Poland's Most Famous Dish: Pierogi

There's a trick for that!

https://www.amazon.com/Utensils-Stainless-Ravioli-Dumpling-A...

Now those "every single one is exactly the same" creates machine-made feel about them but some people don't care. Some are also using spoon or a fork to fold them, it's simpler and a middle ground between hand-made and "machine" made.

Polish from Poland here: no need to roll them out thin. Might be a variation found in your family, but typical pierogi - including those made by my Grandma - have some fluff.

A different thing is how do you make the dough. I've recently been to a potluck organized by a Canadian friend as a token Polish person there and I've seen her look up recipes in which the recipes for dough were very creative - I've seen yoghurt, eggs, cream, butter etc. being added to it. Combine that with a sharp cheddar stuffing and I quickly got heartburn :)

The way we make dough is way simpler: 2:1 white flour and boiling hot water, nothing else. Some people might add eggs, but I never do. Mix roughly while it's hot, then knead really well, roll out, shape and boil in generously salted water till they float + 1 minute.

Pierogi's rolling does not need to be thin, it's actually slightly ticker than Chinese ones.

polish person here, i don't like them

sauerkraut+mushrooms pierogi are the best

This depends entirely on family traditions. My mother is from near the eastern border of Poland (Włodawa), my father from around Lublin, my wife from central Poland (Kutno).

Each family makes different versions of pierogi, even ruskie are different between the families. I (predictably) prefer the version that my mother makes, which has extra thin dough and slightly higher cheese to potato ratio, but all of them are good.

Other than ruskie I love pierogi z jagodami (with wild blueberries). They are the best summer food.

I'm born and raised in Poland until I was 22, and I visit often. Now living abroad.

Pierogi Ruskie is my #1 food when going back. That cheese filling with onion + a good dollop of sour cream. They are the best pierogi for me.

I've seen them folded like that in restaurants, but the homemade ones are usually folded with a plain edge.

Haven’t heard about the rolled edges but fried ones are just perfect with sourcream.

Well, as someone who is Polish, there is a headache even I've had to deal with. There are people in Poland who have only lived in the cities and are oblivious to the regional and even rural takes on food. Especially because there's areas that straddle between Polish/Germany, Polish/Belarussian, Polish/Ukranian and so on historical influences

And by headaches I mean I would bring some polish dish to a company potluck, two crazed never-saw-cows-in-a-field types would rant how it isn't polish and the one old timer Pole would tell them to shutup as they haven't stepped one foot outside Warsaw before coming to the US.

Writing from the Ukrainian side of Galicia here, I would point out that Krakow is far from being the center of the region. Przemyśl or Zamosc lie much closer to the center if you include our side of Galicia where pierogis are widely popular as well. Matter of fact my family and many others here cook and eat them every week on Sunday, which I now hold as a near and dear tradition. There is something special about rolling and folding the dough together, boiling the pierogis, cooking the mushroom/onion sauce. Since this is a food cherished by both Poles and Ukrainians I find the name "galicean" a great fit as well, since it's a region shared between the two countries.

> My family comes from Red Ruthenia, region where ruskie pierogi comes from

Is there any definitive proof behind that? My family too come from former Polish territories in Ukraine.

It feels like in the last decade all of Slavs have been rushing into claiming as their own many traditions. I find it sad and unnecessary.

In fact I suspect the dish to be popular to move of the former Kievan Rus' region and I know for sure potato and cheese vareniki to be very popular in Belarus and western Russia.

I've eaten pierogi in Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, and the diversity and breadth of the dish makes them totally different than what you can find in Romania. I would say that colțunași are a subset of pierogi, since they're only filled with fresh cottage cheese filling and served only with sourcream (smântână). Also, I've encountered them only in the northern part of the country and nowhere else. So, I wouldn't say that we eat the same dish in Romania. Please let me know if you have found them in other parts of the country.

