Name: How Pierogis Are Keeping Eastern European Comfort Food Alive | Food Skills
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T05:13:05.000Z
Duration: 2 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

My name is Tom Birchard, and I am the proud owner of Veselka restaurant on the corner

A pierogi is an Eastern European dumpling made with a simple dough wrapper and a simple

It can be filled with potato, meat, cabbage, or cheese.

It's the Eastern European equivalent of a ravioli or a Chinese dumpling.

I think every culture has a form of dumpling that they're known for.

The pierogi recipe goes back to when I first came here in the '60s.

The process starts with making a large vat of dough, similar to pizza dough.

We run it through a machine called a sheeter that rolls it out into a fairly thin sheet.

We take that sheet, put it on a table, and then cut disks out of it.

We're left with a table full of these disks, and then we put the stuffing in.

We make 2,000-3,000 a day, so it's a lot of hand work.

The pierogis have to be boiled to seal them, but they're not completely cooked.

They're cooled, packed in containers, and held until they come upstairs for final preparation,

which involves another round of boiling or frying until they're tender.

Then they're served with sour cream and sautéed onions.

That part of Western Ukraine was governed by several different political groups.

What we call Ukranian food, other people would call Polish food, some people would call it

It's really, really well known and loved in New York, and by some people around the

Over the years I've been concerned that this cuisine would fall out of favor eventually,

Non-Eastern European or non-Jewish people really feel an affinity for this food.

So that's really gratifying to me—to satisfy that yearning for grandma's cooking.