At the handful of restaurants that serve Polish (or Polish-adjacent) food in the Bay Area, you may encounter a few common threads.
Maybe fat pierogi smothered in sauteed onions and butter; smoky kielbasa stewed with wild game meat and shredded cabbage; or mashed potatoes and sauerkraut with pork chops pounded thin and breaded. In San Francisco, Cafe Europa and Dear Inga can make your table groan under the weight of all their big, protein-rich dishes.
But “Fresh From Poland,” the debut vegetarian cookbook by food writer Michał Korkosz, offers a less bloody take on the cuisine. Nary a lamb shank nor smoked link appear in its pages.
Born and raised in Poland, Korkosz has set out to reveal another side of his home cuisine. In the introduction, he writes, “It’s true that in the canon of Polish cuisine there are truly stunning meat-based dishes, but here I would like to show my homeland from a different angle. Our valleys are rich in wonderful vegetables and fruits, the culture of dairy products and fermented foods is incredibly advanced, and the number of grain-based dishes is countless.” In fact, Poland’s history as a Catholic country did much to advance the populace’s understanding of vegetarian cooking; he pegs the first documented vegetarian Polish recipe to the year 1567.
Americans’ perception of Polish food as a meaty one has a lot to do with the reasons why we think of bulgogi as a typical Korean dish, or of barbacoa as emblematic of how Mexicans eat. For centuries, immigrants to the United States have imagined what it would be like to become American, to become rich — to eat meat multiple times a week. And as other countries get richer, they tend to follow suit. Cookbooks like this one, Luz Calvo and Catriona Esquibel’s “Decolonize Your Diet,” and Bryant Terry’s “Vegetable Kingdom” disentangle perception from historical reality and show us that vegetarian and vegan cooking are much more common around the world than American restaurant menus tend to suggest.
The sheer plethora and diversity of recipes in this 246-page cookbook are a testament to that. The recipes are divvied up into eight sections, ranging from soups to preserves to filling main dishes. Traditional dishes like hunter’s stew and stuffed cabbage make their appearances, though Korkosz, who writes about a variety of cuisines on his food blog, Rozkoszny, is very open to foreign influence, especially in the realm of spices. The chapter on pierogi includes the crowd favorite of dumplings stuffed with mashed potato and onion, but his other fillings include lentils with cumin and coriander, and blueberries with cardamom “to give it a bit of a fairy-tale flavor.”
You could eat a whole tasting menu of vegetarian pierogi, down to dessert, from the recipes here. And their making, from kneading the wrapper dough to assembling the fillings, is a meditative way to spend an afternoon at home. (In a pinch, or if you have too much leftover filling and not enough motivation to make more dough, you can use thick-cut Chinese dumpling wrappers. Don’t tell him I told you that.)
I usually skim the soup sections of cookbooks, but Korkosz’s soups — coupled with eye-catching food styling in vintage ceramic floral bowls — stopped me in my tracks. His base vegetable broth recipe is unique, calling for the browning of root vegetables in butter spiced with allspice, peppercorns and cloves before hitting the pot with water. It adds a depth and richness to the soup recipes that suggest Christmas, or at least the lingering scents from the day after. I also loved his Chilled Beet Soup, which seems like a project recipe but really isn’t: You boil beets and get some garnishes ready. But the outcome, a bowl of soup tinted a bright magenta from a base of beet juice, sour cream and kefir, is stunning to look at and just as perfect to eat on a hot summer day. Grated cucumber, chopped radish and boiled potatoes grant the soup layers of texture — think of a chopped salad with lots and lots of extra dressing.
The styling in this book is one of its strongest points; you can tell from all the mismatched bowls and cake plates that Korkosz is a regular at the thrift store. But it makes sense, considering how much he dips into nostalgia here, frequently citing his grandmother’s and mother’s cooking as an inspiration.
This is one of those rare cookbooks where every recipe is easy to deal with, yet heavy on impact. Korkosz’s recipes include a time estimate that I generally found to be accurate. Most of his side dishes are easy enough to bang out in 20 minutes or less, so you can likely pull together a handful of them to go with a bigger centerpiece at the last minute.
The one thing I had trouble with was measurements, though this is less his problem than ... America’s? For some recipes, like the Russian pierogi filling, I realized that his understanding of what three potatoes or onions looked like was different from mine: The specimens you can find at American grocery stores are likely to be monsters in comparison to what he’s talking about, so go by weight, not count.
But it’s not a huge problem, as Korkosz gently encourages his readers to take his recipes more as suggestions than dogma: to cook “instinctively” and seasonally. So if you ended up with a bunch of celery root from your CSA box, why not substitute it for potatoes? Not everyone lives so close to Seakor Polish Deli on Geary Boulevard, either, so if you end up having to pass on the Polish farmer cheese, surely you can find something suitable at your local grocery store.
