Spinach Pancakes with Lumpfish Roe

Buckwheat flour is the backbone here — it has a mineral, slightly bitter edge and zero gluten, which is exactly why it's cut with wholemeal and plain flour. All buckwheat would give you blinis that crumble the second a spoon touches them, because there's nothing to hold the crumb together once it's wet. If you've only got buckwheat in the cupboard, you can push the ratio, but you'll need to add more plain flour to compensate, not less. No buckwheat at all and you've made something else — still pleasant, just not this.

The yeast is a slow-rise lager-yeast logic, not a bread-dough logic: you're not building a network of gluten strands, you're giving carbon dioxide somewhere to sit inside a thin, wet batter for half an hour. That's why the batter goes under a towel on the worktop and not in the fridge — cold yeast barely moves, and you'd be waiting hours instead of thirty minutes for the same rise. Any domestic kitchen is warm enough for this; you don't need proving drawers or kazans, just a spot away from a draughty window.

Milk rather than water gives the yeast some sugar and protein to work with and softens the final crumb — water would work, technically, but you'd get a thinner-tasting pancake. Full-fat is worth using here because there's so little fat elsewhere in the batter; skimmed milk leaves the blinis slightly dry against all that cold roe and cream on top.

Spinach: blanched for thirty seconds and squeezed hard, because raw spinach carries far too much water into a batter that's already wet, and unsqueezed spinach will thin your mix and stop it holding shape in the pan. The squeeze isn't fussy kitchen ritual — it's the difference between a blini that sets and one that spreads into a puddle. If you've no fresh spinach, frozen leaf spinach, thawed and squeezed the same way, does the identical job — frozen spinach is already blanched, essentially, so you're just thawing and wringing it out.

Lumpfish roe is doing the job caviar does in the dish it's borrowed its format from, at a fraction of the price — that's the whole economic story of this topping. Lumpfish roe is farmed, dyed, cheap, and salty; it's not trying to be sturgeon caviar, it's trying to be affordable enough to put on thirty pancakes for a party. If you want to spend more, salmon roe (the bigger orange pearls) gives a softer, less salty pop and a completely different mouthfeel — fine, just don't expect the same briny punch.

Crème fraîche at 18% is chosen for a reason: full-fat soured cream or crème fraîche carries enough fat to cut the salt of the roe without curdling or thinning out when it meets something cold and salty, the way lower-fat soured cream sometimes can. Thick Greek yoghurt works in a pinch — it won't have quite the same tang, but the fat content does the same cutting job.

Butter for frying rather than a neutral oil is a flavour choice, not a technical one — it browns the underside with that faint nutty smell as the milk solids catch, and since you're only using a couple of tablespoons for thirty small blinis, you can afford that flavour without drowning the pancake in fat. Keep an eye on it in the pan: butter burns faster than oil, and a burnt fleck under a delicate little pancake is a bigger defect here than it would be on a steak, because there's nowhere for the bitterness to hide.

One more thing worth saying plainly: thirty of these, in batches of a few at a time in a frying pan, takes longer than the "25 min cook" suggests if you're doing it solo in an ordinary flat kitchen with one pan and no one to help you flip. Patience is an ingredient in this dish as much as the yeast is — rushed heat gives you pale, undercooked centres and a scorched edge, not a cooked-through, evenly gold little blini. Better to go a shade slower and get all thirty right than fast and get ten you have to throw back.