Fat Tuesday is here: Western Pa. bakeries celebrate with paczki, other traditional treats

It’s Shrove Tuesday, also known as Fat Tuesday in some places. In Southwestern Pennsylvania, that means it’s time for paczki.

Local bakeries make thousands of paczki, a traditional Polish doughnut that is filled and fried.

Oakmont Bakery expects to sell about 8,000 paczki (pronounced “ponch-key”) on Tuesday. It offers 14 varieties, along with hundreds of colorful king cakes, another traditional pre-Lent treat, according to owner Marc Serrao.

The bakery used to only sell paczki for a few days a year, but they’ve become so popular it starts making them in early January and continues through Lent.

“People are so excited that it’s like Christmas all over again,” Serrao said.

Prantl’s Bakery, which has locations in Shadyside, Downtown Pittsburgh, Greensburg and North Huntingdon, sells about 3,600 paczki over the course of the season, according to Wayne Schaller, who handles production for the bakery.

“It’s a real rich doughnut. It’s got butter, eggs, all the stuff to make it more rich that you don’t put in a normal doughnut,” Schaller said. Prantl’s starts selling paczki and king cake a few weeks before Fat Tuesday and every weekend through Lent.

Schaller’s interest in Fat Tuesday goes beyond the professional.

“I was actually married on Fat Tuesday, in New Orleans,” he said.

Customers at Dainty Pastry Shoppe in Latrobe always are eager for the return of paczki, according to office clerk Marlene Colainne.

“They get pretty excited because they wait all year for them to come back out again,” she said.

Fat Tuesday is traditionally the time to indulge a sweet tooth before fasting during Lent, but local bakeries say paczki remain popular throughout the season.

Schaller said they’re hard to resist.

“I come in in the morning, and (Prantl’s President Jeff Pastor) looks at me and he says, ‘any fresh paczkis today?’ We try to resist all day, but it normally doesn’t work,” he said.