Buckwheat Flour Pizza Dough
Speed - 95%
Simplicity - 95%
Tastiness - 95%
95%
Crisp!
The buckwheat flour added a deep earthy flavor to this pizza crust. Rolling it out thin made it crisp as a cracker yet dense enough to hold up heavy toppings.
Ingredients
For the Buckwheat Flour Pizza Dough
- 1.5 Cups Buckwheat Flour
- 1 Tablespoon Active Dry Yeast
- 1 Tablespoons olive oil
- 1/2 Cup Water
- 1 Piece Egg
- 1/2 Teaspoon Sugar
- 1/2 Teaspoon Pinch salt
For the Toppings
- 200 Grams Salmon Fillets thinly sliced
- 1 Cup Brie thinly sliced
- 1 Cup Wilted Spinach
- 2 Tablespoons olive oil
- a pinch Chili Flakes
Instructions
- Combine yeast, salt, sugar, and warm water in a bowl. Leave for 5-10 minutes.
- Stir in the yeast mixture to the buckwheat flour in a bowl.
- Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface.
- Leave the dough to rise for an hour in a lightly oiled bowl.
- Press the dough onto a pizza pan.
- Bake the crust for 10-12 minutes at 425F.
- Top your pizza.
- Bake the pizza for 8 minutes at 425F.
These specialty flours are heaven-sent, with more and more types making their way into health shops recently, making the decision to go gluten-free a whole lot easier.
I got a bag of buckwheat flour the other day, mostly out of intrigue over its unique dark color rather than anything else. I knew immediately that it would bake into a dark crust and was excited to shop for toppings based on colors that would go well with it.
Buckwheat flour has a loose mealy texture, a lot like raw almond flour. I was initially guessing that it won't rise up very much even with yeast added. Worth trying anyway even for the mere purpose of adding that freshly-baked flavor.
Here, I started by blooming my yeast with some sugar and tepid water.
This bubbly yeast mixture goes into a bowl of buckwheat flour. The dough should hold together into a ball easily but there is a very fine line between getting it too sticky and too dry. I suggest that you work your liquid into the dough in small increments to get the texture just right for handling.
Tip the ball of dough onto a work surface dusted with a little more buckwheat flour. Knead on it until just smooth, which should not take too long.
Leave the dough in a lightly oiled bowl to rise a bit. It will rise noticeably but not as much as you'd expect from your typical pizza dough which typically doubles in volume.
As I tried to flatten the dough into my pizza pan, I felt how dense it was. I knew instantly that it wouldn't be wise to work it into a thick crust. Rolling it out thin and allowing it to crisp up would be perfect.
I par-baked the crust for about 10 minutes at 425F, accounting for the very little time my chosen toppings would need to bake.
Aside from the colors of salmon, spinach, and brie, which would do well to liven up that dark brown crust, I was also thinking of a blini, a Russian pancake made from the same flour, and typically topped with some salmon or caviar as an appetizer.
I returned the topped pizza to the oven for another 8 minutes – just enough to get the brie a bit gooey, without overcooking my salmon and wilting those spinach leaves too much.
The crust ended up like a light cracker – crisp and light. Perfect for the light toppings I've chosen.
The Bakerstone pizza oven box works great for making gluten free pizza outdoors on your gas grill. It's a perfect enclosure to fit your pan, square or round, and heats up nicely so you can enjoy the great summer weather with your gluten free pizza dough and perhaps an apple cider!
Buckwheat Flour
Visually, buckwheat flour is a little unusual, which makes it great for making food that stands out on the plate. Combined with bright toppings, the flour works extremely well.
Buckwheat itself isn’t actually wheat or even a grain. Instead, it is a seed that comes from a plant related to sorrel and rhubarb. As a result, buckwheat is gluten-free, as is buckwheat flour.
Get Buckwheat Flour from Amazon!
One important thing to mention about buckwheat flour is how it tastes. In particular, buckwheat has a fairly strong flavor that is almost bitter. The taste isn’t unappealing but some people like it better than others. Additionally, the flavor won’t work well with some dishes, meaning you have to choose the recipe carefully.
Still, there is no shortage of great recipes that use buckwheat flour and the flour does have advantages as well. For one thing, it offers a range of nutritional advantages, which includes being high in protein, fiber and many nutrients. These components make buckwheat flour a better choice nutritionally than many other options.
For that matter, the ‘grain’ comes from a fruit seed, so it has a different nutritional profile than any true grain would offer.
Using Buckwheat Flour
As with other gluten-free options, buckwheat flour is commonly used in baking to create gluten-free alternatives to regular recipes. In some cases, you may be using buckwheat flour on its own. But, you could also be combining it with other options, like brown rice flour. For example, these Apple Ginger Bread Muffins use three different types of flour, one of which is buckwheat.
Using multiple types of flour like this also helps to balance out the flavor of buckwheat and can reduce how strong the flour seems.
Buckwheat flour also has some more unusual uses as well. For example, soba noodles are a common component of the Japanese diet and these are made from buckwheat flour. In most cases, you would choose to buy soba but it is also possible to make your own gluten-free soba if you want to.
Making Buckwheat Flour
Another cool aspect is that buckwheat flour is easy to make. As with many other gluten-free flours, the basic idea is simply that you’re grinding up the grain (or seeds, in this case). I actually use a coffee grinder to do so, although some people simply rely on a blender.
The end result is a fine powder that you can then use as a flour. In some cases, you may need to sieve the powder first but that shouldn’t be necessary with buckwheat.
It is possible to take the process a step further and sprout your buckwheat before you grind it. There are some useful instructions for doing so here. Sprouted buckwheat is supposed to offer more health benefits and tends to have a less intense flavor as well.
But, that aspect is optional. Sprouted or not, buckwheat flour is a great gluten-free alternative, even though it is typically excluded from keto diets and from paleo (depending on your interpretation of paleo).
Ingredients
For the Buckwheat Flour Pizza Dough
- 1.5 Cups Buckwheat Flour
- 1 Tablespoon Active Dry Yeast
- 1 Tablespoons olive oil
- 1/2 Cup Water
- 1 Piece Egg
- 1/2 Teaspoon Sugar
- 1/2 Teaspoon Pinch salt
For the Toppings
- 200 Grams Salmon Fillets thinly sliced
- 1 Cup Brie thinly sliced
- 1 Cup Wilted Spinach
- 2 Tablespoons olive oil
- a pinch Chili Flakes
Instructions
- Combine yeast, salt, sugar, and warm water in a bowl. Leave for 5-10 minutes.
- Stir in the yeast mixture to the buckwheat flour in a bowl.
- Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface.
- Leave the dough to rise for an hour in a lightly oiled bowl.
- Press the dough onto a pizza pan.
- Bake the crust for 10-12 minutes at 425F.
- Top your pizza.
- Bake the pizza for 8 minutes at 425F.
This is a great recipe. I subbed honey for the sugar and used a whole sachet of yeast which I believe is 2T. My flour is also lighter in colour than yours. I made a classic pizza with my 7yo and he LOVED it. Will make this again.
Thanks Linda!
Just curious about the egg listed in the ingredients yet doesn’t seem to be in the instructions.
Please advise!
It looks like I overlooked that part of the instructions, but it should just be combined with other ingredients to help the dough stick together.