Indian Inspired Pierogi
The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.Who ever know that making pierogie by hand could be so easy. It is yet another food that sounds too difficult to tackle and turns out to be a relatively quick and easy meal to make. Especially if you make lots and then you can freeze them and heat at a later time.
When first looking at this challenge I knew that I wanted to do something interesting, what that was I still hadn’t decided. So for the next two weeks I thought about it and decided that an indian inspired pierogi would be delicious, especially if you dipped it in a cucumber raita.
The dough was very easy to work with and surprisingly easy to roll out. My experience with rolling out dough has been with pastries and let me just say that I have had very little luck rolling out pastry dough. My husband can attest to my difficulty with this task as he is usually the one dealing with me frustrated in the kitchen. So needless to say I was very happy when it rolled out nice and easy.
Since I didn’t really have a recipe to work from I decided to look for a indian potato dish and take the spices from that to come up with an adapted potato pierogi. Now these spices were great in theory but when added to the mashed potatoes I didn’t quite end up with what I had been envisioning. Now a bit part of that is my fault because I added WAY too much chili powder to the spice mix making it so spicy it burned your mouth.
Thankfully I had also made some more filling which was just mashed potatoes and cheddar cheese which ended up being best of the two, partly because of the melty cheddar cheese.
I don’t have a pierogi press so I opted to use cup to cut the circles out and then a fork to seal them and it worked great. After a quick egg wash they were ready for the oven, which I figured was a little healthier than deep frying and more texture than boiling them.
Although the flavours weren’t quite what I had wanted the pierogis were still quite delicious.
Dough
2 to 2 1/2 cups flour
1 large egg
1 teaspoon salt
about 1 cup lukewarm water
Place 2 cups flour in a large bowl or on a work surface and make a well in the center. Break the egg into it, add the salt and a little lukewarm at a time (in my situation 1/2 cup was enough). Bring the dough together, kneading well and adding more flour or water as necessary. Cover the dough with a bowl or towel. You’re aiming for soft dough. Let it rest 20 minutes.
On a floured work surface, roll the dough out thinly (1/8” or about 3 millimeters) cut with a 2-inch (5 cm) round or glass. Spoon a portion (teaspoon will be the best) of the filling into the middle of each circle. Fold dough in half and pinch edges together with a fork. Gather scraps, re-roll and fill. Repeat with remaining dough.
Place pierogis on baking sheet and bake until golden brown in 350 degree oven.
Filling
3 large potatoes cooked and mashed
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon coriander, tumeric and chili powder
2 cardamom pods ground
1/4 teaspoon cloves and garam masala
Combine all ingredients for the filling and set aside until ready.
