Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Pierogi: your results may vary . . .
Sometimes a guy has to get ethnic.
Polish pot stickers, Russian raviolis, Slavic won tons . . . call ’em what you will, pierogis are yummy. Yum. Me. So on Sunday, I got busy and spent all afternoon futzing around with filling and dough, folding my little semicircles, browning onions in butter for the sauce, serving them up, and for what?
Karen: Interesting.
Jake: I don’t hate them. (Or the equivalent.)
But I got back at them today. I made a Shepherd’s Pie from the leftover filling (recipe below) and they loved it. Or, Jake loved it, and Karen would have loved it if she weren’t feeling so crappy. Crappy or not, she finished her serving, so that says something.
Needless to say, you can skip the rather difficult pierogi project and jump straight to the easier (and, at least with my family, far more successful) Shepherd’s Pie.
First the pierogi . . .
The dough
I used Gary and Chris Dyrkacz’s recipe. Combine 2.5 cups all purpose flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 egg, 2 tbsp sour cream (full fat), and 1/2 cup lukewarm water. I mixed the flour and salt separately from the liquid ingredients, added the liquid to the dry, mixed it well, and kneaded it only until it formed into a ball. I wrapped it with plastic wrap and left it in the refrigerator all afternoon.
When I was ready to prepare the pierogis, I divided the dough into four equal pieces. I used my pasta maker to roll out the dough, adding flour as needed to keep the dough from becoming too sticky. You’re aiming for a long sheet of pasta three inches wide. I rolled it out to #6 on the pasta machine.
The filling
Finely dice one large yellow onion and fry it in butter until brown. Reserve one-third of the browned onions for the sauce, two-thirds for the filling.
Chop Crimini or Portabella mushrooms into a 1/4-inch dice. You want perhaps 1 cup of diced mushroom, and of course you can leave this out entirely if you don’t like mushroom. Saute the mushrooms with another finely diced yellow onion until the onion is translucent. Add 1 pound of ground buffalo meat (because there’s no such thing as Mad Buffalo Disease, so we’re safe) and saute until thoroughly cooked. Try to boil off or spoon off as much of the juice as possible.
Add the browned onions (the 2/3 portion reserved earlier) to the filling mix. Add some finely chopped Italian parsley, salt and ground black pepper to taste, plus other spices if you wish (I added thyme; some folks might add dill). Taste the filling and correct the flavoring.
Assembly
Use some sort of round cutter with a three-inch diameter to cut three-inch circles from the dough. Size is not key. Put approximately one teaspoon of filling into the center of the circle, fold over, and crimp the edges by pressing with a fork. Do a good enough job with this and your pierogis won’t explode in the boiling water bath. Screw it up and, well, guess you have buffalo-noodle soup. With weird circle-noodles.
Some folks advocate wetting the rim of the circle before you fold it over. It all depends on how much flour you have added to the pasta during the rolling-out process. I’m comfortable with my pasta machine, so I was able to produce a sticky dough.
As you make each pierog, flour the bottom of it and set it aside on a wooden cutting board.
Cooking and presentation
Boil in salted water for about six minutes.
Make a sauce with butter and the reserved one-third of browned, finely diced onions. Add the pierogis to the sauce; shake the pan to coat the pierogis. Garnish with finely diced Italian parsley.
Hey, the Daily Show is on. I’ll add the Shepherd’s Pie recipe after Keith Olbermann. Toodles.
***
I’m back.
Shepherd’s Pie
Unless you’re feeding a small army or are so anal-retentive that you had to make as many pierogis as possible, you’ll have leftover filling and lots of it. You’ll need about two cups for this recipe, more if possible.
You’ll also need a Marie Callendar’s frozen pie crust, five slices of provolone cheese, a pound of store-bought mashed potatoes, a cup of store-bought gravy, butter, and parmesan cheese.
Oy, this is sooo easy.
1. Bake the pie crust according to the package instructions. Bake it BROWN, baby. No half-cooked pie crust, please.
2. Cool the pie crust. Cover the bottom with four slices of provolone cheese. Use the fifth slice, ripped up, to fill any gaps. This will keep your crust from getting soggy.
3. Add meat filling (from the above pierogi recipe) to the crust.
4. Carefully spoon gravy over the meat.
5. Now spoon mashed potatoes over the meat and gravy and spread it around so that you don’t see any meat. Spread it to the edges so that you see as little crust as possible, too.
6. Dot the top with bits of butter. Grind some parmesan cheese over the top (parmigiano reggiano, please). Press the cheese and butter into the potatoes, and then fluff the top with a fork. You want to see lots of spikes of potato — that’s how you’ll get a nice brown top crust in the oven.
7. Bake at 425F until well heated and speckled with toasty brown bits. Mine had been in the refrigerator overnight, so it took about 40 minutes to bake.
8. Enjoy!
D.
The level of substituting I’ll do for this is making me homesick. Buffalo indeed. I ache for decent provolone cheese – it’s my cheese of choice for French onion soup. However, I make shepherd’s pie often (But I never use a dough crust with a cheesy bottom, that’s something I’ll try! Lactose intolerance be damned!) but I use minced lamb. There’s a debate about shepherd’s pie having lamb and cottage pie having beef or is ir vice versa? Plus the kinds of vegetables used are different too, where one has carrots and peans and the other has onion and potato. I forget.
I like the crispy brown potato topping. Cheesy herbed breadcrumbs on the top are nice too.
It’s a shame there’s always someone who cleans their plate and still shrugs when asked “Did you like it?”
Interestingly, and somewhat off the topic and mildly pedantic: when the Russian programmers of my acquaintance talk about these, they refer to them as pilmenyi. Apparently, perogyi are a kind of small cake.
We’re not talking dime-store Russians here, either. These guys are from Byelorussia and Ukraine, serious hardworking tea-drinking Russians who’d rather write code than have sex, or so it seems.
*blinks* You make your own noodles, but you don’t make your own pie crust?
And store-bought mashed potatoes and gravy?
I feel so much better now. Thanks, Doug. **smooches**
This little device might make your life easier, should you ever choose to make perogies again.
Also: boiled perogies are a sin against nature. Once you’ve boiled them, they still need to be either pan-fried or (ideally) deep-fried before they’re ready to be eaten. I speak as someone who lives in a town where there used to be a restaurant named The Golden Perogie.
Weird thing, Lyvvie, but many people with lactose intolerance do well with cheese. Less lactose in cheese? I don’t know.
Dean, I’ll have to check out pilmenyi. I’m always looking for more authentic fillings.
Darla, I’ve never been happy with any of my homemade crusts. Also, during the week, I need fast recipes — I can’t linger in the kitchen like I do on the weekends.
Thanks for the link, Pat. I look at deep fried pierogis and boiled pierogis as two very different animals. And the pot sticker type pierogis are yet another variation. Hard to think of them as all being pierogis, really.
Hmm. My pierogi recipe is:
1. Go to Polish grocer’s down the block and buy pierogis. (Some Kielbasy and beer wouldn’t hurt, either.)
2. Fry ’em up (or steam, if wife is watching).
3. Salt, pepper & eat.
I’m sure yours is good, though. ;o)
I always thought it was because the lactose was already part digested by the cultures used to make the cheese, or yogurt. But we also have one who’ll go anaphylactic with dairy or eggs. Always one who ruins the pie for the rest of us. I’ll make a big pie for us with cheese, and a wee one for Shorty without.
I’m just the opposite with pie crust. I like my own much better than any I’ve bought. The trick is not to mess with it too much.