Sour cakes are the real buckwheat cakes, Broadwater declared. Last updated on May 7, 2022. He follows his mothers recipe, which includes putting in the starter a small amount of all-purpose flour and adding to the batter some evaporated milk, brown sugar, buttermilk, and baking powder. He suggested I arrive at Masontown between mealtimes, so he would have time to talk. Traditional Family Fun and Entertainment All Week Long! Over the course of the festival, the crocks would be emptied and replenished to serve a total of 4,000 dinners. I was one of the few solitary diners. Copyright 2022 The Art of Eating, LLC | PO Box 333 | St. Johnsbury, Vermont 05819 USA | All rights reserved. The main reason the local mills went belly up was a lack of economy of scale; they couldnt compete with the large industrial milling companies. During hunting season, squirrel gravy is traditional. To turn the starter into batter, its mixed with brown or granulated sugar or both, baking soda, salt, and water. The festival also has a carnival, livestock displays, live music and a variety of exhibits. William, grinning, slipped in a parting comment: his tally for this years festival was nine cakes that day and eleven the day before. The Beckley Honey Festival highlights local beekeepers and shows local honey produce I realized that Prestonians do not suppose anyone from outside the Buckwheat Belt would be interested in eating old-fashioned buckwheat cakes, let alone bothering to make them from scratch. Although the buckwheat cake dinners at the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department, sponsor of the festival, draw the biggest crowds more than 8,000 people in 2013 you can also eat cakes at other fire departments in the area as well as churches and restaurants. Broadwater judges when the starter is ready only partly by appearance. In the kitchen I helped mix up batter alongside Matthew Clark, Wolfes son-in-law and the batter master. Raleigh County. The numbers tell the story. a list of festivals, craft shows, art fairs and events in West Virginia. No GPS was needed. Africa, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Japan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and many others During the festival, I discovered at least 16 different buckwheat cake options, but time and capacity limited me to just ten. Its gotta smell strong or its not ready. some well-known festivals in West Virginia. You should be able to read a newspaper through them, thats what I learned., At the Fellowsville Volunteer Fire Department in southwest Preston County, the cakes are intentionally mild. You dont want them thick, she said. Thats what you want. The differences in taste and texture between the cakes made with commercial-yeast starter and wild-yeast starter were small but detectable. The Gardner Winter Music Festival is a music and dance festival held annually in When it gets warm, most people stop eating them, Alice said. At 11:30 the early lunch crowd began to file in, and Strahin had to give his full attention to the batter. Although later I found a few Preston County recipes that call for a little wheat flour, at that point all the published buckwheat cake recipes from the region Id seen called for 100 percent buckwheat flour. Through the service window, you could hear the din of lively conversation in the dining hall. I asked William whether he preferred the Kingwood cakes to those at the other fundraisers in the area. There a sign placed strategically over the door reads: Buckwheat Pride quality control room No Bad Cakes! Wilson shared the recipe for KVFD buckwheat cakes with me. artists, animators, editors, composers, stunt performers, et al. Normally he makes the batter just at the Reedsville Volunteer Fire Department, but this year Masontown was short of hands, so he was helping out in the batter room there, too. Bill Lindley, vice president and November Committee Chairman, said the committee is waiting to see if the COVID directives given by the governor change in time for next years festival. This website contains Were hopeful and intending to have some kind of festival, but we have to balance it with safety, he said. Other anomalies include Melanies addition of buttermilk to the starter rather than the batter and her use of the back of a spoon to thin the center of the cake immediately upon pouring the batter onto the hot griddle. The first cakes were ready to be flipped even before the last were poured. Strahin showed me the griddle room, where I watched a baker run a piece of pork fat across the surface of the griddle leaving a film of grease. Or visit WikiDo Live to attend one of the coming events from your safe home! And besides, Rene said, the sour smell of the starter will permeate a house. From September until April, his mother made cakes most mornings for breakfast and sometimes again for supper. PO Box 6020 Most years people come to the festival. The hull is the dark brown or black exterior shell that protects the kernel; the bran is the light brown or yellowish hard outer layer of the kernel.
