Kasha is toasted buckwheat: the hulled, three-cornered groats of the buckwheat plant, dry-roasted before cooking so that Maillard browning deepens their colour to a warm reddish-brown and layers a robust, roasted-nut, popcorn-warm flavour over the grain's earthy base. A cornerstone of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Ashkenazi Jewish kitchens, it cooks into fluffy, separate, savoury grains — most famously kasha varnishkes, the Jewish comfort dish of kasha tossed with bowtie pasta and browned onions — and is entirely gluten-free, being a pseudocereal unrelated to wheat.