As a Clevelander, although I do not come from any Eastern European heritage, I consider the pierogie to be a family dish. My family cooked pierogies every way imaginable: sauteed, baked, fried and even grilled. One thing we rarely had though was homemade pierogies. On the way home from Melt a few weeks ago I decided that I was going to make pierogies from scratch. And you know what, it was pretty easy.

The first thing you need to do is get together a pierogie dough. The recipe I used is a bit of a mashup from a number of recipes I found online:

Pierogie Dough Recipe

2 1/2 C Flour
1 t Salt
1 Egg
2 T Sour Cream
1/2 C Water

1. In a stand mixer, mix the flour, salt, egg and sour cream.

2. Add the water a bit at a time until the dough starts pulling from the sides of the bowl. You should have something that looks like this:

3. Wrap that bad boy up in plastic wrap and let it kick it in the fridge for awhile. This is a great time to make your fillings if you haven’t already. Typical pierogie fillings include potato, cheese, onion, sauerkraut and prune. I don’t know who the hell likes prune, probably geriatrics. We went with potato & cheese and mushroom.

4. Now comes the part that makes you realize a $2 pierogie is totally worth it. The rolling and stuffing. Go get your dough out of the fridge and using a pastry cutter, cut yourself off a manageable piece. Start rollin’ that mo’ fo’ thin. Real thin. I’m a lazy bastard so I used a pasta maker to get it down where I wanted it. You’re going to want it about this thin:

You are going to eventually have to use something to cut circles out of the dough. I have a circular cookie cutter that I use for empandas, so I used that. You can use whatever you want though: a cup, bowl, scissors, used margarine container, slinky. Doesn’t matter. Like this homie:

5. Now comes the stuffing insanity! Yeah! Its pretty straightforward, you put the potatoes in the dough, seal up the edges and crimp. Easy, peasy, japaneesy. Thanks to the magic of the Internet though I can show you in pictures.

Although you may be tempted to eat these at this point, don’t. They are better cooked. After 3 or 4 minutes in boiling water you will have a colander full of the best pierogies you have ever had. They can also be sauteed, I do mine in a pan with a little butter and some garlic. Wicked good!

Its gonna be hard to eat all of the pierogies you made so you’ll probably want to put some in storage. They will last a week or so in the fridge, but for long term storage the freezer is the best option. A lot of recipes call for boiling the pierogies before you freeze them, but this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In addition to being one hell of a sticky mess, it seems like an awful lot of work for no real benefit. I laid mine out on wax paper, rolling after each row to avoid them from sticking to each other and put them in a zip-top freezer bag.

How to Make Perogie, Pierogie, Perogi, Perogy, Pirohi, Piroghi, Pirogi, Pirogen, Piroshke or Pyrohy

• Basic Empanada Dough
• How to Make Cheese Crackers – Revisited
• How to Make Cavatelli Pasta By Hand
• Cheese Crackers – Make Your Own and They’ll Taste Like Cheese
• Liver and Onions