featured image cred: Dash of Vanilla
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Fruit Filled Pierogi is the 5th of a multi-part post on pierogi. To read it from the beginning, click here. This post contains recipes for fruit fillings. For other types of fillings, dough recipes, and instructions on rolling, filling, and cooking pierogi, click here.
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Berries Are among the Most Common Fruit Filled Pierogi
But the most traditional fruit filling for pierogi is plum. Many types of fruits will work. You’ll find a recipe below for strawberry that would work just as well with cherries, blueberries, or, in fact, just about any kind of berry. What makes berries so attractive as a filling is their size and texture. With the exception of the strawberry, which has been bred to a grotesque enormousness, it’s easy to seal whole berries in pierogi dough. Halved (or sliced, or diced) strawberries work, because they don’t produce a lot of juice right away. Pierogi don’t cook very long: a few minutes in water, a few minutes in a frying pan. Berries will break down sufficiently in this amount of time. Given these parameters, any kind of fruit that is manipulable, a quick-cook, and not too wet will work. How about chocolate pierogi with wild raspberry filling?
Strawberry Pierogi Filling
2 pints fresh strawberries
Sugar
Hull the berries. Cut each of them in half. Coat in sugar.
It’s that simple. However, there are a few caveats:
I like to place the berry cut-side down on the round, and shape the Pierogi to it. If you want the Pierogi to look more traditional, of course you can dice the berries.- Coat each berry-half with sugar individually, just before encasing it in dough. You don’t want them to start juicing until they’re already sealed inside the dough.
- That brings us to this: Some people like to produce a whole batch of raw pierogi, and then boil them. Other people like to boil as they go. They’ll stockpile maybe 6-10, and then place them in the boiling water as they continue producing more raw pierogi, multitasking. With strawberries, it’s best if you multitask. If you allow the berries to juice too long in raw dough, the liquid will weaken the dough and begin to seep through it.
- If you’re planning to freeze these pierogi, you can boil them as prescribed in the general directions. The strawberries will break down in the freezer, which will make them perfect for eating once they’re thawed and fried. If you’re not going to freeze them, though, add two minutes to the boiling time in order to cook the strawberries.
- You may want to serve these with something sweet. If it’s going to be sour cream, sweeten it. Or, serve them with soft-peak whipped cream or sweetened crème fraîche.
Until I did the research associated with this post, I hadn’t heard of strawberry-filled pierogi. I’ve been told that in Poland, Pierogi are likely to be filled with just about anything imaginable. I’ve never been to Poland 🙁 but I do happen to live in the city with the greatest number of Polish-speaking persons outside of Warsaw: Chicago, which boasts five distinct Polish neighborhoods. Yup, there are more Polish speakers here than there are in Krakow. Also, jestem Amerykaninem polskiego pochodzenia, 2nd-generation, who grew up surrounded by Polish traditions, language, and foods … and especially pierogi. But never strawberry. I like them.
Plum Pierogi Filling
Fresh prune plums[1]
Sugar
Wash and pit plums. Add 1 tsp sugar to each plum before sealing. It’s that simple. Ultra-traditional.
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Notes:
See Also:
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Can you offer scientific proof that berries are the most common fruit filling?
No.
Fruit-filled are my favorite. Thanks for this post. I liked the kind of all-encompassing nature of the series. Not sure if I know of anything else quite like it.
Thanks, Lola! Cheers!
I love these filled with blueberries and topped with sour cream.
Me too! Thanks, Gael.
I made your dough recipe using my kitchen Aid mixer. I sort of used potato added finely grated cheddar and strained cottage cheese with a bit of cayenne for a kick. Took forever to fill these babies, but I got it done. I put the first cookie sheet full in the freezer thinking I would boil and fry the second sheet full. But the second sheet was sticking to the pan, so I pulled out the first sheet and cooked them from lightly frozen and put the second sheet in to freeze. I sauteed onion in butter and cooked up bacon. These were so frickin good I almost fell over! My daughter has always been a perogy fiend but home made makes her lose her mind…lol. I texted telling her she needs to come over and try my perogies! Tomorrow, I’ll start another batrch of dough, finish off the rest of the filling and also make blueberry perogies like my German step-grandma used to make for us when she came to visit. She served hers with ice cream! Can’t wait!!! Thank you so much for all these recipes and tips 🙂
What a sweet note! Thank you so much. I wish my grandma were still around, so I could share this with her, since so much of what I’ve put into those posts were pretty much her ideas. Your pierogi do sound good! They sure are sticky little things when they first come out of the water. Rinsing them in cold water helps some, and after that, a nice, thin coating of melted butter. You know what? I’ve got a savory blueberry sauce in the fridge that would be perfect for some pierogi! Thanks for getting me thinking in that direction!
can you cook perogies in an oven
I’ve never heard of that. Interesting.
