I was in Fox Lake, IL. on Sunday (The Metra Weekend Pass is the best transit bargain in northeastern Illinois.), and if you're anywhere nearby, you could get your paczki from
Village Bakery
27 East Grand Ave.
Fox Lake, IL. 60020

Who has scored some authentic paczkis this year?

Last year's last posts on this thread were right before the virus lockdown! Remember: two weeks to bend the curve or whatever that saying was? Who knew we would still be fighting the virus a year later? Good times, good times.

Bennison's has them. I just checked their website. You can order them ahead of time. I believe they are still limiting the number of customers in their store.

NFriday wrote:Bennison's has them. I just checked their website. You can order them ahead of time. I believe they are still limiting the number of customers in their store.

Bennison's are fantastic. Last year they had traditional as well as cream-filled (more like a cream puff).

Stan's has them - order online and pickup. Cherry, Canoli, Chocolate, or Cream.

spinynorman99 wrote:Bennison's are fantastic. Last year they had traditional as well as cream-filled (more like a cream puff).

They still have them: Strawberries and whipped cream, bananas and whipped cream, chocolate praline, and German chocolate. Especially enjoy the first of these.

I got a few at Oak Mill bakery a couple weeks ago. That afternoon the display case was pretty much empty so an employee kindly offered to custom-make some for me. Excellent paczki and having them freshly filled eliminated the potential for sogginess.

I also got some day-old ones Friday from Montrose Market on Golf (former Wally's.) They were pretty pedestrian, similar to what Shop-n-Save has year round, with rose and plum filling. Is plum just a new name for prune or is it something different? I was hard pressed to tell from the flavor.

My Polish neighbor brought me two packzi (which, upon my asking, she said was pronounced "ponsh ki", and my internet searching suggests is right). The two she brought me were raspberry and creme filled, both great.

Pucca wrote:

LAZ wrote:This independent doughnut shop is definitely worth a visit. Both their cake and raised doughnuts are very good, they do a variety of seasonal items (cherry cake doughnuts for Washington's birthday, for example), and they're open 24 hours.

Spunky Dunkers Donuts
20 Northwest Highway, Palatine
847-358-7935
http://www.spunkydunkersdonuts.com/paczki_day

I love their chocolate French and blueberry cake doughnuts. Their French cruller is so light and airy - just the way I like them. We ate our doughnuts and coffee at the counter one Sunday morning and was very impressed by the constant flow of customers. It is well deserved.

3 days, 10,000 doughnuts. Community rallies around Palatine bakery that asked for help online: ‘We knew people liked us, but I had no idea.’

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- ... story.html

Katie wrote:My Polish neighbor brought me two packzi (which, upon my asking, she said was pronounced "ponsh ki", and my internet searching suggests is right). The two she brought me were raspberry and creme filled, both great.

Yes, "ponsh-key" is a good enough approximation in English. The "sh" is more a "ch," though. Cz in Polish is pronounced almost the same as English "ch." The "n" in the first syllable comes from the ą in pączki, which is pronounced in various ways depending on its location in a word and what follows it, but something like "on" (closer to an "aw"-type sound than an "ah" sound if you're from a Great Lakes dialect and make a distinction between the vowels in "caught" and "cot") or "own" in this case.

Better yet, there are examples of five native speakers here pronouncing it.

Of course, the native pronunciation doesn't mean that's how you have to pronounce it in English, but, if you're curious, there it is. I think most often I hear either "PUNCH-key" or "POONCH-key" from English speakers.

Thanks for the explanation, Binko. I can't say I was accurately representing what my neighbor said but rather as a I remembered it later, the key being the unexpected (for me) "n" sound.

Yeah, there's another fairly well-known Polish food where that ą shows up: gołąbki, the cabbage rolls stuffed with rice & ground meat (most commonly, but there are different stuffings.) Around here, I typically hear them pronounced "guh-LOOMP-key" or something like that, but it's closer to "guh-WUMP-key." In that case, the ą takes on a "um/om/owm" sound. The "l" with a slash through it is essentially the same as the English "w" sound. So that ą can be pesky -- several similar, but still different ways it gets pronounced. It can also be a pure nasal vowel (as I believe it originally was.)

Something I learned recently: Paczki is the plural of paczek, so technically it's incorrect to say, "I just ate a delicious paczki!" or "I just ate a dozen delicious paczkis!" How is paczek pronounced? Puncheck?

Yes, "pun-check" or "pone-check" or "pawn-check" would all be somewhat close.

And, yes, pączek is the singular in Polish, though you might lose some people if you use it in English. I have seen some non-Poles use the word pączek in the singular, though. However, once a word enters a language from a foreign source, it tends to be reanalyzed in the target language and may not follow singular or plural rules from the original language (a number of Italian food items are like this; the Greek "gyros" is like this when it gets reanalyzed as "gyro" for the singular.)