Monday, April 17, 2023

Sweet Cheese Pierogi by Maya Corrigan #Recipe

Holiday dinners in my family always featured a dessert of pierogi, Poland's iconic dish. The crescent-shaped dumpling can be stuffed with almost any food--vegetables, cheese, meat, fruits--but the sweet cheese version was the favorite in our family. My grandmother and my aunt made a filling of farmer’s cheese, but that’s hard to come by where I now live. Lacking that, we’ve used ricotta or dry curd cottage cheese. Today I'm sharing a pierogi recipe that my children improvised, using mascarpone as the filling. It turned out delicious.

There are as many different recipes for pierogi dough as there are possible fillings. For all of them you can add additional flour and water as needed to make the dough workable. 

Dough Ingredients

2 1/2 cups of flour
1/4 cup full fat sour cream
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup warm water (more or less), added as needed to make the dough workable


Cheese Filling Ingredients

1 cup mascarpone, ricotta, or farmer’s cheese
1 tablespoon of sugar
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
[1 beaten egg if the cheese is dry, not needed for mascarpone.]

Plus butter (or oil) for browning the finished pierogi.  


Ingredients for sweet cheese pierogi
Oops! I left out the lemon in this photo


Combine the ingredients for the dough in a large mixing bowl and stir together with a fork or with your hands until the dough comes together. Add additional flour if the dough is very sticky and water if it’s too dry. Once you can form it into a cohesive ball, remove it from the bowl. Transfer it to a floured surface and knead it for 5 to 10 minutes. After kneading, the dough should be smooth and only slightly tacky. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes, covered with plastic wrap. 



While the dough is resting, make the cheese filling by combining all the ingredients. 

Divide the dough into two pieces and roll out one piece at a time, keeping the other half covered. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough to a maximum of 1/8-inch thick (or less). The thinner the better. Then cut rounds 3-4 inches in diameter with a floured glass or cookie cutter. This recipe does not tell you the number of servings because that will vary depending on the size of the rounds you cut.  

Put a level tablespoon of cheese filling in the center of the round. Don't stuff it too full or you won't be able to close the pocket. Moisten the edges with water and fold it to make a half-circle. Then seal it by pinching the edges with your fingers or a fork. Set the pierogi aside on a floured towel. Continue to fill each round until you have used all the dough.




Transfer the pierogi into lightly salted boiling water in a large pot. Don't overcrowd them because they expand as they cook. When they rise to the top, they are cooked. Use a slotted spoon to take them from the pot and set them on a buttered plate or wax paper until they are less wet.

Melt butter or pour oil in a skillet until its surface is covered. Fry the pierogi in the pan until golden on each side. 



Serve the pierogi with a dollop of sour cream and/or jam. The plate in the photo below comes from a set that belonged to my grandmother and, after she passed away, to my aunt--the two women who made the best sweet cheese pierogi ever. The hands shown in the above photos belong to my son, my daughter, and my daughter-in-law. I'm proud that they're continuing the family holiday tradition.   






Do you have a family dish that you remember fondly? 


📚

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.




Visit a mystery fan fest in the latest Five-Ingredient Mystery


Val and Granddad attend a mystery fan fest that features a bake-off between contestants playing the roles of cooks to fictional sleuths. As Nero Wolfe’s gourmet chef, Granddad competes against Sherlock Holmes's landlady Mrs. Hudson, played by Cynthia Sweet. Granddad blames her for ripping off the five-ingredient theme of his Codger Cook newspaper column to use in her own recipe column and cookbook. When she’s found dead in her hotel room with a whistling teakettle next to her, he and Val sort through the festival-goers to find the one with the biggest beef against Ms. Not-So-Sweet.



📚


9 comments:

  1. Being an old Army brat, I didn't have the chance to be around extended family much at all except for a short span of annual leave which was divided up around both my parent's families - so not any where for very long. My family memories and favorite dish hands down would be my Mom's homemade doughnuts. They were exceptional to say the least. The one memory of them that stands out happened one Easter. A couple weeks before Easter you were suppose to take a silver dollar and multiply it to 30 representing the 30 pieces of silver Christ was betrayed for. Being the kids my brother and I were, we each went up and grabbed one meaning we had to make $60 to replace it. Turning to our loving Mom to help. Although temporarily flustered at us for taking 2 instead of 1, she helped up by making 120 dozen of doughnuts which my brother and I sold for 50 cents a dozen. They sold so easily that folks continued to call wanting to buy more afterwards. Mom said she was not in the "business" of making doughnuts. LOL As an adult and knowing all the work that went into making homemade doughnuts and then that outstanding number, had me knowing exactly how much Mom loved us to do such a thing. It's always the first thing that comes to mind when I make doughnuts now from Mom's recipe.

    Thank you for the yummy recipe!
    2clowns at arkansas dot net

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What a wonderful memory, Kay! Thank you for sharing it.

      Delete
  2. My great grandmother's favorite perogi was sweet cheese, she made her own cheese. You brought back great memories for me. She also made leckvar (prune) may be spelled wrong as well as many other flavors. lindalou64(@)live(dot)com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for your comment, Linda. Pierogi with homemade cheese must sounds wonderful.

      Delete
  3. Kolache were what my family called these sweets and a favorite filling when made like this was cooked down and sweetened apricots. With 12 children, a husband and often a few others to feed, my grandma would more often make it as a pie. She'd roll out the dough into pie crust size and fill them, bake and have dessert for a crowd. Pierogi were almost always filled with either a potato and cheese mixture or sauerkraut and grated potato, with a slightly different dough, no sugar.
    Sauerkraut was a standard, always a crock available. My personal favorite was grandma's homemade dinner rolls. I used to make them, but well, gravity has made bread and starches quite a bit more rare in my diet! I do still usually make sauerkraut on occasion using her recipe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your comment, Marcia. Potato and sauerkraut fillings are popular for pierogi. It's harder to find the sweet cheese ones in a store.

      Delete
  4. My Lithuaian grandmother used to make pierogis every Christmas season. They were delicious. Every time I see or read about pierogis, I think of her. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And I think of my Polish grandmother. Food certainly brings back memories.

      Delete
  5. I wonder where my comment went yesterday?
    How delightful that this is a multi-generational activity.

    ReplyDelete