Poland

Menu: Pierogi, kielbasa, & chruschiki | Recipe Source: everyday-delicious.com and tasteofhome.com

Note: Biggest thank you to Lisa & Zach Dwyer for helping with this one, I quite literally couldn’t have done it with you!

Pierogi-making, it turns out, is a joyous, delicious, & time-consuming production. When I was researching recipes, every single one had a yield of 70-100 pierogis, and the family reunion sized portioning had me confused until Lisa and I got underway. So much effort goes into making the various fillings, prepping the dough, and assembling the dumplings that you might as well make a giant batch and freeze a bunch while you’re at it! Since we made two types—potato/cheese/onion and mushroom/sauerkraut—it took us about three and a half hours from start to finish, and it was completely and utterly worth it.

The chruschiki tasted like a slightly healthier version of my second-favorite carnival food, the elephant ear. Golden and crispy on the outside, soft and slightly chewy on the inside, they were surprisingly light and delicate and they behaved flawlessly during frying (not always the case with fried foods, in my experience). The dough was a joy to work with compared to some of the other doughs I’ve had to wrestle with over the course of this project, and folding the pieces to create the knot shape was a fun little bakery origami challenge.

Ready to cook?

Pierogis: (link and link): Lisa and I followed this recipe without making any big deviations! I added garlic powder to both of the dumpling filling mixtures but otherwise didn’t add any ingredients. Since there were only four of us eating dinner, we only made 1 batch of dough, which was more than enough to handle the fillings. The yield was 20 of each flavor!

Chruschiki (link): I followed this recipe exactly! I ended up needing a little under 1/4 cup of additional flour to get the dough to the right texture and as always, I fried them in lard instead of oil. I also think I should have rolled these a bit thinner (or adding in the extra flour to reduce the stick was a mistake).