Hello, everybody in the community and all Hive! Lately, I have been sharing some of my cooking, and even though most of them are merely plant-based, I have expressed before that I am not entirely vegan yet or vegetarian, and less so is my partner, who loves to eat meat in all its forms. We usually try to balance our diet, so today I want to share with you a dish that I made yesterday for lunch and it was delicious.
Initially, I wanted to make homemade Pierogi, which is a beautiful, delicate, filled pasta that I ate A LOT in my brief time living in Poland. Polish people treated me with the hospitality I would never forget. I was staying with a big polish family, helping them on their farm, and teaching Spanish to their kids, and it was a nice time I will remember forever. We would spend the whole day in the kitchen with the mother of the kids, and her mother, even the kids, and we would prepare lots of food and then sit at the table to try to eat at least half of the food we made, which was already hard. Pierogis are like the polish version of ravioli, and as the Italians, polish people prepare their pasta with their own hands, and they usually fill them with mushrooms, potatoes, onions, sour cream, pork, or beef.
I was remembering this dish and how I have eaten it since I left Poland, so I tried to imitate what I learned while being there, even though my pasta looked nothing like pierogis, but It was fun to make and delicious.
Now I’ll tell you step by step how to make this filled pasta, from scratch, to impress even the most exigent guest.
For the pasta I used:
300 g of wheat flour
30 g of unsalted butter
1 teaspoon of salt, I used Himalayan pink salt
1 egg
80 mL of water
For the filling:
125 g of ground beef
Spices such as pepper, cumin, basil, parsley, mustard
½ red paprika
celery
1 big clove of garlic
8 g of butter
a pinch of salt
The sauce:
Tomato sauce
2-3 fresh tomatoes
1 pinch of oregano
1 pinch of sugar
1 pinch of salt
First I put together all the ingredients I was going to use to make the dough and started by adding the flour to a bowl and making a hole in the middle of it with my fingers. next to the egg, the salt, and the butter, melted. I mixed everything until it was sandy, and then started adding the water in little amounts and kneading with my fingers vigorously. The final dough is homogeneous, flat, and smooth. I let it rest for about half an hour while I prepared the filling.
After I put the meat in a pot, I add the spices to it, the salt, I let it rest there while I chop the paprika, celery, and garlic. In a pan on the stove at high flame, I added the butter, and then the vegetables and the meat almost immediately, sauteing everything until it was well cooked. To this meat you can add cheese, sour cream, or soy sauce, to give it another powerful taste.
I cut the ready dough in two and using the roller, I flatten half of it on the kitchen counter until it was like 3 cm high, then with the help of a cookie-cutter I cut the flat dough into small circles.
Taking the circles with my hands, I filled using one teaspoon of meat for each circle, and then closed it and sealed the edges by pushing it with my fingers so it won’t open while cooking.
After finishing using all the dough and the meat, I made like 24-25 tiny pierogis (or however you want to call these things). I put like 3-4 liters of water on a pot and turned the stove on high flame, and once it was boiling, I lowered the flame to a minimum and added the pierogis, taking care that they wouldn’t break. I let them cook for 13-17 minutes, moving them occasionally.
While the pierogis were cooking, I prepared the sauce to bathe them once they were ready. The sauce was a mix of tomato paste, water, fresh tomatoes, oregano, and salt.
I finally strained all the pierogis, and then served them with the tomato sauce and some parmesan cheese on top, and let me tell you, ignoring the fact that the form of the tiny pierogis wasn’t what I was intending, they were delicious and my partner was over the moon. If you see the videos on youtube or the recipes from the polish people who make pierogis, you would notice that they have been doing this since they are kids, so their technique is wonderful and the shape of the pierogis is nice, they look cute and delicate, instead, mine look like big empanadas hahaha lol but they tasted great.
I spent a couple of hours making this, and while I was at it, I still remembered my times in Poland and the nice people there, and I hope that I can come back one day and eat their food again.
Regards to everybody, I hope you liked this and thank you if you took the time to read, keep being healthy!
César.