Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings
August 27th, 2011 in Main Dishes, No-meat by Julia Volhina
I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw sour cherries (pitted!) in the Andersons grocery store. It doesn’t happen that often to me here, in US. So I couldn’t simply leave that store without my portion of sour cherries…
Of course, we enjoyed them plain with a bit of sugar, and also made some cherries with whipped cream dessert, however most of sour cherries went to ukrainian sour cherry dumplings – “varenyky (vareniky) z vyshniamy”, and for this one we made plenty of pictures.
With mentioned amount of ingredients you will get about 50-60 dumplings. Most probably you will not need to cook all of them right away – so just freeze remaining potion of dumplings for later use (first put wooden board with dumplings to the fridge until dumplings are frozen, then move them to a ziploc bag and store frozen). Frozen dumplings can be boiled right before serving, just like you usually do it.
Ingredients:
- 2lb of sour cherries, pitted
- 1/2 cup of sugar
- 1-2 table spoons of butter
For dough:
1 cup of milk- 1 egg
- 3-4 cups of all purpose flour
- 2 tbsp of vegetable oil
- Salt
How to prepare, step-by-step:
-
Prepare ingredients: I was happy to get already pitted sour cherries, if you are less lucky than me pit sour cherries (it takes time):
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 1 -
Pour pitted sour cherries into a sieve and put it into a big bowl, pour all sugar over and set aside (sour cherries will produce juice, that is why we need that bowl):
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 2 -
Now it is time to prepare dumplings dough (I recap the method here, read how to make dumplings dough with milk and egg for more details):
Mix milk, salt and oil in a cooking pot; bring to boil, then add 1/2 cup of flour:
Mix milk, oil and salt in cooking pot 
Bring to boil 
Remove from burner, mix flour in 
Cool down and mix an egg in 
Start adding flour 
Until it becomes thick 
Knead more flour in 
Until it doesn't stick to hands anymore 
Then cover with plastic wrap
-
Roll a piece of dough thin (you will need to repeat next 3 steps for all dough you have):
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 4 -
Take thin side glass about 2.5 inch in diameter, dip it into flour for about 1/4 of inch; then cut rolled dough into circles with that glass:
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 5 -
Remove the cut off dough (you may use it combined with next portion of the dough and roll again):
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 6 -
Mix sour cherries and sugar in a sieve, remove produced juice (it it not needed for this recipe, however it tastes great when mixed with a bit of sugar and boiled water):
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 7 -
Assemble dumplings using all dough and all filling, for that:
Put a teaspoon of cherry sugar mix in the middle of a dough circle 
Fold dough circle in half, arrange edges together 
Carefully pat edges together with your fingers
Seal it good, make sure there is no holes 
Dust each dumpling with flour and put on the wooden board 
Repeat with rest of the the dough and filling
-
Now it is time to boil sour cherry dumplings (freeze remaining dumplings and store in freezer in ziploc bag for later use). To cook sour cherry dumplings bring a big pot of water to boil, salt to taste and put dumplings in:
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 9 -
Boil dumplings over moderate heat until they come to the surface:
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 10 -
Then move ready sour cherry dumplings to a big bowl with a skimmer:
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 11 -
Grease with butter so dumplings don’t stick to each other:
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 12 -
Serve warm with a table spoon or two of sour cream (and if you don’t like sour taste dust cooked dumplings with a bit of sugar to taste):
Ukrainian Sour Cherry Dumplings (Varenyky z Vyshniamy) Recipe: Step 13
Очень интересно, я не пробовала делать вареники с заварным тестом.
You can often find sour cherries in the freezer section of the supermarket, labeled “pie cherries”. I use them in a lot of different recipes. They often have better flavor, even, than the containers of fresh sour cherries.
Thanks 🙂
I live in Ukraine 2 years now,here we also make vareniky with cleaned sour cherries but NOT pitted.
The dough is similar but here we put 3-4 cherries and the juice is preserved within the dough.
When ready,dip in sugar and eat carefully (so juicy)
Such cherry trees you can find here everywhere also apricot and walnut trees.
It was hard to find any kind of sour cherry in US for me, let alone finding whole sour cherries to clean myself.
I am amazed that such cherries are so hard to find in US.
Hi Julia! /you can find canned sour cherries (I use the Oregon brand) in the canned fruit of your grocery store. I haven’t found frozen sour cherries anywhere, not even Trader Joe’s nor natural foods stores.
Another source I found on the Internet, which were described as better than cherry pie filling, is to rinse the cherries in the pie filling to wash off the filling.
My Costco store sells 5-lbs bags of tart pitted cherries that look like Bing cherries! I was very pleased and a pie I baked with both these cherries and Oregon was very tasty and there were different textures that made the pie more interesting.
I found frozen sour cherries at Anderson’s.
They look just delicious.