The Polish Bakery: A Glorious Institution
In Poland, the bakery is an institution – selling not only innumerable variations of bread, but also bread rolls, sweet buns, cakes, cookies, savoury pastries, sandwiches… you name it. As customs change and more and more people want to eat breakfast out, bakeries are combined with pastry shops or even turned into cafés, serving drinks, warm sandwiches and pastries. Still, it’s breadstuff – pieczywo – that’s most important. And it has been for years – clients often have no idea how long the history of their favourite piekarnia really is.
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Zbigniew Putka, the president of the Putka bakery in Warsaw, photo: Bartosz Bobkowski / AG
Take, for example, Grzybki, voted the best bakery in Warsaw in a 2010 poll. Its mysterious name – it means ‘little mushrooms’ – comes from the shape of a pavilion on Warsaw’s Aleja Stanów Zjednoczonych, where Krzysztof Cichowski opened the bakery in 1985. Yet it wasn’t him who started the company, but his father Henryk, who on 31st October 1927 achieved the title of baker apprentice – today the date can even be found on the company’s logo.
Bread and pastries at the Putka bakery in Warsaw, photo: Dawid Zuchowicz / AG Putka, another popular Warsaw chain, also has a long family history: the people working there today are fourth-generation bakers. The company started at the dawn of Polish independence in 1918, when Władysław Putka opened his company in Rembertów. Now, the company’s headquarters are in Wesoła: it’s one of the biggest and most modern family bakeries that cater to Warsaw.
There are many more fathers and grandfathers who founded artisan bakeries throughout the 20th century: Goszczyński, Mierzejewski, Witaszczyk are all names to remember if you want to taste traditional bread in Warsaw. But there’s also a new generation of artisans working in the capital, and their breads – only available on request or on particular dates – are the latest craze.
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Pochlebnie bakery, Warsaw, photo: Marek Wiśniewski / Puls Biznesu / Forum
If you place an order in advance, on the weekends, you can pick up amazing breads from the Pochlebnie bakery in the Powiśle district (look out for the potato bread and for the beautifully orange pumpkin sourdough). There are also dozens of people lining up for Monika Walecka’s – also known as Cała w Mące or ‘flour-covered’ – creations in Żoliborz, where she just opened her own bakery. Monika uses ‘ancient’ wheat cultivars like einkorn and emmer and experiments with flavours, adding miso, black sesame and beer to her slowly fermented, handmade dough.
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Pracownia Godny Bakery. Traditional bread baking, photo: Łukasz Cynalewski / AG
First comes the smell. There’s no confusing it: nothing smells like freshly baked sourdough. Then, the mind-blowing variety hits you: there are countless breads to try. The most traditional of all is a bread baked with wheat and rye flours, slightly sour from the leaven, or zakwas, made without any yeast.
But there are others: some are white and fluffy (usually those baked with added yeast), others – wholemeal, heavy from all the bran; some are savoury and salty, while others go hand in hand with butter and jam. Some are sprinkled with seeds such as poppy and sesame, while others are spiced with caraway or nigella. Most are made of wheat and rye, but there are also breads baked with the addition of buckwheat, millet, spelt or oats. Some will surprise you with the addition of fried onions, while in others you can find raisins or cranberries.
SAM Bakery in Warsaw, photo: Bartosz Bobkowski / AG Some of the traditional names are mysterious even to most Poles: few people know that the wheat-rye baltonowski got its name from the Baltona company which supplied food to Polish ships, while pytlowy, or boulted bread, derives from pytel – a mechanism used to clean and sieve flour. We don’t mind baking breads from different culinary traditions though – that’s why in Polish bakeries you can also find great French baguettes and Italian ciabattas.
Two of Warsaw’s most popular chains Galeria Wypieków and Grzybki both offer 32 different breads. Hard to imagine? Not in Poland, where experimenting with different flours and seeds is so much fun – for the customers and the bakers alike.
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Bread rolls, photo: Paweł Sonnenburg / Forum
Yet bread is only the beginning. Take a look at all these bread rolls! The most popular ones are kajzerka, which arrived here from Vienna, and grahamka, which is the invention of 19th-century American reformer Sylvester Graham. But there are also crispy sznytki, healthy multigrain rolls, buttery burger buns, bagels and rolls with spinach, olives or chilli… again, the combinations are endless.
If you’re in a hurry, at some bakeries, you can buy a ready-made sandwich. Poles love their sandwiches (although they may be partial to open-faced ones). Just as with bread itself, even though Poles cherish tradition, they are also open to innovation – so bakeries serve classic sandwiches with ham and cheese, egg or tuna salad, as well as internationally inspired ones with chorizo or mozzarella and vegan sandwiches with hummus or vegetable paté.
Yet there are other savoury items worth trying: the most popular ones are paszteciki, made with either puff pastry or yeast dough and filled with sauerkraut and mushrooms, spinach, meat or lentils. There are rolls with fried cheese and with garlic butter, and sometimes you can even buy a slice of pizza – thick and fluffy, Polish-style.
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Chleboteka bakery & café, photo Kornelia Głowacka-Wol / AG
Although they often come together, in theory these are two different gastronomic concepts: you buy breadstuff in a piekarnia and cakes and pastries in a cukiernia. The bridge between those two are sweet baked goods, which are a Polish staple. Of course everyone knows pączki, yet there are so many other treasures: yeast buns (drożdżówki) with vanilla custard or sweetened cottage cheese, poppy seeds, apples and cinnamon and, obviously, fresh blueberries – the beloved jagodzianki that reign supreme when the season comes.
Some bakeries stop at that, while others go into full-dessert mode, selling all sorts of cakes and cookies: apple pies, fruit tarts and yeast fruit cakes with streusel are clear favourites, although there is also a whole array of cream cakes, such as napoleonka and the chocolatey Warsaw staple – wuzetka.
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Żaczek pastry shop on opening day, photo: Franciszek Mazur / AG
The creativity of Polish bakers knows no limits. We cherish tradition but also don’t shy away from foreign inspirations. The latest craze are Georgian and Armenian bakeries with their khachapuris, or cheese-filled breads . At the popular family-owned Piwoński bakery chain, you can get great Spanish empanadas and ensaimadas, just because one of the owners married a Spaniard.
At the same time, they’re always searching for something new. You could argue this insatiability speaks of Polish character: while, for example, the Swedes are satisfied with kanelbullar and maybe a couple of other bun varieties, the Irish think soda bread with oats is more than enough, even the French limit themselves to a certain number of (wonderful) types of baguettes and croissants, we have so much breadstuff, you could easily get lost. Poles just want it all.
Written by Natalia Metrak, Nov 2019