Balloons Over Morgantown is a Fall season hot air balloon event where 12-18 balloons website also lists the different types of vendors present at each event. But only during fall and winter. Ever since, flour sold under the Eglon label has been ground to its specifications at a larger operation. Whatever the details, the result is entirely different in taste, texture, and appearance from modern pancakes made with chemical leaveners. Before the greaser got to the end of the large griddle, a second volunteer had already begun to pour the batter to make roughly eight-inch cakes, six across and three down. The wild-yeast cakes were lighter and their edges were crisper. 297-299 S. Price Street He seemed a little surprised by that, something I encountered again during the next few days when I mentioned making my own. Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina (tel 803.467.4122, ansonmills.com), whose Rustic Aromatic Buckwheat Flour is notable for the large amount of clearly visible hulls that create a clean, bright, classic buckwheat flavor, sells a 12-ounce bag for $6.95 and a 10-pound bag for $60. come to Morgantown for flights over our beautiful hills. Melanies unusual recipe comes from her husbands Amish grandmother, who grew up on a farm in Marylands Garrett County, and kept a batch of starter going all year long at room temperature. People who come here know we make less sour cakes, and they prefer them. He added, Its in Kingwood that you get the classic sour cakes.. provides something to look forward to during the dreary winter days. Driving from there into Kingwood on the first morning of the festival along Route 7, a narrow ridge road, I could see hilltops, outlined by bright sun, rising above the fog-draped Cheat River valley. For Prestonians, only ultralight buckwheat flour will do. The underside is lighter in color than the top and slightly tacky, with numerous small holes. If I eat em with gravy, its just gravy. The use of very light buckwheat flour, traditional in the region, dials back the pronounced bitterness typically associated with the seed, as does the competing sourness of the fermented starter, a sourness that is held in check by the addition of baking soda. The locals were right. The three gave me a good preliminary education, beginning with terminology. This website provides information on and live honey bee demonstrations. The way our citizens and young people have adapted and overcome the challenge that this year has unmercifully given them. He told me that his family had moved to Michigan from Preston County, but when he was growing up they returned to the festival every year. Morgantown, WV 26501. If buckwheat cakes are served with sausage patties and/or sausage gravy, which they almost always are, the meal is called a buckwheat cake dinner regardless of the time of day. producers, screenwriters, actors, costume designers, makeup artists, special effects When rotating the crocks, he makes a new batch completely from scratch, using active dry yeast. It was my last chance to talk with random buckwheat cake eaters before I headed home. These two brands along with Preston County Old-Fashioned Buckwheat Flour from Marrara Brothers are milled in the Preston County style, whose color is exceedingly light, with all or nearly all the bran and hulls sifted out. But if youre not ready to commit to a week of starter feedings, then commercial yeast is an excellent starting point. The festival I was immediately put to work in front of a 450-degree griddle, and I was glad to be in long sleeves. In the interest of keeping the community informed during this rapidly developing situation, all articles regarding cancellations, closures and other coronavirus-related information with significant public impact will be free to read online without a subscription. different festivals in West Virginia, when they were founded, which city they WVU is an EEO/Affirmative Action employer Minority/Female/Disability/Veteran. Often, however, 19th-century cookbook authors recommend it only when needed to solve the problem of batter found to be sour in the morning. Eliza Leslie, in her 1840 Directions for Cookery, in Its Various Branches, also notes that pearl-ash will lighten the cakes a large plus for naturally gluten-free, rising-challenged buckwheat flour. At the Reedsville Volunteer Fire Department, I ran into Raymond Strahin again. Its why the area is called the Buckwheat Belt, Shockey said. The lighter the flour, the more yeast activity I saw, and the more sour, more risen, and lighter the cakes were. We are going to be looking at data as we get closer to the date, and well follow the directions of our health department and state officials, Buddy Turner, Buckwheat Festival chairman said. In 1838, Mary Randolph in The Virginia Housewife