Hunky Alan's Perogies

A friend on the brewers' list was chatting about perogies today, and in particular about Hunky Bill's Perogy Maker. It's been likely 20 years since I've made perogies, which as far as I'm concerned is far too long. I was still due a Christmas present from Melissa so I went out and picked up a Hunky Bill's for just shy of 30 bucks, to give it a try. Next time I'll time how long it takes because I'm not entirely convinced that it's quicker to do. Rolling out the 2 sheets of dough takes a fair bit of time. Aside from that, the assembly is far quicker with the device. But all told as mentioned I'm just not sure it is a time saver.

Note they are darker simply because I rarely use anything but whole wheat flour

The Dough

I made a double batch of the recipe I used 20 years ago.

• 2 cups flour
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2/3 to 1 cup water (took 1 cup for me today)

I mixed up a double batch in my kitchen aid. Then I went on to the filling.

The Filling

I winged this based on the recipes I'd used 20 years ago. Basically it is bacon, mashed potato, salt, pepper and onion. For the bacon, I hauled out of the freezer a chunk of the stuff I made myself this summer. We got a quarter side of pork from a local organic farmer, and I got him to leave the bacon cut as one huge 6kg piece, which I proceeded to brine and smoke over the next few days. This piece was about 8 inches long, and maybe 1.5 inches by 1.5 inches in the other dimensions. I did not weight it, but would guess maybe 200g to 300g. I sliced it so I ended up with 1.5 inch squares, 2 or 3 times thicker than normal bacon. I cut the bit of rind from each piece and then fried the pieces minus rind for about 5 to 10 minutes in my non-stick pan, turning a few times all the while. I drained the fat and saved it, and took the bacon for use in the filling.

Meanwhile I had cleaned a bunch of smaller potatoes - the biggest was maybe golf ball sized. Note that I scrubbed the potatoes well with one of the surgical scrubbers from Lee Valley, but did not peel them. These were the last of the ones we got from our organic farmer as part of our CSA this past summer. it worked out to be maybe 6 cups of potatoes. I put them into a 2 litre pyrex measuring cup, covered with water and nuked them on high for about 27 minutes. It took about 22 minutes to come to the boil, then I monitored it after that til I could easily poke a fork through them.

I tossed a whole, peeled Vidalia onion into a food processor, along with the potatoes, bacon, 1.5 tsp sea salt, and 1 tsp pepper. I buzzed it up well. This yielded about exactly 6 cups of filling when firmly packed. I split it in half, and grated a bunch of cheddar cheese to mix into one half - got maybe 2-3 cups coarsely grated. This got mixed into one half the filling.

Assembly

I took about a baseball (not softball) sized piece of dough and rolled it out thinly for the Hunky Bill's. Then I filled the 18 spaces, and rolled out another piece for the top. It was really quite easy to do - see this video for details. I repeated this 3 times in total, and each time layed them out onto a cookie tray as you can see in the photo. The parchment paper is a piece I've been re-using for a few weeks now - I generally don't like to use it for the waste, but when I really feel I need to, I make sure I get the most out of it.

After doing 3 racks of the Hunky Bill's I had dough left over of course, because there will always be some from the device the way it works. And I had filling left over. So I decided to finish off the rest of it the old fashioned way - all the while explaining to #1 son that this would have been the way his great grandmother Kowalski did it. You just take a blob of dough maybe half the size of a golf ball, roll it into a ball, then carefully roll it out into a flat circle. Plop a small teaspoon of filling into the circle, fold it over, and use a fork to seal the edges. In university when I was studying Russian, we had an annual "Vetcherinka" or "Russian Night", and I and another student once made perogies the old fashioned way, and borscht, for 150 people.

Cooking

I'm really ticked off at myself that I ruined about 15 perogies due to my own stupidity. Of course I'm used to cooking the frozen ones, which cook for 9 minutes from the freezer. I went for 7 with these and it was still too much - most of them opened up so 15 of the 18 from the first rack went into the composter. Grrrrr! Note to self - boil freshly-made perogies 2 to 3 minutes! They can then be eaten, or optionally fried in the fry pan. I chose this option, using the saved drippings from the fried bacon.

#1 son loved them, but he loves the frozen ones anyway. The big surprise was that #2 loved them. But then again he's taking a liking to a number of "bohunk" things now that he's really into the Ukrainian dance.

Bohunks

My apologies to those of you who may be offended by this term. The term "Hunky" in "Hunky Bill's Perogy Maker" is of course short for "Bohunk". And that word is short for "Bohemian-Hungarian", but also includes Ukrainians and Poles, and other western slavs of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. For those who do not know me, my mother is 100% Bohunk - her father Ukrainian, and her mother Polish. That makes me 50% - and damned proud of it too! When I was growing up we used to call ourselves "bohunk" all the time, and I actually had no idea that it was a derogatory word. I'm not sure if other members of my family knew this or not, but for me it was always a proud word to use. It was not until my first year of university that I learned it was a bad word. We were in the lounge in my student residence, and I was meeting new people. One guy from Western Canada had a very slavic last name and so I proclaimed "Oh, another bohunk". He damned-near throttled me and it took quite a bit of explaining to calm him down. Nonetheless, it is still a proud word for me to use, and I'm not going to let anyone take that away from me. Though I am more careful with it's use these days - for example I don't use it when I take #2 to his Ukrainian dancing on Sundays :-)