A mouthwatering Schuylkill County favorite.

Dough. Potato. Cheese. And a bunch of hungry supporters.

The Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tamaqua held its pierogi sale last month, and the results were off the charts. But it wasn’t easy, said Michael Haspe, who took over as the Christian Education Director last August.

“When Advent Lutheran Church closed in Tuscarora, they gave $1,000 donation to start this youth ministry. … I got put into this position kind of late; we were supposed to have someone else doing it, but he went to seminary to be a pastor and went full time to go to school. I had to put the youth ministry on hold; now I finally have my head above water I wanted to do something with it. I said why don’t we do a pierogi sale, since everyone does fish?”

Haspe and his team took orders. A lot of them. There were 700 total pierogies requested the day before the deadline. That number increased to a final count over 2,000 the next day.

“I couldn’t have done it without the people that helped me from our congregation. We had nine adults and five kids. … The kids weren’t here nearly as long as the adults, because of the COVID-19 concerns.”

Then, Haspe and his culinary team worked Monday through Friday from about 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. to get all of the pierogies done. “Monday, we prepared the first batch of filling; which we did potato and cheese, and sauerkraut and potato. Then we cooled them. The next day we came in, made all of the dough and started making them. When we ran out of ingredients, I ran down to Restaurant Depot and got more ingredients. We made more filling Tuesday, and then we filled pierogies until Friday.

The final count of pierogies last week was about 2,500, or 209 dozen. Talk about “carbs” - the group went through 300 pounds of potatoes, about 150 pounds of flour, 40 pounds of sour cream and 20 pounds of cheese during the production.

“It’s all about teaching our youth ownership of an activity. It teaches life skills, because a lot of kids today don’t have home ec., or it’s a small part of their education.”

Sunday was the pickup day at Zion Lutheran. It sounds like Haspe is looking forward to the next sale for National Pierogi Day in October.

“It has been a journey, but we have been getting really good reviews about them since. It’s something that I want to see us do more often here. I think we may have been the only one in the area that did pierogies this year. We had people come as far as Allentown and Bethlehem to pick them up.”