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My Homemade Food Recipes & Tips

Fresh Cheese Dumplings (Varenyky with Cheese)

April 17th, 2010 in Main Dishes, No-meat by
Total cooking time: 2h

There is more than one recipe for varenyky dumplings on this website, if you are looking for some other recipe, try here: all dumplings recipes.

Fresh Cheese Dumplings

Varenyky with fresh cheese (perogies or vareniki or vareniky with fresh cheese) is one of the traditional Ukrainian dishes for dumplings. You will need fresh white cow milk cheese (quark) to prepare those, which can be a bit hard to find (try some east european store, if that is the case).

To your taste, you can make these dumplings sweet (by adding sugar to cheese) or savory (skip sugar in the filling all together); either kind will taste great with sour cream.

Prepared not boiled fresh cheese dumplings can be frozen up and boiled when you need them; which makes them perfect food for lunch. Boiled dumplings maybe be stored in a fridge and warmed up by frying with a bit of butter over moderate heat.

With described ingredients you will make about 55 dumplings.

Ingredients:


How to prepare, step-by-step:

  1. Prepare ingredients:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 1
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 1
  2. Let’s make dough first. You can find more detailed step-by-step guide on How to Prepare Dough for Dumplings in my previous post, in short words just follow the instructions: salt water and mix it all with some amount of flour, then keep adding flour till the moment dough stops sticking to the hands and knead it until it gets elastic (amount of dough you get really depends of amount of water you use, so if you want to prepare more – just increase amount of water and just keep adding flour); then cover dough with plastic and leave for 15-20 mins:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 2s
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 2
  3. Now it is turn for the filling. Mash fresh white cheese in a bowl with fork or potato masher. Add salt (I usually put about ½ of tbs), sugar to taste and an egg:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 3
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 3
  4. Mix it good:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 4
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 4
  5. Then let’s roll the dough. The most important part here is to roll it very-very thin and it may be hard to do. So take about ¼ of all dough (or even smaller), knead it several times on a floured wooden board, flour dough a bit if it keeps sticking to the hands. Then flatten it with your hands (don’t forget to cover rest of the dough with plastic again, to prevent it from drying):
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 5
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 5
  6. Flour rolling pin from each side and start rolling the dough from the middle to the sides with some force:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 6
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 6
  7. Keep rolling dough from the middle to each side until it gets evenly very thin, if it is hard for you to get whole piece of dough thin – just do as thin as you can and then roll each “dough circle” once again before you fill it with cheese, just to make sure it is thin enough:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 7
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 7
  8. Take thin side glass about 2.5 inch in diameter, dip it into flour for about ¼ of inch. Then cut rolled dough into circles with that glass:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 8
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 8
  9. Remove the cut off dough (you may use it combined with next portion of the dough and roll again, if needed):
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 9
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 9
  10. These circles you got, you will use to make dumplings (“varenyky”), if you see the dough wasn’t rolled thin enough – just roll each circle with a rolling pin to make it thinner:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 10
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 10
  11. To prepare dumpling: take one dough circle and arrange about teaspoon of the filling in the center of it:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 11
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 11
  12. Fold circle in half:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 12
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 12
  13. Stick opposite sides of the dough together with your fingers:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 13
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 13
  14. Continue till the end:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 14
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 14
  15. Then flour dumpling from each side:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 15
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 15
  16. Repeat steps 5-15 for all dough and stuffing, stack prepared dumplings up on the floured wooden board (at this point you can choose either to proceed with the cooking or freeze dumplings up for later use):
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 16
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 16
  17. And by the way, often happen what you got some dough left when the filling is gone. Then you can choose to make some empty dumplings like the following, and just boil them with the rest (I loved those when I was a kid). To prepare those just get dough circle and pull opposite sides of it with your pointing finger and thumb towards each other until it forms a bow:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 17
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 17
  18. Now it is a time to boil dumplings (you can boil dumplings frozen from before too). Fill a big cooking pot with water and bring to boil, salt to taste. Then put a portion of dumplings into the water:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 18
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 18
  19. Let dumplings to boil until dumplings come to the surface (make sure water isn’t boiling too much), then boil for 2 more minutes and get them out of the water with skimmer:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 19
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 19
  20. Put cooked dumplings into the bowl and smear with butter:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 20
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings Recipe: Step 20
  21. Serve fresh cheese dumplings warm with a side of sour cream:
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings
    Fresh Cheese Dumplings
Enjoy!

3 Responses to “Fresh Cheese Dumplings (Varenyky with Cheese)”

  1. Cremilda S.deOliveira says:

    Gostei muito da receita, eu já faço Vareneky a muito tempo,
    Uma prima me ensinou, e como vou recebê-la; queria ver se
    Caso eu tinha total domínio da receita. Acertei, mas. Foi
    Muito bom conhecê-los. Gostaria de consulta-los sempre
    .muito obrigado.

    Cremilda

  2. Tatiana says:

    You are the best Ukrainian food site on the web.
    Every time I try making these- they dont wanna stick together… ever… ANy ideas?? My grandma did not seem to have this problem ever… Maybe flour here is “funny”…
    Were you born in the states? YOu seem to have a profound knkowledge of our traditional food.. Just like my grandma used to make. and no b-s.:):)
    DO you have a recipe for yeast poppy seed rolls? or Paska?
    Kind regards,
    TAtiana

    • Do you mean that dough doesn’t stick together when you make a dumpling? It might be because of too much flour in the dough (as you mentioned flour may be a bit “funny”, are you using all purpose flour?) – it will also make dough stiff after dumplings are boiled. Try either reducing flour, or use a bit of kefir instead of portion of water when making dough. Or you can water inside edges of the dough circle when making a dumpling it will help it to be sticky.

      I was born in Ukraine (the USSR’s republic a that time), so that is why I know about traditional food of Ukraine, and Russia, and some others parts of USSR. I will have a recipe for Hala on one of upcoming saturdays (have pictures already, just need to process them and write the recipe up). Hala is yeast poppy seed sweet bread-like baking thing, you can also make it as hala rolls :). I never did Paska to be honest, maybe one day…

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