- Elimination
- Reintroduction
- Maintenance
- Breakfast
Blueberry Buckwheat Pancakes
A weekend breakfast that does not feel like a compromise. Buckwheat carries real flavour, and the batter rests while the pan heats.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Total
- 25 min
- Serves
- 4
Published
Ingredients
Makes 4 servings. Each ingredient is labelled with its FODMAP status at this quantity.
- Low FODMAP
150 g buckwheat flour
Low FODMAP at 100 g per serve, far above what one portion here contains.
- Low FODMAP
50 g white rice flour
Lightens the crumb. Buckwheat alone bakes dense.
- Low FODMAP
2 tsp baking powder
- Low FODMAP
1 tbsp caster sugar
Sucrose is FODMAP-free. Honey and agave are not.
- Low FODMAP
1/4 tsp salt
- Low FODMAP
2 eggs
- Low FODMAP
300 ml lactose-free milk
Or almond milk. Both are fine; oat milk is only low FODMAP at 125 ml and would be tight here.
- Low FODMAP
40 g butter, melted, plus more for the pan
Butter is almost pure fat and effectively lactose-free.
- Portion-dependent
160 g blueberries
Low FODMAP at 40 g — about 20 berries — per serve. This is the limiting ingredient.
- Low FODMAP
to serve maple syrup
Low FODMAP at 2 tbsp per serve.
What the labels mean
- Low FODMAPSafe at the serving size listed.
- Portion-dependentLow FODMAP only up to the serving size listed — larger servings stack.
Method
Step 1: Whisk the buckwheat flour, rice flour, baking powder, sugar and salt together in a large bowl until evenly combined and no lumps of baking powder remain.
Step 2: In a second bowl, beat the eggs into the lactose-free milk, then whisk in the melted butter.
Step 3: Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and whisk just until combined. A few small lumps are fine and preferable — over-mixing develops the batter and gives you flat, rubbery pancakes.
Step 4: Rest the batter for 10 minutes. Buckwheat is thirstier than wheat flour and needs the time to hydrate, and the baking powder gets a head start.
Step 5: Heat a little butter in a non-stick pan over medium-low. Ladle in about 60 ml of batter per pancake and press 6 or 7 blueberries into each while the top is still wet.
Step 6: Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until bubbles break the surface and the edges look dry, then flip and give it another 1 to 2 minutes. Serve with maple syrup.
Notes and swaps
- Medium-low, not medium-high. Buckwheat browns faster than wheat and will look done while the centre is still batter.
- Press the berries in after the batter hits the pan rather than stirring them through. Folded into the bowl they bleed and the whole stack turns grey-purple.
- The batter keeps overnight in the fridge. It thickens, so loosen it with a splash of lactose-free milk before cooking.
Pancakes look like an obvious casualty of elimination. Wheat flour is out, honey is out, ordinary milk is out at anything above a splash, and most gluten-free flour blends lean on ingredients that are worse than what they replaced.
Buckwheat solves it more elegantly than a blend does, because it is not a substitution at all. It is simply a different, better-tasting ingredient that happens to be safe.
Buckwheat is not wheat
The name is one of the more unhelpful accidents in food. Buckwheat is not a grass, not a cereal and not related to wheat. It is the seed of a plant closer to rhubarb, it contains no gluten, and it is low FODMAP at 100 g of flour — a threshold you would struggle to reach in a single sitting.
What it gives you is flavour. Wheat flour is close to neutral; buckwheat is nutty, faintly earthy and slightly bitter in the way good rye is. If you have been eating fairly bland food for a month, that is the point.
The trade-off is texture. Buckwheat has no gluten to build structure with, so used alone it bakes dense and a little crumbly. The 3:1 ratio with white rice flour here is what keeps the crumb light without diluting the flavour.
Twenty berries
Blueberries are the ceiling in this recipe, and the number is lower than most people expect: 40 g per serving, roughly 20 berries. Beyond that the excess fructose adds up.
That is why the ingredient list specifies 160 g across four servings and why the method has you pressing six or seven berries into each pancake rather than folding a punnet through the bowl. Counting them into the pan is not fussiness — it is the only way to know what you actually ate.
The rest
Two smaller things are worth knowing.
Sugar is fine. Ordinary sucrose contains glucose and fructose in equal measure, and the glucose carries the fructose across the gut wall, so it causes no problem at normal amounts. Honey does not work this way — it has substantially more fructose than glucose, which is exactly the imbalance that triggers symptoms. Maple syrup is safe at 2 tablespoons.
Milk choice matters more than it looks. Lactose-free dairy and almond milk are both comfortable here. Oat milk is only low FODMAP at 125 ml, and this batter uses 300 ml, so it would put you over before you had eaten anything.
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