WetLeather Recipe Database - food for bikers

Name:	Pierogis	Contributor:	Bri Petroski
Description:	Pierogis	Posted:	2005-10-11
Key words:	dumplings, cheese	Category:	Main Dishes
ID:	644	Updated:	2006-04-02 19:54:57
Ingredients:	Pasta: eggs salt flour Filling: riced boiled potatoes dry curd cottage cheese fried onions grated mozzarella salt pepper
Preparation:	The pasta consists of eggs, salt and flour. Use however many eggs you need to make the desired amount of perogies. I usually do about 12 eggs for 5 pounds of potatoes. Use a tsp of salt per egg and enough flour to make very stiff dough. You pretty much have to knead it by hand at least at the end. Machines with dough hooks burn themselves out trying to knead this stuff. Some folks say add water to this. I don't. It makes the pasta tenderer. I like it tough because it holds up to the boiling process better and I prefer it tough. I have used some percentage of whole wheat flour in this and it worked out ok but I prefer all white flour. The filling is riced boiled potatoes, dry curd cottage cheese, fried onions, grated mozzarella, salt, and pepper. I never measure this stuff so I don't really know how much of any of it but IIRC you want the combined volume of the cheese to be about the same as that of the potato. The onions, salt and pepper are to taste. The potatoes need to be boiled like you would mashers and then dried somewhat. Pouring the water off and putting the pan back on the stove for a few seconds helps. Then rice the potatoes with a masher and let them cool. The onions need to be fried golden in butter. For a 12 egg / 5 pounds of potatoes batch it takes at least 4 big yellow onions. More is better. Drain half of them out of the butter and add to the filling. The rest of the onion and the butter are sauce for serving. You have to roll the dough thin and cut it. The grandmothers rolled it by hand and cut squares from which they were able to make perfect crescents. My mother and I use an Atlas pasta roller to about thinness setting 4 and a round cutter. I can't make a crescent from a square. Maybe it's because I'm only half Polish. Fill the circles, fold em in half and do a rolled crimped edge. If you don't get this part right they come apart when you boil them. Roll them in some flour to keep them from sticking and line them up on a cookie sheet or something. You can freeze them on the sheets at this point then bag them frozen. It's hard to tell the difference between fresh and frozen. If you do choose to freeze some, do be careful of the frozen product. It's pretty fragile. I got a bag of them out once to cook a few and the bag slipped out of my hands. It didn't show at the time but later when I boiled them most of them were cracked and all the filling leaked out. The frozen pasta had shattered in place. To boil them either fresh or frozen, use an 8 qt pot or larger with water and a little olive oil. Add about a dozen to a boiling pot and stir with a wooden spoon to keep them off the bottom until they start to float. Cook them until the pasta is done. Dip them out with a slotted spoon and add twelve more. Serve them with onion butter. Refrigerate the boiled leftovers and pan fry them in butter in an iron skillet for breakfast the next day. Serve those with onion butter as well. Great grandmother made cherry perogi as well but I have no idea how that went. It was goodness though.
Notes:	> From: Bill Johns > Does anyone have a good recipe for pierogis? > > Surprise me. This is probably the least surprising (most traditional) recipie you'll see but here goes. This recipe is what my great grandmother, grandmother and mother always made. I think it's fairly traditional other than the mozzarella which is something my mother started doing at some point. The grandmothers did it just about like this only no mozzarella.
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