Smoked Salmon and Dill Blinis

A blini under a curl of smoked salmon is the sort of thing that looks like it belongs on a silver tray at a party, but the truth is they make one of the most luxurious-feeling weekend breakfasts you can put together at home. The little buckwheat pancakes are warm, nutty and faintly sour from the yeast; the crème fraîche is cool and sharp; the salmon is silky and the dill is bright and grassy. My twist is to use proper buckwheat flour rather than the all-white shortcuts you often see, because that earthy, almost smoky note is the whole reason a real blini tastes the way it does. Make a batch on a slow Sunday morning, set everyone up to top their own, and breakfast becomes something to linger over.

3 The Story

Blinis come to us from Russia and Ukraine, where they are far more than a canapé base. Traditionally they are leavened pancakes made with buckwheat, eaten in great quantities during Maslenitsa, the butter-rich week of feasting before the start of Lent. In that context they are eaten warm and folded around all manner of fillings, from soured cream and butter to jam, mushrooms, and of course caviar and smoked fish. The dainty bite-sized versions sold in supermarket packs are a Western party adaptation; the originals are often the size of a saucer.

The defining ingredient is buckwheat, and despite the name it is not a wheat or even a grass but the seed of a plant related to rhubarb and sorrel. Milled into flour it is gluten-free, greyish and full of a distinctive earthy, mineral flavour that some describe as nutty and others as faintly smoky. It is what gives a true blini its character. Because buckwheat has no gluten to build structure, it is usually cut with a little plain flour, as here, which keeps the batter cohesive while letting the buckwheat flavour shine. If you only ever make blinis with white flour you end up with a perfectly nice drop scone, but you miss the point entirely.

Two techniques lift these from good to genuinely light. The first is the yeast. A short prove is not just about rise; it develops a gentle, almost beery tang that plays beautifully against the richness of the salmon and the sourness of the crème fraîche. The second is folding in a whisked egg white at the end, an old trick that aerates the batter and gives the cooked blinis a tender, almost soufflé-like interior rather than a dense, chewy one. Do not be tempted to skip either; together they take a couple of minutes and make all the difference.

When it comes to cooking, keep the blinis small and the heat moderate. Too high and the outside scorches before the inside sets; too low and they turn pale and tough. A teaspoon of batter spreads to roughly a fifty-pence-piece round, which is the ideal size for a one-bite topping. Wait for bubbles to rise and pop across the surface before you flip, just as you would for a pancake, and resist crowding the pan. They are best eaten warm, but you can make the batch ahead and reheat them briefly in a low oven or a dry pan.

The crème fraîche deserves a mention too, because it is doing more work than it looks. Its job is to be the cool, sharp hinge between the warm, yeasty blini and the rich, oily fish, and a thinner soured cream simply will not hold its shape on top of a small pancake the way a good thick crème fraîche does. Spoon it on rather than spread it, so each blini gets a generous little dollop that the salmon can drape over. If you want to gild things, a knob of softened butter melting into the warm blini under the crème fraîche is the traditional and frankly unbeatable touch, the way it is eaten across Russia and Ukraine during Maslenitsa, when butter is the whole point.

The toppings are where you can have fun. The classic combination of crème fraîche, smoked salmon and dill is hard to beat, and a squeeze of lemon and a good grind of pepper are all the seasoning it needs. But you might fold a little grated horseradish or some snipped chives into the crème fraîche, or swap the salmon for cured trout, or even a spoonful of cod’s roe. For something celebratory, a little caviar or trout roe takes them somewhere special. And if you have batter left over, the blinis freeze well between sheets of greaseproof paper, ready to be revived for the next slow morning when only something a little bit luxurious will do.