Globe-cooking recipe : Pierogi (Poland)

All this week I'm on  a work trip to Poland - our school is one of the partners in a big European project about sport as a vector of integration so we've headed back to Gdynia for the second and final time. Yesterday, I got my first taste of Poland at the airport when we tucked into these pierogi. They're a bit like ravioli without a tomato sauce and when we met up with the Polish delegation later on, I asked one of the girls how you make them. She gave me her mum's recipe !

You can make different fillings - as well as these meat ones, there are versions with cheese and potato, potato and cabbage, mushrooms...

Pierogi

ingredients :

(makes  about 30)

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon melted butter

1 cup sour cream

1 egg

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

filling :

ground beef (more finely ground than mince, maybe more like sausage meat)

onions

carrot

salt, pepper, garlic/onion salt

finely shredded cabbage

Mix the flour and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together the melted butter, sour cream, egg and oil. Stir into the flour until it makes a dough, cover with a teatowel and set aside for 20 minutes while you make the filling.

Cook the finely minced onion and cabbage with the ground meat, remove excess liquid, season and leave to cool.

Separate the dough into two balls. Roll out and cut into circleswith a cookie cutter. Brush a little water around the edges of the circles and put a tablespoonful of filling in the middle. Fold over and press to seal the edges. (They can be frozen at this stage if you've made too many.)

Drop them one at a time into a pot of boiling salted water. When they float to the top, they are ready.

Some people like to cook them in a frying pan in butter once they have been boiled.

STOP PRESS ! : Later in the trip, we visited a restaurant that specialises in pierogi so you can discover lots more variants, including dessert pierogi, here.

*** Don't miss my country-by-country globecooking recipe index ! ***

Fancy trying out some more Polish cuisine? How about Bigos or Golabki?