Pinch by pinch Perogy makers take pride in ‘baba-approved’ accolades for their handmade products By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jul. 20, 2024

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2024 (447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Have perogies, will travel.

Before establishing a bricks-and-mortar location two-and-a-half years ago, West End Pierogies owners Lorraine and David Pfeffer stayed busy building up their clientele one kilometre at a time.

First they’d spend all day and night in a Winnipeg commercial kitchen whipping up hundreds of perogies, cabbage rolls and perishke, based on recipes expertly developed decades ago by Lorraine’s paternal grandmother, Rose Bodnaruk. The married couple would then hit the road in a delivery truck laden with three packed freezer units, to hand out pre-orders to customers at designated pick-up spots in rural municipalities such as Sanford, Stonewall, Petersfield and Winnipeg Beach.

Lorraine borrows a line from Frank Sinatra to explain their early-on business approach: if they could make it there, they could make it anywhere.

“My grandma was rather famous in the Selkirk/Beausejour area for her perogies and she used to tell us that because people in the country are used to making everything themselves, they tend to be a lot pickier,” she says, seated next to David in a shared office at their 1,200-square-foot premises, which opened at 833 Cavalier Dr. in February 2022.

“Her rule of thumb was if you’re able to sell rural then you know you’re doing something right.”

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Lorraine guesses she was five years old when her parents began dropping her and her sister off at their grandparents’ farmstead near Highland Glen for two weeks every summer. In addition to investigating their surroundings, they would gather in the kitchen most afternoons to assist their grandmother with what Lorraine laughingly calls her “side-hustle.”

Christmas orders for perogies used to start rolling in by mid-July. According to their grandmother, whose parents left Ukraine for Canada in the 1910s, three sets of hands, even the pint-sized variety, were better than one.

“By the time I was 12 I was definitely a professional pincher,” Lorraine says with a measure of pride. “Grandma Rose, who passed away in 2002, continued making perogies into her 70s and my sister and I were still helping her right through high school.”

Lorraine went on to become a dental hygienist. She playfully pokes David in the ribs, confessing that after they tied the knot 11 years ago, she pretended to scarcely know her way around a kitchen to escape cooking. She finally came clean one evening while he was preparing a batch of frozen, store-bought perogies. You know, she murmured, whatever she came up with would be far superior to what he was about to shove down his throat.

“It was the first time I’d seen her in action and it was pretty impressive to witness,” David says. “I guess it’s like riding a bike; she was able to pinch six or seven a minute.”

Skip ahead to the spring of 2020. Owing to medical concerns, Lorraine opted not to return to her hygienist job when COVID-related restrictions were lifted. She and David may be the “parents” of three dogs, including a now-17-year-old Shih Tzu, but that wasn’t enough to alleviate the boredom she was experiencing from being home 24-7, she says.

Lorraine began spending her idle time preparing perogies and cabbage rolls for the two of them. Within a few weeks she was running out of room in the freezer, and started giving extras away to friends and family. By that fall, word had spread about her prowess, to the degree that she was being inundated with messages from complete strangers, who wanted to know how much she charged per dozen.

That set the wheels in motion for West End Pierogies, a tag they settled on because they live within shouting distance of the west Perimeter. (They know, they know; if they had a dime for every time a person came through the door, alerting them that they’re nowhere near Winnipeg’s West End, they’d be rich, David says.)

Like they mentioned off the top, West End Pierogies — the I after the P in their name is a whole other can of worms, they mention — started off as a mobile operation. The problem was, they only had access to the commercial kitchen they were utilizing one day a week. As sales and requests for new drop-off points continued to increase, they realized that wasn’t going to cut it going forward.

The Pfeffers took possession of a former trophy shop in the Cavalier Shopping Centre, a short drive from their place, in September 2021. They spent five months renovating the space, and opened to the public during the first week of February 2022.

Their initial day of business was a Tuesday. Because they didn’t think they’d be too hard-pressed off the hop, they performed one of their regular rural runs the Sunday before, which greatly depleted their stock, David recalls. “That turned out to be a huge mistake. By the (first) weekend we had lineups out the door and it was all we could do to keep up with demand.”

Things haven’t slowed down much since. Every Monday and Tuesday Lorraine and David roll out of bed at 1:30 a.m., to report to work. The store is closed both of those days, and they spend until 10 a.m. or so preparing for the week ahead before going shopping for needed supplies. Everything, save mixing the dough, is done by hand, they point out, and as for the pinching, that remains Lorraine’s domain.

“David does everything else pretty much — he rolls out the dough, stamps the circles and lays stuff out on trays to be flash-frozen — but yeah, there’s a definite art to pinching that’s difficult to teach,” Lorraine says, nimbly waving her fingers in the air.

The Pfeffers currently offer 10 varieties of perogies, including mushroom, cottage cheese and potato-cheddar, their top seller. Something like cheddar-jalapeno would have been unheard of in her grandmother’s day, Lorraine smiles, but it’s immensely popular, especially with those who didn’t grow up eating perogies.

“It’s funny because we assume everybody in Manitoba is familiar with perogies and cabbage rolls but for lots of new Canadians, that isn’t the case,” she continues. “There’s a lady who works a few doors from us who was like ‘how do I cook these?’ That’s why we have instructions on our website that even tell you how to do them on the barbecue or in an air fryer, versus boiled or fried.”

This Sunday, West End Pierogies, which continues to schedule rural drop-offs as far as Gimli (see their website westendpierogies.com for a list of dates and times), will be a registered vendor at the Manitoba Night Market & Festival taking place at Assiniboia Downs from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. There they’ll be offering a newer concoction — cheddar, bacon and onion — that sold out at the last night market in June.

“We’ve done a few other (markets) in the past and for sure, the biggest compliment we get is when a baba in their 70s or 80s comes by, and says our perogies remind her of making them with her own grandmother, eons ago,” Lorraine says, mentioning that ex-Winnipeggers living in California and B.C. have stopped by their shop, to load up ahead of catching a flight home.

“To be baba-approved means the world to us.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca