Yeah you read that right. Blueberry and cream cheese pierogi. I created this recipe after reminiscing about all the Polish food I ate growing up. Particularly, one experience in which my mom went to get some pierogi at the Polish mart (none of that frozen crud) and brought home dessert pierogi. They were blueberry and ricotta pierogi, which I loved and remember fondly, but my Mom recalls them not being sweet enough! I created this recipe as an ode to that day where we tried something different and interesting!
INGREDIENTS:
Dough- I edited this recipe from The Spruce Eats
2 large eggs
2 cups flour
1/3 cup room temp water
1/4 teaspoon salt
Filling-
1 small frozen bag of blueberries (12 ounces or so, does not need to be exact)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/2 lemon
cinnamon
Nutmeg
dash of salt
So basically,
Dough:
You’ll wanna make the dough first. It’s so so simple. Literally, plop the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl, and whisk it around for a bit until you feel good about it. keep the mixer on low/medium and break the eggs into it one at a time. Use your discretion with the water. If it gets pretty liquidy, add a tiny bit more flour. You don’t want the dough to be like pie crust (a little rough and crumbly), you want it to be a little bit sticky. when the dough is well mixed, put it in a lil’ bowl, and refrigerate it for about an hour. It does not need to be super hardened to work with, like pie dough does. It should just be cold enough that is can be rolled out a bit.
Filling:
Take that bag of blueberries, and throw it in a large sauce pan. I like working with frozen blueberries, because they already have retained water and juice, so when you add corn starch, it will turn into a nice gooey filling. Turn the stove on low and put the lemon juice and sugar in. You need to stir constantly for a little bit, maybe like 3 or 4 minutes, to let the sugar melt down without burning it. Add the corn starch. This is what makes it like pie filling-ish. The corn starch will transform the liquids from a liquid texture (duh) to a gelatinous one. Stir that for a while, maybe like 10 minutes. At this point you don’t need to worry so much about stirring constantly, but you probably should give it a good mix in the pan every minute or so, to keep it from burning. Turn off the heat and let the mixture cool.
And the rest:
Take the dough out of the fridge, and on a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough into one thin layer. You don’t want it to be thin enough that you can see though it, but it should be thinner than a rolled crust or a rolled cookie.
Grab the whipped cream cheese from the fridge, and the mostly cooled blueberry filling, and in a separate bowl, mix equal parts cream cheese and filling, until it’s a delicious and workable texture. Add your spices in now! Except salt; you should have added that in with the dry ingredients earlier.
cut out circles from your dough, these can be like 2 1/2 or like 3 inch circles. I used a tart cutter thing to cut mine, but you can use a big cup if you don’t have a decently sized circle cookie cutter or mini pie cutter thing.
Take a decent sized amount of your filling and put it on one side of your circle. Take a little eggwash, and coat the outside of the circle, to help it stick together when you fold them over. Fold and accordion the dough as well as you can. Pinch the sides together well. Boil some water, drop in the pierogi. Build for like 5-8 minutes, strain in a colander, and put some powdered sugar on those goodies.
Enjoy!
Merry Weather 