Paczki season kicked off Jan. 6 at Oakmont Bakery where customers were at-the-ready to get their hands on the fried polish pastry known for sweet fruit or cream fillings inside a crispy dough.
Similar to a doughnut, but richer, bigger and filled with a hearty helping of fruit or cream, paczki is a Lenten pastry staple.
Customer and paczki fan Chris Ondo of Sharpsburg was easy to spot clutching a large box labeled PACZKI as he waited for a coffee Tuesday at the bakery.
“I used to see paczki other places but I come here. They’re the best ones by far and whenever they release them, I make the trip a few times,” Ondo said.
Last year, Oakmont Bakery sold nearly 267,000 paczki, with Fat Tuesday rolling out the most sold with more than 10,500.
“We fry all day,” said Oakmont Bakery co-owner Tony Serrao. “We never run out.”
Oakmont employees man the kitchen 22 hours a day to keep the cases filled with plenty of paczki.
Pronounced “poonch-key,” paczki is a national holiday celebrated annually on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday in Poland.
The origins harken back centuries to when Polish women would collect all the sweets, jams and rich food scraps before the start of Lent and used them as fillings in fried dough.
“I always thought of them as doughnuts, but they’re not,” Ondo said. “The coconut is my favorite.”
Ondo and his young daughter bought coconut and chocolate cream and the newest Steelers-themed Blitz-ki paczki.
Blitz-ki’s rep the Black and Gold and are filled with vanilla buttercream and topped with gold fondant buttercream and black and gold sprinkles.
“The prune paczki is what the old-school Polish person wants,” co-owner Marc Serrao said. “Our newest flavor this season is cookie dough.”
For the customers that aren’t familiar with paczki, Serrao noted other customers often pitch in with their own paczki knowledge.
“Everyone pronounces it all different ways. It’s really funny to hear everyone at the counter. Paczki translated in Polish means ‘little package,’ ” Serrao said.
Paczki sales at Oakmont Bakery total more than 8,000 on weekends. Last year, paczki lovers bought more than 12,000 when Oakmont Bakery featured them as a surprise special one day last July.
Bakery employee Joshua Pergine grew up in Philadelphia, eating cheesesteaks.
New to Pittsburgh, Pergine has become a bit of a paczki pro after working at Oakmont for eight months.
“I didn’t know what they were, but they’re good,” said Pergine as he poured glaze over freshly fried paczki during a recent behind-the-scenes TribLive tour highlighting the entire paczki-making process.
Creating a paczki takes about one hour.
The rich flavor is ramped up from cake or doughnuts due to adding more sugar and eggs to the dough, which is run through a rounding machine that rolls the dough into precise balls.
Next, the dough balls proof in a warming oven for 45 minutes.
Then it’s fry time — the dough is fried for about two minutes and flipped often until it’s a golden brown.
Freshly fried paczki are drained and then hand-glazed and poked once in the middle with a wooden stick to make room for the final step — the filling. Then, off to the display case they go.
Popular filling flavors include prune (lekvar), coconut, custard, vanilla, raspberry, blueberry, cherry, cookies ‘n cream, cookie dough, lemon, maple and cream.
F olks looking to indulge with the fewest calories can choose a just-under 600 calories fruit-filled paczki or one with Pittsburgh cream filling.
But it’s probably best to not do the math when enjoying paczki.
“People just go crazy over them,” Serrao said of the demand for paczki. “People buy six, eight dozen at a time. They take them to work, give them out to people and take them home.”
Bethel Bakery in Bethel Park sells more than 50,000 paczki each season.
They kicked off their paczki sales this week with specialty flavor of the week, strawberry buttercream.
Not a fan of fillings?
There’s a glazed, unfilled paczki too.
Grab a free “Paczki Passport” and earn a $10 coupon when you try 11 different flavors.
Four standard flavors are offered daily; French buttercream, raspberry, chocolate buttercream and Bavarian cream.
“We sell about 800 per day and our most popular flavor is our signature French buttercream paczki,” said Bethel Bakery marketing coordinator Natalie Lacek.
Specialty flavors are switched up at Bethel Bakery, and the best-selling weekly flavor is fresh strawberry.
Lacek noted a new flavor, death by chocolate, will debut Feb. 23-28.