If you haven't heard of it before, you might have known it as hulled and roasted buckwheat. It's wrongly called kasha to designate this grain, slightly reminiscent of steel-cut oats. Buckwheat grains, once roasted, release a pleasant smoky flavor. In Russia, it's cooked with milk to look a bit like porridge. In this case, this traditional porridge is called kacha (written with a "c" and not an "s"). Kasha is one of the pseudo-cereals, highly prized for their lack of gluten, such as quinoa, amaranth, millet, and so on. Wrongly called "buckwheat," kasha does not belong to the grass family like quinoa. In this case, it is not a cereal. It's part of the same family as rhubarb and sorrel: the Polygonaceae. Thus, since it is gluten-free, it becomes particularly digestible. It's chewy and slightly sweet and has a nutty flavor. It can be used in both sweet and savory recipes. For example, it can be used as a base for rice or hot cereal; it can be incorporated into salads, soups, risotto imitations, and about a million other things.