Making the Pierogi

Now let’s put them together!

The old-fashioned way

Roll out the dough by hand. Exhausting.

The 21st century way

Follow the instructions to set up the pasta machine motor. Cut a thick piece of dough, roll it out enough that it will go through the widest pasta machine setting. Use the pasta maker to roll the dough to an appropriate thickness. This will involve running the piece of dough through the pasta machine, lowering the width setting each time. Typically the appropriate thickness will be one or two settings away from the thinnest dough. If you hold up the round of dough and it starts to stretch a lot, the dough is probably too thin. When you determine the best thickness using your machine, write that down somewhere, maybe on the pasta machine box. Otherwise, it becomes a family tradition to argue about the correct pierogi dough thickness setting. On my machine, setting 5 is too thick but setting 6 is too thin so I run it through setting 5 twice and it’s perfect.

Use a biscuit cutter to cut out rounds of dough from your long piece of dough.

Have a bowl of water ready to help seal the pierogi. Have your filling available with small spoons. Dip your finger in the water and lightly run it around the outside edge of the dough circle – this will help with sealing the pierogi. Put a small spoonful of filling in the top half of the circle and fold the bottom half up and over. Now you need to seal the pierogi. Do that by pinching the edges together but it’s not just squeezing them together. There is a pinch and slide type of motion to blend together and seal the two pieces of dough. You can cheat and use a sandwich sealer to start the process.

Set aside on a floured tea towel until you have a batch to cook.