Welcome back to cooking with Chloe. This week, I’m making Polish-inspired dishes with help from sisters Vanessa (she/her) and Casey White (she/her), who are also the co-founders of their family biz, Jaju Pierogi. If you cry over sweet family stories, you might want to grab a tissue before reading on. “Our grandfather started a Polish deli in Western Massachusetts with his siblings, where they made pierogi as well as other Polish foods,” the sisters share. “We were lucky enough to grow up with pierogi always in our freezer—it was like our mac and cheese. When we went to college, we started to indoctrinate our friends to the pierogi life, and we noticed then that high-quality pierogi were very hard to come by at the grocery store.”

If you’ve ever had grocery store pierogi, then you know that these girls are right. But thanks to Vanessa and Casey, things are changing. “In 2015, we got our grandfather’s aka Jaju’s recipes and started playing with them on Vanessa’s kitchen table,” they say. “At the start of 2016, we went to our first farmers market and sold out in an hour! We then took pre-orders for 30 dozen more that we hand-delivered to people’s homes. We understood quickly that there was a demand and spent the next couple years building our brand through brewery pop-ups, farmers markets, and festivals, and started distributing to stores in 2017. The growth we experienced during the Covid lockdown gave us even more confidence to pursue other chains and distribution partnerships. Today, we’re in over 1k stores.”

Ok, so maybe you took offense when I implied that most store-bought pierogi are meh, but this brand really is special, and truly keeps their family at the heart of it all. “When you eat our pierogi, we want you to remember your family’s recipe, or the pierogi you got from the Polish Church sale, or the ones your Eastern European neighbors made,” they say. “We still use whole potatoes, eggs, butter, and swear by the cheese our grandfather used. We want our pierogi to have the same texture as if your grandmother mashed the potatoes. We want you to feel the warmth behind them.”

And while traditional ingredients are comforting, the sisters don’t mind getting creative, too: “We want to bring pierogi to people of all backgrounds—especially those who have never had them before. So, we’ve introduced flavors that cater to diverse palates, like Sweet Potato & Caramelized Onion or Jalapeño Cheddar. We’ve also experimented with specials in the past such as Smoked Mozzarella, Buffalo Chicken, BBQ Chicken & Pineapple, and Strawberry Rhubarb Cream Cheese. It’s fun pushing the envelope on what people traditionally associate with this food. We’re just here to make pierogi mainstream while keeping our grandfather’s memory alive.”

Now, let’s get cooking!

Smacznego!

Chloe Trout, associate editor