Food resilience is at the top of my mind.
To be resilient we need to know how to use different natural foods that are grown locally.
Let me introduce buckwheat and a farm in Canterbury — "Pure New Zealand Buckwheat".
Buckwheat is the seed of a flowering annual plant and is called a pseudocereal. Its hulled seeds are grain-like, each having a three-sided distinctive triangular appearance with pointed corners.
Buckwheat is 72% carbs, 10% dietary fibre, 3% fat and 13% protein. Gluten-free, it is a full protein, containing all nine amino acids.
It is high in fibre, it is very low in fats, as well as having a low GI (glycemic index), which enables it to be used to control blood sugar (making it popular with diabetics). It is especially high in niacin, magnesium, manganese and phosphorus.
In 100g of cooked buckwheat, you get only 92 calories and about 20% of your daily protein. It contains a healthy amount of dietary fibre, vitamin B, minerals and magnesium.
It is ready to eat soaked and raw, or can be cooked in dishes just like rice, or milled into flour.
Buckwheat is often cultivated as a cover crop as it has beneficial properties for the land. It is drought tolerant and grows well in Canterbury. According to Pure New Zealand Buckwheat, when it is planted, phosphorus that is bound in the soil can be released. It also attracts beneficial insects, including bees, aiding pollination.
"Buckwheat can be sown in with or alongside brassica to promote the beneficial insects that feed on undesirable pests — this allows the farmer to control these pests without using chemical sprays," the farm’s website says.
In search of New Zealand-grown grains, I had a chat with Nick Walters, who, with his wife Kath, runs Pure New Zealand Buckwheat farm.
Q: Tell us why you chose to grow buckwheat.
Nick: We started this process of growing buckwheat in 2017 to harvest in 2018 ... it was a four-year process by the time we got an industrial-size operation.
The farm had been in the family for generations, the land had a few different uses over the years, aerobic crops and some sheep and cattle.
When we started farming in our own right I embarked on a new way of thinking and working the land in a more sustainable way, it’s been a long process.
We are not a racehorse with blinkers on, we constantly look to improve, we don’t use organic agriculture methods but we take care of our soil, we take elements from the different methods — we combine regenerative practices and conventional practices to make it work for us financially and environmentally as best we can.
Q: How do you market your product in New Zealand, or do you find it more lucrative to export? And where do you find that you’re selling your product — big supermarkets or the small health food shops?
Nick: We sell in top-end food stores. We used to sell to supermarkets but stopped as the margins offered to us were too low.
We’ve just started exporting through to Japan as well. We started a year ago and had a contract for this season ...
The problem we found with supermarkets is that they want provenance but they don’t want to pay for any provenance, we can get a bigger margin in Japan for our product than here in New Zealand.
So, we see a situation where we export our buckwheat to Japan and supermarkets import buckwheat from China to New Zealand ... that is the experience of New Zealand food production ... there’s a lack of support by big supermarkets for the New Zealand product as a nation’s high-value product, where other countries, like Japan, will buy our made in New Zealand as a "high value food product".
The New Zealand market is pretty small, not just because of our population numbers but also because of awareness. I have seen big changes in the past 15 years, the change in New Zealanders’ diets has been phenomenal — a lot more flexitarian Mediterranean-type ideas starting to come forward, experimentation with other dishes as well, so, yeah, definitely you see that reflected in the New Zealand market.
Q: Do you think the power of the consumer can come in and help growers like you?
Nick: It’s the question of increasing efficiency of scale. With New Zealand growers it is so fickle and they (the distributors) can’t get a consistency of supply. When there’s a shortfall on a product like that it’s very hard to make up.
Q: Do you think the circular economy model would help grow the market for farms like yours, or would you seek to grow bigger as an exporter?
Nick: I would love to support a circular economy model, yes. The biggest thing we need is communication, we start with the area around us — New Zealand South Island. The main thing is that you know the quality of product that you’re producing, so these elements of care are there, that’s very different to the big companies. We have a lot of inquiries from the website and we encourage that. We put the cellphone number there on the website to be available and personal with our customers, it takes a bit of extra care to communicate with every customer.
Q: Do you think, looking ahead into the future — would you grow other grains as well? If so, which grains would you expand into?
Nick: Yes, we want to grow millet, but we really need to rationalise where we are again now, get the efficiencies and staff that we can trust and leave to do the job in these sorts of projects. So, we always have a vision, it’s just when the vision comes ... there’s a lot to do ...
Q: Do you think it’s a movement in this field of agriculture, now that sustainability is more in focus, that farmers are going to grow more of these grains?
Nick: A lot of people that I know don’t have the capacity to do the marketing for specialised grains like we do. It takes a lot of work to break into new markets and manage website sales as well as the growing ... and so they are relying on us to supply them with the contract, and they will just grow for us as we expand perhaps.
Buckwheat pilaf
Make a good vegetable stock for this dish, make it nice and flavourful, or use a cube or powdered stock of good quality.
Ingredients
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup buckwheat groats
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ tsp ground allspice
1¼ cups vegetable stock
10g parsley, finely chopped
10g coriander, finely chopped
10g mint, finely chopped
Salt and black pepper
Method
Place the onions and olive oil in a large pot and saute on medium heat, stirring, for 15-20 minutes until the onions are soft and brown.
Meanwhile, soak the buckwheat in cold water for 5 minutes. Drain in a sieve and rinse and set aside.
Add the buckwheat and spices to the onions, followed by the stock and salt and pepper. Stir well and bring to the boil, then turn the heat down and cook covered on this very low heat for 15 minutes.
Remove from the heat and leave covered for 5 minutes. Then remove the lid and allow to cool, adding the chopped herbs once the pilaf has cooled a little.
Taste and adjust the seasoning.
Buckwheat blini
I took inspiration for this recipe from the cookbook Laurel’s Kitchen — a well known vegetarian cookbook from the ’80s.
These blinis are a russian pancake that traditionally is served with savoury filling, usually alongside steamed cabbage and beetroot, filled with chopped sweet onions and hard boiled egg.
Here I filled them with a fresh summer garden salad and zingy tahini dressing.
Makes about 12
Ingredients
2 tsp active dry yeast
¼ cup warm water
½ cup buckwheat flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 cup milk (I use oat milk), lukewarm
1 tsp honey
2 Tbsp oil
¼ tsp salt
2 egg whites and one yolk, beaten lightly
Method
Dissolve yeast in water.
In a medium-size bowl, mix buckwheat and wholemeal flour, milk, honey, oil, salt, eggs and yeast mixture.
Beat until smooth, cover and let rise in a warm place for an hour.
Stir down. Heat a crepe pan or a griddle and lightly oil. Drop batter by the spoonful and tilt the pan to spread the mixture around. If it seems thick, like a pancake mix, add some milk to thin it down.
Cook blinis until the top is beginning to dry, turn over to brown on the other side.
Keep warm in a damp towel and place in a warm oven until ready to serve.
Fill with a garden salad and roll, serve with tahini dressing.
Ingredients
¼ cup tahini (or 4 Tbsp)
¼ tsp salt
Juice of ½ a lemon
2 Tbsp water
½ tsp harissa (optional)
Method
In a small bowl place all ingredients except water and whisk briskly together, when it thickens add the water — add more water if too thick. Add harissa if you like to create a spicy sauce.
Drizzle on the blini or serve in a bowl separately.
