Buckwheat bliny (also called blintz and blini) are thin, spongy pancakes that are savory and slightly sour. Bliny are a traditional food in Russia and Eastern Europe. It's common to serve them with butter or sour cream, and they can be dressed up with a smidgen of caviar if you want to be fancy. Smoked salmon, trout, or whitefish also make great accompaniments to bliny.
The wonderful thing about bliny is they are so versatile. You can make the size of your bliny more pancake-like and serve them as a side dish alongside your favorite Russian main dish or as a full meal on their own. You can also make the bliny small and serve them as a hors d'oeuvre at an elegant cocktail party with some crème fraîche, caviar, and champagne.
Other accompaniments are: chopped hard-boiled eggs, shot glasses of ice-cold vodka, smoked sturgeon, minced onion, and fresh dill.
Buckwheat Bliny
Ingredients:
2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon instant yeast
1 cup warm milk
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg, separated
A little bit of oil or cooking spray
Your choice of accompaniments:
• butter
• sour cream
• crème fraîche
• caviar
• smoked fish (salmon, sturgeon, trout, whitefish)
• chopped onions
• chopped hard-boiled eggs
• fresh chopped dill
• beet salad
Preparation:
In a bowl, mix the first four dry ingredients together and then make a well in the center. Add the milk and blend well with a wooden spoon. Cover with a dish towel and place in a warm, draft-free area and let the sponge rise until it doubles in size, about a hour.
Melt the two tablespoons of butter and let it cool. Break up and beat the egg yolk in a small bowl and add the cooled melted butter a teaspoon at a time to temper it and beat well. Add this egg yolk/butter mixture to the sponge and mix well.
In a separate bowl, whisk the egg white until stiff and fold into the sponge/batter. Cover again and let stand for twenty minutes.
Heat a skillet or griddle to medium heat and coat lightly with vegetable oil or cooking spray. Spoon about 2 tablespoons to a quarter cup of batter on the skillet, depending on how large you want your bliny to be. When the bubbles on the surface of the batter pop (after about a minute or two) turn the bliny over with a spatula and cook for another 45 seconds to a minute. Transfer to a plate and keep warm. Serve with your preferred accompaniments.
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Mmm, looks good. I think the plural of bliny is blini though. Not blinys.
But I could be wrong.
@Slow Lorus I checked Wikipedia and it's "bliny." Corrected.
Are Blini not tiny pancakes though? Those look quite big. All the ones I've seen are about 2inches across and canape sized.
The spelling varies - it's a transliteration, after all. But blini is the most commonly used/accepted spelling, perhaps because ending with a y suggests that the would would be pronounced bligh-nee, rather than the correct blee-nee.
In Russia the blinys I had were normally about 10" in diameter and were made either sweet or savory. For a cheap meal I would have just a cheese filling (sort of like a quesadilla), but meat and vegetables were also common fillings. For sweet one of my favorites had honey drizzled on top. I remember thinking that the filings were very much like anything that you would put in a crepe.
A friend just came back from Ethiopia raving about injera...a blini like bread made with teff flour rather than buckwheat. If you look at most regional cooking, a version of blini/crepe/flat breads show up depending on the local grain.
@gardenali, i can find blinis here in France in the smoked fish/caviar section of the grocery in two sizes: a 4-5 inch biggie or a lil canapé sized two incher.
Excited to have a recipe to make them at home though. Smoked salmon, crème fraîche, lemon, and capres are my favorite combo.
I for one like pancakes with rather sour jam like fresh (not boiled) strawberry, whortleberry/foxberry, or cranberry jam. And I don't make the pancake dough sweet so this could be used with bliny (blee-noeh) too.
I like a lot the buttermilk pancakes too:
2 eggs
salt, sugar
0,5 litre sour milk/buttermilk/kefir
5 g soda
200 g wheat flour
oil for frying
Whip the eggs, add a bit of salt & sugar, buttermilk and wheat flour that has been mixed with soda before. The taste should stay rather neutral or the buttermilk should be the dominating taste. Fry small tablespoon pancakes. You can serve with jam, honey and milk. You can add rhabarber or apple pieces into the dough, but then you should add some sugar or serve the pancakes with sugar, syrup, chocolate or honey drizzled onto it.
In West Virginia, we'd just call those Buckwheat cakes. There's a whole festival, The Buckwheat Festival, in Kingwood, WV, every August. The VFW serves up some delicious cakes and sausage.
This recipe is very similar to what I have in my Russian cookbooks and what I myself tried. I'm a huge fan.
And as far as the spelling is concerned, the singular form in Russian is блин [transliterated as "blin"] and the plural is блины (blini or bliny -- doesn't really matter).
и and ы vowels sound very similar to a non-Russian ear. "ы" is commonly transliterated as "y" to differentiate it from "и" -- but it can be a little confusing. Since there's no direct equivalent of the ы sound in English, both "blini" and "bliny" are acceptable spellings. But definitely not blinis or blinys -- that would be like saying spaghettis.
Another peculiarity: in Russian, the second syllable in blee-NEE is stressed.