I got inspired by Bourdain, well, really Olga, and made a huge batch of Ground beef pelmenis once. They are awesome! It’s better than a ravioli, and with sourcream and chopped kosher dills to garnish really becomes a substantial meal (I also added a few drops of pepper sauce as a condiment… guess that’s the hillbilly in me.) I divided it up into four huge bags and froze the leftovers. They freeze extremely well, so if you go on a pelmeni bender you can spend a couple of hours making a huge quantity and eat them later.
It reminded me of the time I made pierogi in 6th grade. Pelmeni and pierogi are probably closely related. I’m not too keen on the Polish take with cottage cheese and potatoes, however.
Very filling, very satisfying, much easier to make than they sound. The dough is a bit tempermental, about a medium level paste.
Being from the same general tradition as the Germans and the Czechs (actually, these two are separate traditions) is no guarantee for good beer, alas. I’m pretty sure that beer, which never really was that popular in Russia originally, was not very tasty when brewed in Russia in the olden days. Nowadays, things are different, and most Russian brewers are foreign-owned. Baltika, for instance, which I think is Russia’s most popular beer today, is owned by Heineken.
Here’s a fairly standard recipe. Pelmeni, uszka (Polish dumplings, smaller than pierogi and folded differently), and tortellini all seem to be variations on the same theme.
You may be thinking of peroshki, which is sort of the Russian version of pierogi. My mother used to make them, claiming that a Russian woman in Juneau taught her how. She made them with raised dough and the filling was ground beef with onions and celery and rosemary (probably not the most Russian of ingredients). After being filled and raised, they are deep fried. Fookin’ heaven, I tells ya. I make them occasionally, but it’s a day-long venture.
I could be totally wrong, but the singular is a pirozhok, and the plural is pirozhki, with the accent on the final “ee.” Peirogi is and Anglicized term.
No, Pierogi is a Polish word. A Russian Peroshki is made of dough, and is baked or deep friend, not boiled. It’s roughly the size of a danish, not bite-sized. At my local bakery, they’re filled with sauerkraut! As already described, boiled Russian meat dumplings are pelmeni.
To clear this up: In Russian, it’s пирог, (pirog), and the diminutive is пирожок (pirozhok), plural пирожки (pirozhki). With the stress on the i. Pierogi is, indeed, Polish.
We have a little stand in our Market in town that’s a Russian food stand.
They sell pirozhki, some with meat and vegetables, some with sauerkraut, some with potato and some with jam! I love the jam ones for an afternoon snack. Still hot. MMmm.
When I made the humongo batch of Pelmeni, I kind of made a hybrid of two online recipes. I used the dough recipe for the pelmeni that pulykamell linked to, and this pelmeni recipe from RusCuisine.com for the stuffing and technique. I doubled the recipe, used two pounds of ground beef with onion and garlic, a 4 cup dough, and I flattened the dough from walnut pieces with my hand and a rolling pin, later I worked it entirely by hand and pitty pattied the dough after I got comfortable. One doesn’t need a special mold or fabulous technique. Rolling them is the tempermental part with this recipe’s sticky dough. Best to work them out with wet hands.
Using straight beef was probably the only mistake I can think of, and counterintuitively they are probably considered bourgeois or extravagent in Russia without the pork cut.
I once had a friend who was a Russian immigrant. He would never eat onions, no matter how they were prepared (I happen to love onions). When I asked him about this, he said that as a kid they were so poor that all they could afford to eat were onions, and they ate them every way they could be prepared, and if he never ate another onion, that was fine by him!
