Power Pierogi

I stumbled upon an article on Epicurious about how professional triathlete Paula Newby-Fraser favors pierogis as her fuel on the bike portion of the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon in Kona. It was like the culinary stars aligned. I have a half Ironman in Augusta, GA tomorrow for which I’ve been training for months.

Also, my family has a Slovak background, and though generally considered a Polish dish, dumplings are also native to Slovakia. I’m pretty sure I’m genetically predisposed to loving dumplings filled with some sort of mixture of potato and cheese, often fried and served dripping in butter. Then again, who wouldn’t like that? Now, I can’t imagine that Paula butters up her pierogis, but I don’t actually plan on eating pierogis on my ride tomorrow.

I had never made pierogis from scratch, so I did a quick search online, found a variety of recipes, and quickly came up with a plan.

First I started the filling – I cubed a russet potato and boiled the pieces for about ten minutes. Once they were drained I mashed them with jack cheese and Fage yogurt. There was way too much filling for the amount of dough I made, but hey, extra mashed potatoes.

Making the pierogi dough is very similar to making traditional pasta. I had two cups of flour, two eggs, a splash of olive oil, and 1tsp of salt. As I started mixing in the flour into the egg, I also worked in 1/2 cup of warm water into the mixture. Once the dough was smooth, it was wrapped and put into the fridge for thirty minutes.

Then I cut the dough into fourths…

Then again into 1” pieces.

The pictures are inconsistent here because I had to play around with the contrast as I was taking the photos late at night. Anyways, to make the dumpling I would flatten out the piece with my palm, then take the flattened piece and pull it from the outside like I would with pizza dough until I could get it as thin as possible. The pieces would tear on occasion though and I think using a pasta roller would be much faster and more consistent.

I sealed each pierogi by pinching the ends, then using a fork to make the impressions on the edge, really just for aesthetics.

Once your water hits a rolling boil, add the dumplings, and turn down the heat just a bit so it won’t reach a rolling boil again. You don’t want the dumplings to tear apart.

The next set of photos are from the the following day, because these photos came out much better. I’ve been saving bacon fat lately…

…so I warmed some up in a cast iron skillet and started frying chopped bacon. When the bacon was almost done I added the pierogis.

Below are the pierogis plated with some bacon and some hot bacon fat poured over.

They were delicious, with my only complaint being that the dough was a little too thick. Using the pasta roller should help. I look forward to making these again. One great thing about this recipe is that you can really use the “kitchen sink” approach and use almost anything in the filling. Cabbage, beef, or onions all come to mind.