· 6 min read
Pirozhki in London: A Guide to the Fillings
Six fillings, and people are rarely neutral about any of them. What each one actually tastes like and which to order if you have never had one.
A pirozhok is a small hand pie. Soft enriched dough wrapped around a filling, baked until golden, eaten with your hands. Across Russia, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics they are what people eat between meals, on trains, at markets and in school canteens, and almost everybody who grew up with them has a filling they defend.
We make six. This is what is in each of them.
The dough, which people underestimate
Before the fillings, a word about what surrounds them, because a pirozhok is not a pasty and the difference is the dough.
A pasty uses shortcrust, which is flour and fat, and it bakes to a firm crumbly shell. Pirozhki use a yeasted enriched dough, closer to a soft bread roll, with milk, egg and a little butter and sugar in it. It is proved, shaped around the filling and proved again before baking.
The result is soft rather than crisp. It gives under your thumb. It does not shatter, it does not flake over your shirt, and it stays pleasant to eat cold the next day, which shortcrust does not.
If you were expecting something like a Cornish pasty, adjust. This is a filled bun.
Cabbage and egg
The one most people name first, and the one that is hardest to buy in London.
The cabbage is braised slowly, on its own, until it has collapsed and gone sweet. This is the entire job. Boiled cabbage is watery and sulphurous and makes a dull pirozhok, and there is no way to rescue it later. Properly cooked down it turns soft, faintly sweet and savoury at once.
Chopped hard boiled egg goes in with it, which sounds odd to anyone who has not had it and is completely standard across the region. The egg adds body and takes the edge off the cabbage.
Six for £22. If someone has asked you to bring pirozhki and given no further instruction, bring these.
Potato and onion
The plainest of the six and the one people quietly go back to.
Mashed potato, seasoned properly, with onion fried until golden before it goes in. Raw onion stirred through mash produces something bland and slightly harsh, so the frying is not optional.
These are cold weather food. They are what gets made when there is not much in the house, which is why they carry the particular association they do for people who grew up on them. They are also the ones children will eat without any discussion at all, which cannot be said for the liver or the cabbage.
Six for £22.
Mushroom
Mushrooms and onion, cooked down until all the water has gone and what is left is concentrated.
That reduction is the whole thing and it is why these cost more than the potato. Mushrooms are mostly water. Cook them briefly and you get a wet filling that makes the dough soggy from the inside. Cook them properly and the volume drops by more than half, leaving something dark and savoury with real depth.
This is the one we point vegetarians towards, because it has the weight that the meat fillings have and that potato and cabbage do not quite reach. It is also the filling that most often converts somebody who thought they did not care for pirozhki.
Six for £27.
Meat and cabbage
The most substantial of the six, and the one to order if these are standing in for a meal rather than sitting alongside one.
The meat is seasoned and cooked down together with the cabbage rather than layered separately. This matters. Two fillings put in side by side give you bites of one and bites of the other, and the meat juices soak into the dough at the base. Cooked as one mixture, every bite has both and the pastry stays intact.
Two of these is a proper lunch. They also go first at any gathering, so order more than you think you need.
Six for £27.
Onion and egg
Caramelised onion with chopped hard boiled egg, and it is sweeter and rounder than the cabbage version.
The onions are cooked down slowly until they are genuinely caramelised rather than merely softened, at which point they turn almost jammy. Against plain hard boiled egg the result is much richer than two such ordinary ingredients suggest.
This is the filling to offer someone who is unsure about the whole idea, because it is the most familiar tasting of the savoury ones. There is nothing in it that anyone will find strange.
Six for £22.
Liver
Not for everyone, and we make it precisely because of that.
Liver is cooked with onion and worked to a smooth, well seasoned filling rather than left coarse. Badly made, liver filling is dry and metallic and puts people off for life. Made properly it is rich, deep and savoury, and it is the reason people who want it really want it.
It is very close to impossible to buy in London. Almost every order for these comes from somebody who has been looking for a while.
If you did not grow up with them, start elsewhere. If you did, you already know. Six for £27.
Apple
The sweet one. Six small hand pies with apple and cinnamon inside, baked golden.
They exist because a whole apple pie needs plates, a knife and a person to serve it, and these need none of those. That makes them right for a lunchbox, a picnic, a children's party or an office table, where a pie mostly stays on the table looking at people.
Six for £22.
How to eat them
Warm is best. Ten minutes in a moderate oven brings back the softness of the dough and wakes up the filling. Avoid the microwave, which makes the dough tough and rubbery within about fifteen seconds.
Cold is entirely legitimate and is how most of them are actually eaten, straight from the fridge the following day. They are portable food by design.
They go with soup. In Russia and Ukraine a bowl of borscht or a clear broth with a pirozhok on the side is a normal lunch, and the soft dough is made for dipping.
They freeze well, which almost nothing else we make does. Freeze them the day they arrive, then reheat from frozen at a moderate temperature for around twenty minutes.
Ordering
Each filling comes as six pieces, from £22 to £27, and they need 48 hours notice like everything else. Full allergen information is on each product page.
Most people order two or three fillings at once, partly to cover different tastes and partly because our minimum order is £50. A sensible first order is cabbage and egg, potato and onion, and mushroom. That covers the classic, the comforting and the one with the most depth, and it will tell you quickly which camp you are in.
Delivery is £12 within SW3 and £15 across the rest of London and Surrey.
Order it for the date you need
Everything here is baked to order for your date.
48 hours notice, 72 for bread. Delivered across London and Surrey.