Blueberries are in season and in my house this means blueberry varenyky. The fact that
I am making this dish with a fractured arm should give you an idea of how much I love
it. Luckily, I have a few absolutely fabulous oompa-loompas, so I’ll have plenty of help.
The timestamp for the recipe is in the description below, but given that it’s one of my favorite
dishes, I have a lot to say on this topic.
If you’ve never heard of fruit pasta, you probably have never visited Eastern Europe
in the summer. Slavic nations go absolutely nuts for the dumplings filled with sour cherries,
apricots, plums, and my absolutely favorite -- blueberries. If you think that sweet pasta
is weird, let me set you straight. Pretty much all doughs lend themselves well to both
sweet and savory dishes. Pies and tarts can be sweet and savory. Cream puffs can be sweet
and savory. So why shouldn’t pasta be sweet and savory? It’s like a soup dumpling meets
ripe fruit -- what’s not to love about that?
The first question I get when I introduce people to this dish is how does this fit into
a meal. Is this a dessert? Is this the main course? In my house, it’s the main course.
It’s way too good to only eat a small dessert portion and it’s not nearly as sweet as
most desserts. Come on, Americans, the idea of eating a sweet dish as the main course
should be right up your alley. You do it all the time for brunch -- waffles, pancakes,
french toast. Well, blueberry varenyky are just like that, only way less sweet and way
more tasty.
Since the blueberries are the star of the show, they have to be spectacular -- in other
words local. I’ve never succeeded with this dish using supermarket blueberries. They are
always too mushy and bland and they never have the acidity necessary for this dish.
Of course, I live in Massachusetts where supermarket fruit sucks. Maybe if I lived in California,
it would be better. Ideally, you want berries that are both sweet and tart. If they are
not sweet enough, that’s easily fixable. We’ll be adding sugar into each dumpling
and you can add a bit more or less depending on how sweet your berries are. But if your
blueberries have no acidity, you’ll be in trouble because lemon juice might make your
dough soggy, so I prefer not to add it.
I do not wash the blueberries for this dish because I want them to be dry. These are local
organic berries, so I am just not going to worry about it. If you want to wash them,
make sure you spread them out on a towel to dry before using.
This is my standard dough for Eastern European dumplings. It’s the same one I use for pelmeni.
You can make it by hand using the well method, you can use a food processor, like I do in
the pelmeni video, or you can use a mixer. Today I’ll use a mixer since many people
have been asking me “how do you make pasta dough in a mixer?” The ratio of ingredients
and the procedure is exactly the same as my Italian egg pasta dough. The only difference
is that this dough has less eggs and more water. The reason for this is that it is rolled
thicker, and thus it needs to be less tough. In a mixer, it’s best to start with the
wet ingredients on the bottom.
Put the mixer bowl on a scale, zero it out, and add 1 whole egg and 1 egg yolk. Do not
zero out the scale after adding the eggs. Add enough cold water until you get one hundred
and eighty five grams or liquid ingredients. Pour slowly. Water is heavy. Add 300 grams
of bread flour (unbleached all-purpose will work in a pinch but will result in a slightly
flabier texture). Then add the right amount of salt for your salt type.
Fit the mixer with a dough hook and get it going on medium-low speed. After several minutes,
you’ll get a dough. In real life everything takes way longer than it does in a video,
so be patient.
When you get to a homogeneous consistency, touch the dough with your finger to check
if it’s at all sticky. Mine is, which is not surprising. Summers in Boston are very
humid and it looks like I’ll need more flour to get to the right texture.
Once all your flour is absorbed, give it a squeeze and see if you got out of the sticky
stage. Yes, we are good, so I’ll give it another couple of minutes of kneading and
get it out. I shoot for about 6 minutes in the mixer from the time the original dough
becomes homogeneous. If you had to add a bit of flour during those 6 minutes, like I did,
you don’t need to restart the timer.