advised cooks to use the starter immediately after it has risen well. Once the mills in the area began to close in the sixties and seventies, Shockey said, buckwheat began its steady decline in the field. Beyond was the batter room, where six 10- to 20-gallon crocks of fermenting starter, from two to three days old, were lined up on the floor in chronological order. Everybody will eat them, then the excitement will sort of die off, and then theyll start getting sour because not as many people are eating them. Though Id eaten my last buckwheat dinner only a few hours before, I easily gobbled down the nicely browned, mildly sour cakes with the works: two plump whole-hog breakfast sausage patties, sausage gravy, and homemade pancake syrup. KINGWOOD Plans are being made for the 79th Buckwheat Festival which will be in 2021. During four days, he said, Kingwood makes 200 crocks of batter weighing 80 pounds apiece, which translates to 100,000 cakes. Every fall, WVUs Office of Global Affairs, Multicultural Programs and Graduate Education features food and wines from locally owned restaurants and wineries. She suggests that newcomers start with sweet cakes and work their way up. Instead, she uses one of the locally packaged buckwheat cake mixes. Coopers Rock State Forest The closest room I could find was in the neighboring town of Terra Alta, about ten miles east and 700 feet higher. They were quite thin, very brown on top, with a very light-colored, slightly spongy underside. When most of the hulls and bran are removed, the flour is very mild, with a detectable nutty flavor and very little or no bitterness. 500 East Parkway Dr. Not content with the texture of the cakes made with 100-percent dark whole-grain flour, I later retested the dark cakes and found that using a ratio of two-thirds light buckwheat flour to one-third dark greatly improved the texture while maintaining the classic buckwheat punch. and festival websites. Other popular accompaniments are apple sauce and apple butter. We love hearing from you! They dont bother to make them for themselves at home because they can get them once a month at the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department. Morgantown, WV 26501. The somewhat sharp flavor of the hull is up front and assertive; the more hull there is, the more it dominates the taste, giving the rustic and pleasantly bitter flavor associated with buckwheat. They had a sour twang and, in the center on top, a signature dark brown spot about the size of a quarter. Then I opened a string-stitched paper sack of Preston County-style buckwheat flour and found the opposite: silky, snowy white flour. The flavor might be best described as modified buckwheat. That gives you good flavor, he stressed. Long afterward, when I had returned home and was experimenting with starters, I would learn that the mysterious purplish-pink color is a sign of wild yeast. So then you have to watch how much you make because they can get too sour. Preston County Fairgrounds How we do agriculture today is an even bigger reason. His mother would stock up on the local buckwheat flour, and back in Michigan she would make cakes through the fall and winter until the flour ran out. Some people sit out there and talk for hours, catching up.. Conversely, the darker the flour, the more the cakes had the classic buckwheat flavor beloved of buckwheat fans.
Everyone must be at the festival, the waitress commented. Celebrating and savoring all things buckwheat! He could eat 14 or 15 cakes at one sitting. On my left, Jeff and Rene Stone, a congenial-looking couple in their early sixties, told me they were from the area and grew up eating buckwheat cakes made from starter. County Chamber of Commerce. Not wanting to waste anything, the family used leftover, still-warm coffee to thin the batter instead of the usual water. To this day he prefers sweeter or barely sour cakes, the style that Fellowsville is known for. 2022 West Virginia University. Though neutralizing some of the batters acidity is not the sodas only function it also helps to lighten the cakes and make them more tender, and aids in browning it is its most important. On the other side of the scale, the starter made with dark whole-grain flour created cakes that were flat, crumbly, and difficult to bake: whatever gluten strands that had begun to form were clearly torn to shreds by the large quantity of bran and particularly of sharp hulls, allowing the gas from the yeast to escape. My first stop was the United Methodist Church in Masontown, a village about 11 miles west of Kingwood. My order of buckwheat cakes arrived. For years, I thought that buckwheat flour was dark gray, whole-grain, found in the health food aisle, and never used straight up, not without some loft-inducing wheat flour. Bruceton Mills, WV 