheat is made from it. Sometimes the culture is mistakenly referred to as cereals (cereals). In fact, buckwheat is a cereal grain crop, since its seeds are used as food for people, but it is not a cereal.
Buckwheat is a pseudo-cereal plant
The ancestral home of the plant is India and Nepal. There buckwheat is called "black rice". Even before our era, the culture spread throughout the eastern countries, and came to the Slavic peoples only in the 7th century.
In Russia, buckwheat grows mainly in temperate climates. The plant is quite tall (up to 1 meter), with a reddish stem. It blooms with white or pink flowers, collected in inflorescences, with a pleasant aroma. After flowering, small seeds are tied, which ripen in autumn. Harvesting usually begins in early September. Buckwheat fruits - ripe seeds - have a triangular shape. Buckwheat is made from them.
Unpeeled buckwheat seeds are brown, triangular in shape
Buckwheat benefits not only humans, songbirds also willingly eat its seeds. In addition, buckwheat is an excellent honey plant. Bees are attracted by its aroma, and dark brown honey obtained from the nectar of the plant is healthy and fragrant. Buckwheat can also be used as green manure, because it displaces weeds.
Buckwheat can bloom with white or pink flowers, both of which are great at attracting bees.
Video: blooming buckwheat
How buckwheat groats are made
Peeled buckwheat seeds are light green in color. They turn brown after heat treatment - frying, steaming. There are several varieties of cereals, depending on the manufacturing method:
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green, not subjected to any processing;
green buckwheat Green buckwheat groats - ripe buckwheat seeds that have not undergone heat treatment
- fried brown unground;
- steamed kernel
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peeled, or rolled, unground (without shell)
buckwheat unground The shade of the fried kernel depends on the processing - the more the groats are rolled, the lighter they are
- milled and sifted (Smolensk groats)
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crushed grains (buckwheat done).
buckwheat Buckwheat prodel can be made from both green and fried buckwheat
In terms of the content of vitamins and microelements, green buckwheat, which belongs to dietary products, is in the lead. The fewer processing steps, the more nutrients are retained in the product. And from the rare Smolensk groats in Russia they prepared the traditional "downy" porridge.
Video: buckwheat - the way to our table
Buckwheat is grown not only for eating seeds, but also as a honey plant or green manure. Buckwheat fruits are useful in any form, but green cereals have the highest nutritional value.