Cloud Bread Blinis

According to my Number One Fan, cloud bread is all the rage among the Keto recipe bloggers these days.  In preparation for a Wedding Anniversary Dinner with caviar we had flown in from an importer in New Jersey, I found this recipe for making low carb blinis. Blinis are the traditional Russian accoutrements for transporting a dollop of caviar from tin to mouth, along with garnishes of finely chopped boiled egg yolks and boiled egg whites, minced capers and crème fraîche, which is like sour cream without the sour part.  Traditional blinis are made with buckwheat and have sugar in them, which definitely are off limits to low carb diets.

The recipe comes from a site, irenamacri.com.  Apparently, Irena is big into the Paleo diet scene, including authoring two Paleo cookbooks. I don't know if she is the creator of this recipe or if she adopted it from someone else, but whoever came up with this idea, my hat's off.  This is more about food chemistry than about culinary art because at the end of the day, minus the seasonings, a cloud bread blini is made with just eggs and cream cheese.  But it's in the preparation technique that the magic happens.

A lot of cloud bread recipes I've seen on the Internet call for cream of tartar.  This recipe does not.  It uses instead white vinegar to perform the task of stabilizing the proteins in egg whites so they won't collapse after they've been beaten to stiff peaks.  Actually, any acid will perform this chemical process, including lemon juice and cream of tartar.  White vinegar seemed to be the easiest to use for me, and who doesn't have a bottle of plain ol' distilled white vinegar in their pantry?

Perform the technique to create the blinis as written, but your oven characteristics may have you adjusting the temperature and time for baking them.  The original recipe called for 20 minutes at 300 degrees.  Knowing my oven tends to run cooler, I tried 22 minutes at 310 degrees when I made my first batch.  There were a couple of blinis in that batch where the very center was just a tad moist.  It wasn't objectionable, but I would postulate that any moisture left in the blini will be an aid to bacterial growth if the blini is left un-refrigerated.  But, as I learned, refrigeration makes the blinis limp and tacky. So, you want the blini fully cooked without any residual moisture, and they should keep fine for a couple of days at room temperature.

All of that may be entirely academic.  These little gems are so light and delectable that they're bound to be eaten at one sitting.

My second batch was baked at 325 degrees for 22 minutes and they came out near perfect. I might have been able to go a minute longer.

This recipe will make between 18 and 20 blinis that are a little larger than a silver dollar, but a little smaller than the diameter of a hockey puck.  Results are going to vary slightly depending on the size of your eggs and the amount of batter you put down for each blini.

The original recipe called for cream cheese, and you can certainly use that - about two tablespoons.  But I used whipped cream cheese.  It's easier to manage than regular cream cheese and besides, the whole structure of cloud bread is based on the air bubbles created by the beaten egg whites.  I figured whipped cream cheese just gives you a bit of an edge.

Caviar isn't required for this recipe.  In fact, Irena's original recipe was really meant as a transport for a smoked salmon canape. You can let your imagination go from there.

Ingredients
2 extra large eggs
1 tsp white vinegar
2 heaping dollops - about 4 tbsp - whipped cream cheese (like, Philadelphia Whipped)
1/4 tsp of salt, plus a pinch
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
pinch of ground white pepper

The Recipe
Preheat the oven to 325°F.

Line a sheet pan or cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Cleanly separate the egg yolks from the whites, or albumen, into two different mixing bowls.  The Internet will give you lots of advice about how to separate egg yolks from whites, but the easiest way is to crack the egg open in the palm of your hand and allow the albumen to simply slip through your fingers to the bowl below. You're left with holding the yolk.

Add the vinegar and a pinch of salt to the egg whites.  Using an electric mixer, start by beating on low until the whites start to froth.  Kick the mixer to medium high, and continue beating the egg whites until they form stiff peaks.  This will take 3-4 minutes.

In the bowl with the egg yolks, add the dollops of whipped cream cheese, the 1/4 teaspoons of salt, garlic powder, onion powder and the pinch of white pepper.  Using a wire whisk, vigorously whip the yolks until they are very smooth and creamy, maybe two minutes.

To the egg yolks, take 1/3 of the beaten albumen and using a rubber spatula or rubber scraper, carefully fold them into the yolks.  And by folding, I mean folding, not stirring.  This takes a little patience, but the idea here is to be gentle with the batter, to slowly incorporate the egg whites so as to not break down all of the air bubbles in them.  Follow suit with the second and final third of the albumen.

Using a soup spoon, carefully place a large dollop of batter onto the parchment-lined sheet pan or cookie sheet.  You'll quickly see that the batter won't run and stays put.  Do this until you've put down all the batter.  I went with four lines of five dollops, more or less.  Be sure to leave a little room in-between each dollop because they will flatten out and spread a little as they cook.

Put your oven rack on the uppermost level, and bake your blinis for 22-23 minutes.  Some or all of the blinis will be just starting to brown on top.

Remove from the oven and note that the blinis will cool rapidly.  You can handle them almost immediately out of the oven.  They tend to stick a bit to the parchment paper, so use a thin spatula to carefully dislodge them once they have completely cooked.