This is the time of the year when I am excited about making pierogi again. A friend of mine who visited last weekend said that she was also about to embark on her own ‘pierogeddon’ soon as she has four hungry mouths to feed and pierogi are her Xmas go to. Although she runs a half Polish and half Jewish household with some vegans and some non-vegans in it, pierogi seems to make everyone in her family happy so she really has her work cut out – we are talking hundreds of little parcels here!
Pierogi are an everyday fare in Poland (or at least used to be when I was a child and the pace of life was a little slower), but they also tend to feature on Polish Christmas tables as one of twelve mandatory dishes, so many people make massive batches of them and freeze them for Christmas. To my mum’s chagrin, I am as untraditional as they come (sorry mom!), but I do like my pierogi now and then. I mean what’s not to like? Especially the pan-fried ones are to die for on the cold dark days that we’ve been plunged into quite recently. While pierogi are very easily made vegan – although there is only one traditional filling (the cabbage and mushroom one) that tends to be vegan – the traditional dough always contains gluten, which is bad news for some. After I featured my old cabbage and mushroom pierogi quite recently, I got quite a few questions about making them gluten-free so this recipe is my answer to those of you who are after some decent gluten-free pierogi with a vegan filling. Making a vegan filling is dead easy, I went for my beloved mushrooms, but the dough without gluten or egg is the tricky part of this dish. In order to make a supple dough that will hold together, I combined two types of gluten-free flours: buckwheat and rice flour (brown rice flour is fine too), with some tapioca starch, a little olive oil and some psyllium husk powder thickened with water. The last two ingredients are there for much needed flexibility, which is usually taken care of by gluten. I tested these with both psyllium husk powder and with whole psyllium husks and they both work just as well.
What is great about psyllium husk powder is that, as opposed to xanthan gum which is often used in commercial gluten-free dough, it is a natural, wholefood plant based ingredient that has traditionally been used to aid digestive issues (my local Indian store sells it for example). You can get it in health food stores, perhaps in your corner store and online and it’s what makes this dough quite easy to handle. It’s a very potent and therefore quite efficient ingredient that will make your gluten-free dough or any kind of dough so much easier to handle. Neither myself nor Duncan are used to gluten-free pierogi dough, but we’ve consumed these with pleasure and I hope you’ll enjoy them too.
1 tsp psyllium powder or 2 tsp psyllium husks 60 g / ½ cup buckwheat flour 70 g / ½ cup rice flour 30 g / ¼ cup tapioca starch or cornstarch / cornflour ½ tsp sea salt 15 ml / 1 tbsp olive oil
TOPPING
30 ml / 2 tbsp olive oil ½ onion, finely diced salt crushed walnuts (or walnut crumb)
cabbage and mushroom potatoes, fried onion and ‘ricotta-style’ cheese (known as ‘ruskie’ pierogi) spinach and ‘ricotta’ pumpkin and ‘ricotta’ beetroot and walnut