What Korkosz is hoping to imprint on his readers — and what he achieves with this book — is bigger than codifying the pierogi, anyway. This collection makes it clear that when you think of the food of Poland, you can and should think beyond its typical, front-facing dishes: Think of tomatoes and horseradish, pastries smeared with rose petal jam, and pierogi stuffed with the sun-ripened flavors of summer.
“Fresh From Poland: New Vegetarian Cooking from the Old Country” (The Experiment, 2020, $19.95), by Michał Korkosz.
Soleil Ho is The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic. Email: soleil@sfchronicle.com
Blueberry Pierogi With Honeyed Sour Cream
Makes about 40 pierogi, or 4 servings. Prep time: 30 minutes. Cook time: 15 minutes
This recipe (and the accompanying recipe for the dough) were printed with permission from “Fresh From Poland: New Vegetarian Cooking from the Old Country” (The Experiment, 2020, $19.95), by Michał Korkosz. He writes that Polish summer feels like hot days, strong sunlight and walks to the farmers’ market for jars of wild blueberries. Then lazily making pierogi, stuffing them with as many blueberries as possible, trying not to stain your fingers with the sweet purple juice flowing out of them.
Note: In the summer, the Polish countryside is studded with jagody, also known as wild blueberries or bilberries. For a taste of Poland, use bilberries instead of blueberries, if you can find them!
1 pound blueberries, fresh or thawed frozen, plus more for serving
1 tablespoon cornstarch
4 tablespoons honey, plus more for serving
¾ teaspoon ground cardamom
Basic pierogi dough (see accompanying recipe)
1 cup sour cream or crème fraîche
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Instructions: Combine the blueberries, cornstarch, 3 tablespoons of the honey and the cardamom in a large bowl. At this point, prepare the Basic Pierogi Dough (see accompanying recipe) and follow directions for filling and cooking the pierogi.
While the pierogi are cooking, beat the sour cream, vanilla and the remaining 1 tablespoon honey together until slightly fluffy, about 5 minutes.
Divide the cooked pierogi among plates and top with the sour cream, additional blueberries, and honey.
Basic Pierogi Dough
Makes 50 pierogi, 4 to 6 servings
The consistency is the most important part — sometimes you have to sprinkle the dough with more flour or add a little water to achieve a nice ball. Practice makes perfect.
3½ cups (450 g) all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading and holding
1 teaspoon salt
¼ cup cold-pressed rapeseed oil or extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon sunflower oil
Instructions: Combine the flour and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, combine the rapeseed oil and 1 cup warm water. Slowly add the liquid ingredients to the flour and mix with a wooden spoon until the dough is well combined. Turn the dough out onto a clean, lightly floured surface and knead for 4 to 5 minutes, until it is smooth and supple. Invert a bowl over the dough and let it rest at room temperature for at least 15 minutes to allow the gluten to relax.
Divide the dough into three equal pieces. Place one piece on a lightly floured surface. (Cover the remaining dough with a clean kitchen towel to keep it from drying out.) Using a rolling pin, roll out the dough to a thickness of just less than ⅛ inch, lifting up the dough to dust the surface with flour to prevent sticking, if needed.
Using a pastry cutter or inverted glass tumbler, cut out 2½-inch diameter circles of dough. Roll out the circles even thinner, to 3 inches in diameter. Gather the dough scraps into a ball and set aside. Continue with the other two pieces of dough, and the combined scraps, until all dough is used, making 30 to 50 circles.
Put 1 to 2 tablespoons filling in the center of each round, leaving a ¾-inch (2 cm) border. Grasp the dough from opposite ends and pull it up and over the filling, pressing down to seal the edges together and creating a semicircle. Pinch the edges together to seal completely. If the edges don’t adhere, brush them lightly with water, then seal. Do not leave any gaps or the pierogi may open during cooking.
Transfer the pierogi to a lightly floured kitchen towel and cover with another towel to prevent drying. Continue until all the dough is used.
Boil a large pot of salted water and add the sunflower oil. Working in batches, use a slotted spoon to gently lower 10 to 15 pierogi at a time into the pot. When the pierogi rise to the surface, continue to cook them for 1 to 2 minutes more, then transfer with the spoon to a colander to drain immediately.
Note: Uncooked pierogi can be stored for up to 2 months. Freeze on baking sheets for about 1 hour, then transfer to a resealable plastic bag. Boil them straight from the freezer, adding 2 minutes to the overall cooking time.
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