Today, we are making pirozhki. Nope, not pierogi, pirozhki. Ok, let’s have a little Russian
lesson. Pirozhki means little pies. It’s the plural form of the word pirozhok. And
they shouldn’t be confused with the Polish pierogi, which is a boiled pasta dish. Pirozhki
can be made out of yeasted or puff pastry dough, they can be baked or fried, and they
can be stuffed with sweet or savory fillings. The ones we are making today are the most
common type. Yeasted dough that is baked. By the way, if you feel that I talk too much,
look below this video for a timestamp of when the action starts.
Given my accent you probably expect that I am going to share my family’s recipe with
you. Unfortunately not. In the US most Russian people including my parents make them with
pre-made pillsbury biscuit dough. When we immigrated from the former Soviet Union, my
parents were working very hard just to keep the roof over our head and food on the table.
There was no time to make your own dough. Pillsbury was cheap and available, so that’s
what we used. Eventually, we started having more time to spend in the kitchen and we did
have a few attempts at homemade dough, but they always backfired. The flour was different.
The yeast was different. The salt was different. And so back to Pillsbury we went.
Since I am primarily a cook and not a baker, I didn’t mess around with this dish until
a few years ago. I tried using brioche dough, but it was never quite right. And then one
day, I discovered Alex & Milana. It’s a Russian YouTube channel where a young woman
named Milana, who is a professional pastry chef in Moscow, makes absolutely incredible
baked goods. I mean stuff like this! Yeah. Well, lots of people on YouTube make stuff
like this, but what’s so amazing about Milana is that she does not skimp on detail. She
shows every step, explains every nuance, and gives weight measurements for everything.
Milana’s pirozhki video was just the push I needed to revisit this dish from my childhood.
It took 3 tries and a lot of adjustments, but the final result was out of this world.
Have you ever wondered why your Italian grandma’s pizza recipe didn’t work for you in the
US? Or maybe you studied abroad and got a great cake recipe from your host family. You
followed the recipe to the T and it still was a bust. I feel your pain. I’ve never
had any luck adopting baking recipes until now. Milana’s pirozhki dough is the very
first successful baking translation in my life and I thought you might be interested
not only in the recipe, but also in the adjustments that made it work in another country.
The first ingredient that I had to figure out was salt. There was absolutely no way
for me to use 1 tsp of salt measurement Milana gave in her recipe because our salts are different.
Instead, I took the salt measurement from my brioche dough. I don’t mean literally
took the same number. I mean the same percentage of salt by weight relative to the weight of
other ingredients. The more difficult adjustment was flour. It actually took a few tries to
get it right and I ended up using way way less flour to produce the same texture of
dough as Milana’s video showed. I hear that’s not uncommon. Many professional European and
Japanese bakers told me that they had to drop the flour amount in their baked goods to make
them work in the US.
At this point I could stop tinkering. I had a functional dough with excellent texture,
but I was looking for a bit more flavor complexity. As far as yeast doughs go, this one has a
short rising time. In this kind of dough you can’t rely on fermentation to give you any
interesting flavors. So here is what I decided to do. To increase acidity and sweetness,
I replaced milk with buttermilk and increased the sugar amount to match my brioche dough.
The results were absolutely mouthwatering. So, in case you want to reconsider that foreighn
recipe you gave up on, I hope you now have a better idea of what to do with salt and
flour.
Ok, enough talking let’s make the dough. Combine 100g of heavy cream and 220g of buttermilk
and heat them in a microwave or on the stove top to somewhere between 105 and 110F. You
want it to feel like a hottub, but I strongly suggest you use a thermometer so that you
don’t damage your yeast. Pour in 14 grams of active dry yeast or 10 grams of SAF instant
yeast. Stir and wait 10 minutes for yeast to dissolve. No it won’t bubble up. We are
not proofing it, just hydrating it.
While our yeast is hydrating, measure your dry ingredients into a bowl of a stand mixer
or any large bowl if you want to make the dough by hand. We’ll need 450g unbleached
all-purpose flour. I am using King Arthur brand. 1 Tbsp Diamond Crystal Kosher salt
(or 1 and a half teaspoons of table salt), and 40 grams of granulated sugar. Whisk the
dry ingredients to combine. If you have a mixer, this dough is a breeze to make, but
today I will make it by hand for all my viewers who don’t have expensive mixers. If you
are making the dough by hand, make a well in the middle. If you are using a mixer, no
need for the well.
It’s been 10 minutes. Our yeast has dissolved and we are ready to proceed. Add 40 grams
of warm, but not hot melted butter and 36 grams of yolks (that should be 2 yolks, but
if your yolks aren’t quite 36 grams, add water, milk, or buttermilk to make up the
difference). It’s ok if your yolks are from the fridge. The other ingredients will warm
them up.
Mix up all the wet stuff and pour it into the well of dry ingredients. If you are using
a mixer, attach a dough hook, start mixing on low speed and dump in all your wet ingredients.
Gradually incorporate flour until it’s all absorbed and a dough forms. If you are using
a mixer, wait for the dough to form, then crank up the speed to medium-low (2 on kitchenaid)
and knead for 6 minutes scraping down and rearranging the dough after the first 3 minutes.
My dough is starting to feel too stiff for a fork, so I’ll start kneading by hand.
