Pirojki - bread buns with potato filling

Pirojki is a good old classic. These bread buns are familiar to people who grew up in Azerbaijan & Russia as street food. Not to be confused with the polish Pierogi which are dumplings, pirojki are bread buns that can be fried or baked.

For those who never had them before it’s sort of breads with filling (it can be meat, cabbage, potatoes etc) that are popular in Azerbaijan but also in most of post-USSR space. I have watched a ton of YouTube videos of Azerbaijani and Russian grandmas until I managed to figure out somewhat accurate recipe with proportions that you all could follow, as majority of the videos I’ve watched had no measurements. Though this recipe my need some more work, i have made it a few times by now and it does work, minus some discrepancies in flour measures.

Ingredients

Filling

• 0,5 kg potatoes

• bunch of parsley

• 2 garlic cloves

• 100 grams butter

• 1 teaspoon salt

• sunflower oil for frying

Dough

• 25 grams fresh yeast

• 350 milliliters warm water

• 500 grams plain white flour

• 1 tablespoon sugar

• 2 teaspoons of salt

• 100 milliliters of sunflower oil

---

Method

1. Mix water with yeast, sugar, and a bit of flour (50 grams or so).

2. Which and leave for 20 minutes to froth.

3. Meanwhile you can start with the potato mash. Peel and boil the potatoes. In the blender blitz parsley, garlic, and salt. Mix your herbs with potatoes and butter and mash them.

4. After 20 min, add the rest of the flour (450 grams) to your yeast mix, add oil and salt and mix well.

5. Knead the dough until it stops sticking to your fingers (you might need some extra flour to ensure that the consistency is right). The dough shouldn’t be dry and should remain shiny and elastic.

6. Leave the dough for 40-60 min to rise.

7. After the dough has risen, divide it into 14 balls (you can make more depending on the size of pirojkis you want). Spoon the filling and seal the sides to make oval-shaped breads.

8. Fill in the pan with a lot of sunflower oil and drop your pirojkis into the pan. Fry for a few minutes on each side until golden.

Pirojki before being fried