Pizza Talk, Episode 10: Is Buckwheat the Next New Thing? A Conversation with Karen Getz, of Maine Crisp

Pizza Talk (and our “Mother House,” Pizza Quest), has always been about more than pizza. It’s really a celebration of artisanship and the search for meaningfulness wherever we find it. We’ve all seen how the worlds of bread and pizza, in which I spend a lot of my life, have opened to new depths of discovery as the makers of these products made deeper and deeper dives into their possibilities. In the International Symposium on Bread that I host for Johnson & Wales University, we are always asking our speakers, “What should bread bakers be thinking about five years from now,” or, in other words, what’s going to be the next new thing?

I met Karen Getz about five years ago at the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan, Maine, where she showed me a product she was developing using a specific type of buckwheat grown in Maine. The product was a gluten-free crisp bread, kind of like a sweet and savory melba toast cracker, made exclusively from buckwheat, and it was delicious. A few months ago, Karen and I reconnected and I discovered just how far her company has come, as Maine Crisp is beginning its march across the country. I’ve long suspected that buckwheat was the least appreciated of the ancient grains that folks have been obsessing about (sorry quinoa and amaranth and einkorn), perhaps because it is fairly easy to grow or. maybe, because no one has found a way to evoke its full deliciousness in an everyday product (though “kasha and bowties” has always done the trick for me). Whatever the reason, I think the time has come for buckwheat and I think Maine Crisp is the harbinger of what could (and should) be a very important buckwheat moment.

In this episode you will meet Karen and learn a lot more about buckwheat than you ever knew, and what it takes to launch a visionary product company, and most importantly, how wonderful these crisps are (yes, I’ll be tasting as we talk). Remember, if you never heard about or tasted a Maine Crisp , you heard about it here first!