Unfortunately, this hands free kneading won’t work in every mixer. Any mixer can bring the
wet and dry ingredients together. But the success of the kneading step will depend on
your mixer. If you have a spiral hook, like this KitchenAid pro or if you have another
good mixer like Kenwood, you can let your mixer do all the kneading. But if you have
a KitchenAid Classic or Artisan with a C hook or some other not so great mixer, chances
are your dough hook will whack the ball of dough around, but won’t wrap it around itself
in a sort of spiral that is necessary for good kneading. If that’s the case, get it
out onto the counter and knead for 8 minutes by hand.
I’ll link to the detailed instructions on kneading pasta dough below this video. This
dough is turning out beautifully. It’s tacky, but not sticky, and smooth as a baby’s butt.
Sprinkle it with flour, wrap in plastic, and let it rest at room temperature for at least
30 minutes and up to several hours. This will let the gluten relax, so that the dough won’t
shrink too much when we try to roll it out.
Cut the dough into 4 pieces and keep 3 of them wrapped tightly in plastic while working
with the 4th piece. Flatten out the piece of dough and sprinkle it generously with flour
on both sides. Roll it out to the thickness of about 4mm. Put it through a pasta machine
on the thickest setting.
Then we need to do the letter turn 3 to 4 times. This will help us get the right width,
the right texture, and it will help us get rid of any air bubbles in the dough. Fold
the dough into thirds, flatten it out, reflour, and feed it back through the machine. We are
still on the thickest setting. At some point during all this folding, I encountered the
problem that so many of you write to me about. You see this chewed up texture. That’s either
because I didn’t use enough flour or didn’t roll out my dough thinly enough before feeding
it through the machine. It’s very easily fixed. Just refold, reflour, reroll, and refeed.
I’ll try to roll it a bit thinner with my rolling pin. Do this a couple of times and
you’ll be back in business.
The cookie cutter we’ll use is 8.5cm in diameter. I find that you need this big size
to fit a good bit of blueberries, which will produce that awesome blueberry explosion.
To reduce the amount of scraps, shoot for your ribbon to be close to the size of your
cookie cutter before you start thinning it out. On my machine, 1 is the thickest setting
and 8 is the thinnest. Today we are going to setting 5, but we can’t just jump there
or our dough could rip. We have to go through all the settings one at a time. If at any
point, your dough feels at all sticky, add more flour. In case your machine settings
are different from mine, my final thickness is about 2mm.
As soon as you roll this first piece of dough, you need to cut it and fill it. If you let
it sit, it will dry up. Place it on a cutting board that is generously sprinkled with semola
flour or just plain old flour if you don’t have semola. I find that semola is better
at reducing sticking than all-purpose, but both will work. You’ll probably have to
cut your ribbon in half to make it fit on the board.
Cut out the circles leaving no space between them to maximize how many you’ll get. The
basic principle is the same as with all filled pastas. Lots of flour under the dough, but
no flour on top of the dough. This will help your dough seal together. Collect the scraps,
smoosh them together, wrap tightly in plastic and keep adding to this ball of scraps as
you roll out the rest of the dough. In the end, these scraps can be rerolled. You can
skip the folding step with them since they were already folded plenty and floured plenty.
I know that reusing the scraps seems wrong. Wouldn’t they feel way dryer due to all
that extra flour that was worked into them. Yes, they feel drier, but it all works out.
After cooking, no one will ever know.
Unless you are very fast at shaping, I suggest you cover most of your circles with plastic
so that they don’t dry up. Our first dumpling is a dry run. It will help us figure out how
many blueberries we need and how much sugar we’ll need. I’ll try around 7 blueberries
and ¼ teaspoon of sugar. Let’s see if we can seal it without ripping it. This feels
like roughly the right amount of blueberries. If we don’t put in enough. The dumplings
won’t be juicy, and if we put in too much, the dough might rip, so you’ll need to experiment.
When your dumpling is done, place it on a parchment or foil lined baking sheet that
is very generously floured. I prefer semola for this, but regular flour works too.
Now that we know that we’ll need around 7 blueberries, let’s do a taste test. Put
7 blueberries into a small cup, add ¼ tsp of sugar and pop it in a microwave for 10-15
seconds or just until the blueberries burst. Cool it slightly and taste. See how you like
the sweetness level, and adjust as necessary for the rest of the dumplings. I feel like
¼ tsp of sugar is just right, so I’ll keep on going like this.
