‘The hard part is making them in such volume’

Paczki are so popular now that many bakeries offer them for an extended period of time, according to Bruce Aronson, owner of the Donut Den in Joliet.

Aronson only sells them one day year – on Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. But he makes 15,000 of them to sell.

“It’s very chaotic and then it’s over,” Aronson said.

Paczki (pronounced PUNCH-key or POONCH-key) are a doughnut-like pastry popular in Polish cuisine, especially on Fat Tuesday. They are similar to a Bismarck but richer, Darin DeBenedetti, co-owner of Milano Bakery in Joliet, said.

During a traditional Lenten fast, which is still true in Orthodox churches, people abstained from meat, eggs and dairy products until Easter. So pastries such as paczki were a way to use up all these items before Lent begins.

Prune was the traditional filling, DeBenedetti said. But now he also makes other flavors, including lemon, maple bacon, Death by Chocolate, fresh strawberry whipped cream, Bavarian cream with a chocolate topping, peanut butter and jelly, Oreo and — DeBenedetti ‘s favorite — strawberry with cream cheese.

The strawberry whipped cream and Bavarian cream paczki are his top sellers, DeBenedetti said.

People buy paczki one at a time or give them away as gifts, DeBenedetti said.

“They bring them home for the family,” DeBenedetti said. “Or for loved ones that don’t get around so much, people drop them off at their houses.”

DeBenedetti said Milano makes and sells about 6,000 paczki “from start to finish” in the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday.

That wasn’t the case when one of his bakers, who was from Chicago, decided to make 300 for Milano back in the 1990s.

“We sold about a dozen of them,” DeBenedetti said. “So I just went up Jefferson Street and dropped them off at restaurants and gave them away.”

After that, DeBenedetti felt making paczki was a “lost cause,” he said. But interest seemed in the pastry picked up year after year, he said.

All paczki are made by his cake decorators now, he said.

By contrast, Aronson, who is Swedish and not Polish, actually grew up making paczki in the bakery his father owned in Arlington Heights.

“It wasn’t anything back then like it was today,” Aronson said. “For some reason, it’s growing every year.”

Aronson said he only made a few hundred when he first started offering paczki.

“Then it was a thousand and then it was 5,000,” Aronson said. “As the years go by, it gets to be a big thing.”

Like Milano, the Donut Den also makes non-traditional flavors of paczki. These include cherry, apple, lemon, apricot, cheese, French silk (which is like a chocolate custard, Aronson said) and fresh strawberry.

“The hard part is making them in such volume,” Aronson said.

Aronson said he does take a few advance orders, about 350 of them, with an order deadline of the Sunday before Fat Tuesday. At 9 a.m. Monday, the paczki-making began. People began packing orders at 10 p.m. Monday night, he said.

Even ex-employees come into the Donut Den to help, he said.

“It’s my biggest day of the year,” Aronson said.

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A customer leaves with a box of paczkis on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, at the Donut Den in Joliet, Ill. Paczki Day, celebrated on Fat Tuesday, is one of the busiest days of the year for many local donut shops, with many selling thousands of the polish pastries, however heavy snowfall and depressed turnout from the COVID-19 pandemic has threatened this years sales. (Geoff Stellfox - gstellfox@shawmedia.com/Geoff Stellfox - gstellfox@shawmedia.com)