26525. Some people were lined up for dinner tickets at the window; others, looking sated, had just come from the Buckwheat Room. different cultures from around the world. Despite buckwheats near-disappearance from our fields and tables, it remains a big deal in Preston County and particularly in Kingwood, where the first buckwheat festival was held in 1938. Before the advent of modern farming, a main source of fertilizer and soil health as well as weed control was cover crops. Our membership couldnt do it (Buckwheat Festival) without our volunteers., What we have makes me proud of the volunteers and the young people of the court. Women's Resource Center In keeping with tradition, guests may enjoy authentic homemade buckwheat pancakes for breakfast. Despite not having a festival, and all of the trials and tribulations that weve had this year, Im struck with pride, Turner said. To confirm or debunk this bit of kitchen folklore, I did two sets of three-way tests. This article provides information on Hazelton Milling Companys flour is sold at stores in Preston County and at fundraisers during the buckwheat festival; prices vary according to the success of the years crop. On either side of the road, rolling pasture descended, marked by occasional cattle, plastic-wrapped bales of hay, and here and there a house. Each year on the last Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of September, from 100,000 to 150,000 festival-goers descend on Kingwood to take in one of three parades, watch the coronation of King Buckwheat and Queen Ceres, and eat buckwheat cakes and whole-hog sausage patties made from pork raised and slaughtered by local high school students. Like most buckwheat cake eaters in the region, they like their cakes with syrup (maple or imitation) or sausage or both, and the sausage may be in patty or gravy form or both. (The white buckwheat flour from Maine, where its used to make ployes, doesnt work in West Virginia-style cakes.). And though cooked on a hot griddle not in an oven buckwheat cakes are always referred to as baked and not cooked. The McKinneys and Strahin, in their fifties and sixties, told me that they grew up eating buckwheat cakes: Strahin and Dwaine McKinney nearly every morning, Alice McKinney weekly. The WV Tourism website lists In the anonymous 1830 cookbook The Cook Not Mad, pearl-ash is used as a matter of course. Today, however, hardly any buckwheat is grown here. as well. The Appalachian Festival of Beckley West Virginia is organized by the Beckley-Raleigh Late in the morning on Sunday, the last day of the festival, I returned to the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department to enjoy a plate of cakes. South Middle School After offering me a piece of the homemade peanut butter fudge sold at the fundraiser, he invited the Reedsville batter master, Dave Broadwater, to join us at one of the cloth-covered tables. This website lists festivals for people who wish to It makes me really proud of our volunteers and our fire department, our citizens and our young people and our court. Lingering in the sunshine were an uncle and nephew who had traveled from Michigan to attend the festival. Its hard to imagine now, but from the time buckwheat arrived in America with the Dutch in 1626 up until about World War II, we were filthy rich with tons of buckwheat (to quote miller, farmer, amateur food historian, and buckwheat evangelist Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills in South Carolina). Because I am one of those fans, I found a plate of tri-color buckwheats to be one of the best things going: each bite revealed the full spectrum of taste and texture, from the slight sourness and lighter texture of the Preston County-style cakes to the full-on rustic buckwheat flavor of the dark buckwheat cakes (with the cakes made of light buckwheat flour in between). All proceeds benefit the Coopers Rock Foundation. When the season starts each September, high demand makes it difficult for Melanie Fisher, the owner of the restaurant, to serve truly sour cakes, even though some customers ask for them. When I arrived at the off hour of 10:30 a.m., the brightly lit dining hall was nearly half full. They are very loyal and we appreciate every one, Brown said. Mineral County At buckwheats height in the late 1880s, over a million acres were planted in it; today, according to the 2012 Census of Agriculture, a meager 40,000 acres are left. He was the only customer. Please confirm details with the organizers. As expected, they had a decided twang, easily offset with a liberal drizzling of syrup.
A third volunteer was poised, spatula in hand. Light to medium-light buckwheat flour is sold by New Hope Mills in Auburn, New York (tel 315.252.2676, newhopemills.com); two 5-pound bags cost $23.80 and six bags cost $68.25.