Here are a few shaping tips for you. If your 7 blueberries are lying on your dough in a
circle, it will be very hard to seal. What you want is about 5 blueberries on the bottom
and 2 on top. Like this.
Seal the dough in the middle and then on the sides. If any blueberries roll out, just shove
them back in. It is crucial that the dumplings are sealed tightly or they’ll burst in the
water and become a soggy watery mess. After I get the edges to connect, I go through them
one more time gently rubbing them between my thumb and index finger to seal them tightly.
If your edge curls up like this, you know it’s a good seal.
To speed things up, I usually put the filling on several circles of dough and then start
sealing them. Don’t be afraid to stretch the dough out a little. It’s very resilient.
And after you seal one side, you might want to pick up the dumpling and tilt it open-side-up
to prevent the blueberries from rolling out.
Now that my oompa-loompas came to help, we’ll be done in no time.
When you are done, you can either cook your varenyky right away or put the baking sheet
with the finished dumplings in the freezer just until they are hard, about 2 hours. Then
immediately move them into a zip lock bag and keep in the freezer until you want to
use them. If possible within a month. Moving them into a zip lock bag as soon as they freeze
is crucial. If you leave them uncovered in the freezer for too long, they’ll dehydrate
and the dough will crack.
Bring a large pot of water to almost a boil. Salt it generously, but not quite as generously
as you would for savory pasta. Bring the water to a full boil. I like to cook one dumpling
as a dry run. The bottleneck here are the blueberries. This dough is incredibly flexible
with timing. It doesn’t overcook easily. But we need to get the blueberries to start
releasing juice. It’s been about 5 minutes and it’s starting to look right. I am starting
to see a bit of pink through the dough and when I press on the bumps left by the blueberries,
they feel completely soft. Let’s cut into it and see how we are doing. There is some
juice oozing out, which is good, but my blueberries seem a tad too intact, so I think we could
use another minute of cooking. This will be very helpful information when we cook the
whole batch.
The easiest way to get them in the pot is to move them to a bowl and dump them in. I
like to use a small bowl and do this in batches so that they don’t crush each other. Ok,
we are all in. Tuck them all into the water and cover the pot until you get the boil back.
Once you get the boil back, that’s when you want to set the timer for your best guess
as to when they’ll be done. We did 5 minutes on our trial one and it looked like it could
use a bit more time, so I’ll set it for 6 minutes. For frozen ones you might need
a bit longer. That’s why it really helps to do a trial dumpling.
As you might have noticed, they like to float and to help their top cook as much as the
bottom, I like to partially cover them. You’ll need to turn down the heat so that the water
doesn’t boil out of the pot. If you see the water bubbling too much, uncover, stir,
and then cover again. I want to keep things at an energetic simmer, but not a rolling
boil.
If you see a lot of pink juice through the dough on some of them, like this one, I suggest
you get it out. Or if you see a very thin dough that is threatening to burst, it might
be best to get it out early too.
Ok, it’s been 6 minutes since we got a boil and it’s time to check them. Feels great
-- the blueberries feel completely soft, so let’s get them all out into a large pan
or bowl with 5 Tbsp of melted butter. Under no circumstances should you use a colander.
That will crush many of them, which would be very sad. Give them a gentle stir and then
make the sour cream sauce.
Put ½ cup of sour cream into a bowl. Add about ¼ cup of cooking water and a couple
teaspoons of sugar. Whisk it up and pour over the dumplings. Give them a stir and sprinkle
with a little extra sugar to taste.
The right way to eat them is to put a whole one in your mouth and let all that blueberry
juice explode. But you don’t want to burn yourself, so it’s a good idea to cut the
first one in half to test for temperature.
I can’t believe we did it! A huge thanks to my family for helping me with this project
and for taking such good care of me. And thanks to all my viewers for sending me wishes for
a speedy recovery. As we’ve learned from this video, you can take Helen out of the
kitchen, but you can’t take the kitchen out of Helen. I know the plan was to take
it easy and just work on Q&A videos, but then I saw those awesome blueberries that only
happen in Massachusetts for a few weeks a year and I couldn’t help myself.
Here are more very detailed culinary tutorials for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.