There is hardly any grain-cultivating population in the world that doesn’t have dumplings of some sort. Interestingly, however, the Romanian term colțunași is from Italian by way of Modern Greek, so it cannot be more than a few centuries old in Romanian. One therefore wonders what the earlier Romanian term for dumplings was, or whether dumplings were commonly eaten at all when the Vlach economy was still centered around transhumance.

The latter is called "gołąbki" ("pigeons").

> My polish mother called them "pirojki", which is the french term.

Well, French terms "pirojki" and "bistro" were transplanted words from Russian when they occupied Paris around 1814 or 1815 after the Napoleonic wars.

Ok, I need to double check, but I'm pretty sure using ketchup anywhere near pierogi is illegal.

Never heard about them from outside of Poland, but heard about pierogi a lot, even Men in Black had them (what else would an alien eat, right?).

Not internationally. At least in the US. I've never heard of krowki, but having lived in Wisconsin and the Chicago area (which both have a large number of people with Polish heritage) Pierogi are a common bar food.

Krowki are almost the same as fudge - depending on the recipe and shape those are usually indistinguishable.

But as per se they aren't very famous and are universally liked, so it's a safe thing to bring from Poland. Because ingredients are simple and mostly safe they also make a good gift for pregnant (assuming they want to munch on sugar-milk-butter candies, but who's to judge a sweet-tooth?).

So it's basically a new version of the "Freedom Fries" mania, but with higher popularity?

I have been in Poland for much of the time since the war started, and while I have read news articles about this supposed new term pierogie ukraińskie, I don’t think I have ever seen it in the real world. The pierogis served at milk bars, or from Żabka to be microwaved, are still overwhelmingly referred to as ruskie. Even the Ukrainian cafe nearby serves them as pierogie ruskie.

That only happened in the first few weeks/months following the invasion, and since then people returned to calling them "Ruskie". The general consensus is that the name refers to the historical area of Ruthenia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia

My friend told me "ruskie" is used as a somewhat pejorative description of a "Russian". Like Brits say "Yanks" about the Americans.

The other issue is that people don't know how to translate "ruski" to English, so they would say "Russian dumplings", but in reality they should be called "Ruthenian dumplings" from Ruthenian Voivodeship.

They probably seen tourists turn their nose on "Russian dumplings", so they renamed them to "Ukrainian".

Since most of the Ruthenian Voivodeship is now in Ukraine it somewhat makes sense, but it is not entirely correct. Just shows lazy thinking.

In the UK, those sold in supermarkets are no longer called "ruskie" but simply potato and cheese dumplings.

I'm not sure if it's a shift in language - it's more like a reaction/virtue signalling of some restaurants in the first weeks of invasion that briefly got viral, but - in the rare case of accuracy winning over memes - it died out as people soon after (re)learned that "ruskie" in "pierogi ruskie" refers to Ruś, not Russia. At least, that's my local experience (Kraków, Poland) - we went through the meme phase and came out of it a week or two later, and I haven't heard anyone mentioning "ukraińskie pierogi" ever since (until on HN, today).

That lasted like 3 months.

Sorry but no. Live here and eat pierogi few times a week. Still calling them ruskie, and people are just as indifferent to that name as they have always been.

The subject has popped up here and there. But more as a whimsical joke amongst people around me with more of an intelligentsia background.

There are however, many new places with Ukrainian pelmieni opening up everywhere you look. But that’s a separate thing.

>The reason is that the adjective ruskie is typically understood as "Russian" in general parlance

I’m not a native speaker, but I always heard that the Greek derived Rosyjski/Rosjanin/Rosjanka were for Russians (ie the ethnic majority in the Russian Federation) but Ruskie was still reserved for the Rus’ in general.

I’ve had native speaking members explain the distinction to me, that ruskie is more of a catch-all term for the Rus’ peoples. Then again, my family hails from northeast and southeast Poland near the borders with the Rus’.