Fold toward you, press, and rotate the bowl with the other hand. Keep folding and rotating
in the same direction. At this point, all the flour is absorbed and our dough is ready
for a work out. Turn it out onto a clean work surface. No need to add flour. This is not
a very sticky dough. And knead it for 10 minutes. If you’ve never kneaded anything by hand,
this is a great first dough because it’s not as stiff as pasta, but is not as sticky
as baguette or brioche. Just fold it toward you and rotate after each fold. Pick a direction
and stick with it. The goal is to wrap the dough around itself increasing its ability
to stretch without ripping. It’s normal for it to stick a little in the beginning,
but as you develop more gluten by kneading, the dough should stop sticking. If you are
sticking after 2 minutes of kneading, add a little flour to your work surface.
Form the dough into a tight ball, place it into a lightly oiled bowl smooth side up and
oil the top a bit. Cover with plastic and let it rise until it triples or even quadruples
in size. This will take 1 to 2 hours depending on the temperature of your kitchen. Since
my kitchen is very cold in winter, I place a pan of boiling water on the bottom of the
oven and place the bowl with the dough on a rack above it.
It’s been about an hour and a half and our dough is huge and bubbly. Let’s release
it from the sides of the bowl and turn it out onto a work surface. We want to remove
as many bubbles as possible. To do that, I will fold it like a letter this way, and then
fold it again like a letter the other way. The next step is portioning. Let’s divide
the dough into 40g pieces and roll them into balls. Keep all the pieces covered at all
time unless you are working with them. This dough can dry out very quickly. To form balls,
flatten out each piece. Fold it towards the middle like a dumpling, flip it over and roll
pressing hard with the palm of your hand. Once all your pieces are rolled into balls,
it’s time to roll them out and fill them.
Working with one ball at a time, place it smooth side down onto a lightly floured surface
and pat it flat with your hand. Add a little flour on top so that the dough doesn’t stick
to the rolling pin. Roll it out until very thin. Make sure you either rotate the dough
or the rolling pin to keep the shape even and round. A 40g piece should become about
5 and half inches in diameter and be this thick. Add the filling of your choice. Today
I am using caramelized cabbage and mushroom duxelles. Yes, the very ones I just made videos
about. You want the filling to be slightly oblong since pirozhki are usually formed into
a boat shape. Pirozhki are not stuffed bread. They should feel more like a very thin pastry
with a lot of filling. Moral of the story is don’t skimp on the filling.
Pinch the dough together to seal it.
I like to go through it one more time adding little folds to the seam to help it stay together.
You might find some other way to seal them tightly. But it needs to be tight because
they like to open up. When finished place the pirozhok on a parchment lined baking sheet.
Let me show you a mushroom one too. I know it’s not instagramable, but this is mushroom
lovers dream. I’ve only had mushroom pirozhoki once in my childhood, but they left such an
impression on me that they remain my favorite to this day. Followed by cabbage and only
then by potato. I mean potato is good, but it’s carbs with carbs, so it’s not very
interesting.
Keeping the seal closed is the hardest part of this dish for me. Since I’ve struggled
with it so much, I think I should tell you what I’ve learned from my experiments. I’ve
tried brushing the edges of the dough circles with water and with egg and that didn’t
help. The solution that finally worked was chilling the filling before using it. If the
filling is at all warm or even room temperature, the dough rises too quickly and the seam comes
undone. Another thing that helped was reducing the amount of flour in the dough to make it
stickier. The dough recipe I gave you today is the one that worked well for me. But your
humidity conditions might be different. Your flour might be different, so if you are having
a hard time sealing them, make a note in your recipe to reduce flour by 10 to 20 grams next
time you make this dish. But also don’t panic if they open a bit. These fillings aren’t
wet. They’ll stay in even if the seam opens a bit.
Place your pirozhki seam side down on a parchment lined baking sheet leaving roughly 1 and half
inches between them. Cover them with plastic and let them sit in a warm humid place about
30 minutes or until they puff up just a little. Don’t expect them to double or anything
like that. This dough is very thin. The full batch of dough will produce 20 pirozhki, so
while the first 10 are rising you can work on shaping the next 10.
If your only warm and humid place is your turned off oven with a pan of boiling water,
you might only want to use it for 20 minutes as a proofing box because at some point you
will need to preheat it. So don’t forget to get the baking sheet and the pan of water
out of your oven before you turn it on. This also means that the second baking sheet doesn’t
really get a warm and humid place. I just let it rise a bit longer near the oven.
Preheat the oven to 400F. When it’s ready to go, whisk together 1 yolk and 1 Tbsp heavy
cream.
Brush each pirozhok with this egg wash. Be careful not to drip too much on the cookie
sheet.
Bake them in the middle of 400 degree oven just until they turn golden brown. This will
take 10 to 15 minutes depending on your oven. At 10 minutes, I like to check the dough on
the bottom. If you find that the bottom is browning faster than the top, you can insulate
the bottom by placing another baking sheet underneath.
As soon as the pirozhki are out, brush them with melted butter. Wait 10 minutes and dig
in. They are the best when they are still warm. I know. My food styling leaves much
to be desired. I was shooting this video on a snow day while the kids were home and most
of my energy was spent on trying to protect my pirozhki long enough to take a few pictures.
Once we unleashed the hungry hords on them, they were inhaled almost instantly. In case
you have more self control than we do and have leftovers, here is how to store them.
Since the fillings are perishable, it’s best NOT to keep pirozhki at room temperature
longer than 4 hours. The good news is that they can be cooled, refrigerated in an airtight
container overnight, and then rewarmed. To do that, preheat the oven to 400F, wrap a
single layer of pirozhki in foil and bake for 8-10 minutes or just until hot. Not quite
as amazing as just baked, but close.
The recipe for the dough and fillings are below. Yes, I now provide complete written
recipes, so there is absolutely no excuse not to bake something.
Here are more very detailed cooking 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.