Old-fashioned buckwheat blinis (Blinis Gretschnvoi)
Servings: 60
An old-fashioned recipe, with measurements that are not always precise, ... and very generous, because it is given by a cook from a great house. It is above all a traditional recipe
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Ingredients
- 1 kilo Buckwheat flour
- 30 gr Yeast
- 1 litre Water
- 500 gr Wheat flour
- 0,5 litre Full cream
- Salt
- 6 Egg
- 250 gr Cream Estimated quantity for whipped cream
- Butter Melted, for cooking
Instructions
Preparing the blinis
- Put two pounds of buckwheat flour in a saucepan, from which you form a leaven in warm water with three ounces [85 g] of yeast. Cover the pan and place in a moderately warm place.
- Leave to rest for four hours.
- Add one pound of wheat flour, six egg yolks, half a bottle (1/2 litre?) of lukewarm cream and a little salt; mix everything together well, beating lightly to obtain a smooth and light paste.
- Fold in the six stiffly whipped egg whites and half the volume of the whipped cream whites; mix in by removing the dough very slightly like biscuit.
- Leave for another 20 minutes before cooking.
Cooking the blinis
- After greasing your blini pans with melted butter, put a steaming spoonful of the mixture into each one, taking care to keep it underneath so as not to stir the mass.
- You push your little pans onto the stove and then, once they have been turned over, you put them in the oven after having previously buttered them with the brush; when the other side has taken on colour, you take them out.
Service
- The blinis are served on a hot napkin, with a sauce boat of melted butter [it's 1884...] and a sauce boat of sour cream (Smitane) as well as a small plate of caviar.
Notes
The recipe gives us a valuable clue to the "right size" of the blini: the chef mentions "scawordes", small round tailless pans seven centimetres wide. This is simply the folkloric transcription of сковорода, skovoroda, the Russian word for pan. (And Gretschnvoi is also the Russian word for buckwheat, гречневая крупа).
For the oven temperature, not mentioned, I preheated in revolving heat to 180°. Instead of putting my pans in the oven (because I don't have a real blini pan, or a small pan with an oven-safe handle), I put the blini on a baking sheet that has been heated in the oven.