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Pelmeni With Potato Filling

What you need: 

1 1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup room temperature water
2 tablespoons ground flax-seed
1 teaspoon salt
3 large potatoes
1 medium onion, chopped
handful of chopped parsley or dill
1 tablespoon vegan buttery spread (optional)
seasonings to taste

What you do: 

In a bowl beat flax-seed, salt and water.
Start adding flour, mixing with a spoon. When you feel you can handle the dough, dig in with your hands. Knead, roll into a ball and let develop for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile boil potatoes until done. Drain them and mash with chopped dill/parley, onion and vegan buttery spread (if using). Do not cook your onion or the filling will poignant. Add salt, pepper and seasonings of your choice. I like to use ‘potato seasoning’, which contains dried onion, salt, coriander etc. This should be a lot thicker and spicier than regular mashed potatoes.
Now it’s time to make Pelmeni. You can use a ravioli maker or Pelmeni maker, which is a rack with holes. You roll out half of the dough, put it on this `rack`, then put filling in holes, cover with another rolled dough and roll over. You can also make Pelmeni by hand. Use a glass to cut circles from the rolled dough, put the filling in the middle and seal the edges. Then freeze them. They keep for about 6 month that way.
COOKING:[br] Bring water to boil. Add bullion cube (or use bullion instead of water) and a halved onion. Add your pelmenis (still frozen) and stir. Cook for 15 minutes, making sure they don’t stick to the bottom, until the dough is cooked through.
Serve with sauce made of vegan mayo and mustard. Garnish with fresh parsley.

Preparation Time: 
1 hour to 30 minutes
Cooking Time: 
Servings: 
4

SO HOW'D IT GO?

Great recipe!

I was very happy to find a vegan pel'meni recipe. Having a very traditional slavic diet and Russian girlfriend, this is a good find as both of us are going vegan. I did have to use more water but otherwise the entire process went easily and yieled delicious results. I stuck to a more traditional method of preparing them, that being no bullion, no sauce and instead eating them with a hotter dry spice and sour cream. Also, as I have learned from preparing them many times before, you can eliminate the risk of overboiling and exploding the pel'meni in the water by taking them out of the water about five minutes after they start floating and then cook them in a sautee pan with sliced onions, salt, pepper and non-dairy butter or cooking oil for another five to ten minutes longer on low heat. Other traditional fillings include cabbage, mushrooms, farmer's cheese (tvorog) and cherries if you wanted to try a dessert version.

The plural form is pel'meni for those who were wondering.

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yum! these were great! i had to hand roll them with a rolling pin which was kind of a pain in the ass, but definitely worth it.  i put a ton of dill and garlic in the filling but left out the earth balance (to try and make it a bit healthier!)  i have a ton of filling leftover, so maybe only use 1-2 potatoes. nayonaise + mustard is so tasty! this is a very filling dish, i only had a few and froze the rest for another time! i'll definitely be making this again! :)

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these were ok.
i definitely should have used more spices and stuff in the filling because they came out a little bland. the mayo mustard sauce helped (it was awesome)..but they still lacked something.
i have a lot of leftover filling, so ill probably spice it up with more coriander and dill and try again. :)

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could you cook the pelminis in vegetable broth instead, if so how much..and how long to freeze them?

of course you can. the cooking time is ~15 minutes, but may vary depending on the thickness of your dough.
you freeze the leftovers (uncooked) overnight or so. when ready to eat, drop them in boiling water (still frozen) and cook. you can store them frozen for about 3-4 month.

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could you cook the pelminis in vegetable broth instead, if so how much..and how long to freeze them?

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so we made an afternoon out of it... rolled out the dough with a rolling pin, having doubled the recipe, and used various glasses to make various sized circles.  we made three different fillings, one of the potato filling (amazing!), another of sauteed portabellos, spinach, cayenne, garlic and onion (also phenomenal), and for the sweet one, we used four plums, a cup of dried tart cherries, and more or less than a half cup of sugar and cooking it all together for a while.  soooooooooooo delicious! i didn't have the vegan mayo, so we used a creamy corn and pepper soup as the sauce for the savory ones. i think we made about 50 pelmeni and ate a whole lot of it right away.  fantastic recipe! thank you so much!

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This was time consuming, but worth every second of work.  I did have to add a little more water to the dough--i couldn't get it to form a ball.  The dough was the very very firm.  I don't know if would recommend making this recipe without a pasta roller. I tried to roll it out by hand first and couldn't get it very thin with a rolling pin.  This yielded 31 pelmenis (is that the plural form?).  Next time I'll double it so I can have some on hand in the freezer.  The mustard mayo sauce was excellent on this--I had never had it before.  Thank you for the killer recipe. 

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To make this, is the flax-seed crucial? Could I possibly use some other alternative or something?

the flax works as an 'egg', so it's very important, otherwise the dough won't stick together. you could use any other egg substitutes (no soda), but i don't know the amount you have to use.

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photo

I could've eaten a scrumptious meal, but looking at your photos make me hungry! You should seriously get copyrights to publish the photos alongside the recipes and make the non-vegan world drool with jealousy. I'm sure the original recipe submitters would be happy to have their names in a cookbook with your photos... P.S. if you ever did that, please let me know!!!

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