This is my Mom, together we worked (with the help of Dad) to make many stuffed perogies for our Christmas Eve (Wigilia) dinner.
Mixing and rolling out the pastry/pasta dough is extremely sensitive and important! Never try to roll out the whole batch at once.
Recipe for Dough:
6 cups flour
6 eggs
1 container of sour cream (not light sour cream folks – this is holiday fare!)
Measure flour into large mixing bowl and create a well into the middle, set aside. In another bowl, beat eggs and sour cream together until everything is smooth. Pour the egg & cream mixture into the flour well. Stir to incorporate all the egg mixture into the flour, do NOT over mix! Dough will be slightly sticky, turn out onto a floured surface and knead gently. Do NOT over knead. It will result in a tough chewy dough – not what we want!
See? It's really sticking to Mom's hands.
Now please don't ask how thick to roll out the dough, because I'm just gonna tell you to roll it out 'not too thick and not too thin'. Too thick and your perogies will be chewy-al dente all over, too thin and the filling will explode when you boil them.
Now for the fillings: our family prefers two choices = sauerkraut with mushrooms, and cheese. Mom cooked the sauerkraut with mushrooms and mixed up the farmers cheese with ricotta the night before so we could just work on the process of rolling out, filling & boiling for one day.
I highly recommend refrigerating the sauerkraut overnight. It was easier to spoon onto the dough circles and seal up the little pouches of tastiness. That mixture can be quite greasy and little pieces of cabbage can inhibit the perfect seal.
It takes a very special tool to seal the perogies. Perhaps there's still time for you to ask for one for Christmas. It's called a 'fork'! Pretty new & unique! Go get yourself one if you don't have one yet - it's all the rage!
To seal a perogi properly: dip a finger in some water and rim half of the circle of dough, fold over dough with filling inside, press firmly, and then proceed to fork seal, then flip and fork seal the other side. After you have quite a few stuffed and sealed, bring a large pot of salted water to almost-boiling. If you put the perogies in a rolling boil you will most certainly cause the fragile pockets to burst!
Gently remove the perogies from the almost-boiling water after the dough has begun to cook. You really will be able to tell, they become more rigid. Run them under cool water, but be careful not to let the water stream burrow a hole in it. Once cooled and mostly dry, the perogies are ready for the freezer bags (our preferred method of stashing them so we won’t eat them all before Christmas Eve).
Of course there will always be a few that break or explode in the cooking process, so you will be forced to taste test along the way. Quality control is a good thing. There are many bonuses to making these: working with family, carrying on a Polish family tradition, learning the tradition, and sharing the tradition with my kids.
On Christmas Eve we cook the defrosted perogies up in a frying pan with some butter and olive oil along with chopped onions. Served along side monk fish, sweet rice, lazy perogi (unstuffed) and sauerkraut with split peas we pass around the traditional oplatki.
Me & Mom just starting out... many thanks to Dad the photographer, barista, and perogi boiler!
This is only half of the dining room table. I did marry an Italian, so unbeknownst to me when we first started really getting serious it really is ok to eat meat on Christmas Eve! I was so shocked my first CE dinner with Mr. Monkey (not yet my Mister) to see all sorts of pasta in red sauce, meat balls, bricihole and not a piece of seafood to be seen. So the other half of our dining room table is loaded with foods covered in red sauce! Have a blessed Christmas Eve.