Check out doing perogies in a slow cooker. I have done that and they are so totally awesome.
I’ve never heard of that!!! Cool!
Hey if you do make them sure would like your thoughts. Good luck.
OK
Ohhhh my goodness what an AMAZING idea! I have never had fruit filled/sweet pierogis before. I’m having a hard time thinking of anything else but making these now!
Shannon recently posted…Lentils with Roasted Sweet Potatoes & Parsley Tahini
Oh, you’re in for a treat. They’re so good!
Thanks so much for your various pierogi posts! My wife is from Warsaw and we’ve been back to visit quite a few times. While we LOVE pierogi, they are a chore to make completely by hand, and fruit versions are some of the best things in the world! Will soon try your recipe for stand-mixer dough and blueberry filling.
A small place in Warsaw that sells nearly 100 kinds of pierogi (really!) has the best I’ve ever had, and the best of their best is sour cherry-filled, we think, though their wild forest mushroom & Ruskie types are also excellent. At any rate, I strongly suggest you visit Poland, one of the most pro-American countries you can find. And these days, that’s really saying something!
Yes, these days that IS really saying something!
Thanks so much for you comment. Actually, I had plans to visit Poland this summer, but there were scrapped because of the pandemic.
That stand-mixer dough is a really good one; I’m sure you’ll like it. Blueberries, because you’re not going to cut them the way you would a strawberry, you won’t have to worry about how soon you add the sugar. I’d simply toss the berries in sugar. Or, on the other hand, I might go full-on and use a recipe for blueberry pie filling – but instead of adding the butter to the berries, I’d put one, tiny dot into each pierog. (Man, you know I might just follow my own advice and make these myself!)
Jeff, have you ever heard of BAKED pierogi? My Grandma (transplanted from Poland) used to make them with what I believed was a yeast dough, as they did rise some. After they were filled and baked, they were brushed with butter to add flavor and gloss to the dough. I also remember her browning diced onion cooked in butter and these baked beauties were coated that way. They were absolutely delish! The sad part is that NO ONE has the recipe. I don’t remember her EVER using one! BTW…the filling were savory…only potato or shredded and slightly cooked cabbage. They were terribly poor, and didn’t have many resources.
That’s interesting. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of them. The dough must be substantially different if it uses yeast. Was it bread-like?
Regarding the onion, a LOT of people do this. I didn’t grow up with that particular tradition, but I’ve certainly had pierogi served that way plenty of times. I’m not surprised if your grandmother didn’t use a recipe. Neither did mine. I know the recipe only because some of the ladies from her Polish-Catholic church created a cookbook as a fundraising effort, and it contains several pierogi recipes, and also I spend a week with her one year, cooking with her, and copying down everything she did. She didn’t even use measuring cups or spoons! It was all, “I put this much in…” as she eyballed it, and followed a long and stopped to measure everything.
I think a lot of Polish immigrants were poor. Let’s face it, the desire for a better life is what often drives people to immigrate, now as well as back then. My grandmother’s pierogi were pretty much also either potato, or saurkraut. With access to more resources, the potato filling is mixed with famer’s cheese, and the saurkraut might be mixed with cottage cheese. I consider saurkraut fillings and potato fillings to be the quintessential pierogi. She’s not around anymore, but I can’t imagine what she’d think of my fancy lamb or apple pie versions.
Is there any way of sweetening the dough? I born in Krakow and living in Canada love them and think they are perfect they way they are (mmmm with sour cream on top). But my kids don’t like the traditional pierogi dough taste with something sweet inside. It throws them off I guess. Any suggestions?
I feel that my relatives and ancestors would all turn on me if I were to even admit that such a thing would be possible. If I could, I’d pass a law making it illegal, in fact. But if I had to write that law, it would have to be very specific in order to be properly enforceable … so it would have to prohibit, for instance, adding powdered sugar to the flour before adding the wet ingredients. And then there’d have to be a public service campaign to promote an understanding of the law, stating that we have no idea how much powdered sugar one might add to their dough, and that we also have no idea how this might change the dough in ways that might be hard to predict.