This new Ottawa bakery is making popular Russian pies

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Pie Rogues

571 Gladstone Ave., pierogues.com

Russian baked goods (savoury pies and chocolate babka buns) made to order for Friday pickups, $6 to $9

Irina Khazanova has put a lot behind her.

The 40-year-old’s first career was as an editor and proofreader. But the last time that she worked in an office was in 2016. “I realized I didn’t want my life to be in front of a computer,” she says.

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Because she went to culinary school as well as university, she embarked on a second career, selling cakes and French baked goods from her home in Moscow.

Then, she came to Canada five years ago, with her wife and two cats, above all to escape the the Russian government’s anti-gay discrimination.

“It’s getting worse and worse and we just decided if we want to be a couple and considered a couple, that’s one of the benefits I get from being in Canada,” says Khazanova.

In Ottawa, she recently finished working at Art-Is-In Bakery. Now, she’s fully committed to her one-woman business, Pie Rogues.

Its name plays on the Russian words for “pie” (pirog) and “small pies” (piroshki), and naturally, Pie Rogues sells Russian pies, both large and small. Khazanova, who is Jewish, also makes chocolate babka, the sweet braided bread that originated in the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine.

Although Khazanova left her homeland, she is still a fan of its food and culture and wants to champion it.

“Russia does not have the best image in the eyes of other nations at the moment,” she says. “I wanted to introduce the best that our culture has to the people in Ottawa, to just show the locals what Russia is really about, what it means to me in terms of memories and flavours.”

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That said, Khazanova isn’t averse to making little tweaks to personalize her pies, all of which I found delicious, from their breads to their delectable fillings.

“Cabbage pies are the largest part of my memory of my mom making pies,” she says. “It’s a very Russian flavour and Russian vegetable.”

But to her cabbage and mushroom pies, Khazanova adds caraway and garlic, even if in Russia “you would never see caraway added to it.” For her pork and cabbage pie, she adds fennel seeds. “Pork with fennel is a very non-Russian flavour, but it’s popular in Canada, so I improvised,” says Khazanova.

“They are different, but they are comforting and nice,” she says.

The addition of feta and parsley to her potato pies is also distinctly non-Russian, but it did make for a more lively, flavourful filling. A pie that’s filled with scallions, egg and rice — “classic Russian,” Khazanova says — is made with sushi rice, she confesses because it most closely approximates the right texture. “It brings this quirky but nice Asian sub-flavour,” Khazanova adds.

As for babka, Khazanova opted not to make a poppy seed version, if it’s the most classic one, because chocolate babka is more popular in North America, she says. Her bun-sized chocolate babka was richly flavoured but not too sweet, and texturally somewhere in the middle between bread and cake.

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After launching her business with support from an Invest Ottawa program for immigrant entrepreneurs, Khazanova began production last summer. For now, she works and sells out of a shared commercial kitchen on Gladstone Avenue, without any employees, although she says “invariably, my poor wife is helping me in every way possible.”

There are other people making Russian pies in Ottawa, “but they cater only to Russians,” Khazanova says. She wants to cast her net more widely, make sure that Ottawans at large know and like her wares, and then open her own bakery.

“I’m not quite there yet,” she says.

But from what I’ve tasted, she deserves to be, and with any luck, she’ll get there.

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