Brian Rowell Daily Press Gavin Keener prepares dough for paczkis at Elmer’s County Market as Bakery Manager Art Ziebell looks on. The bakery produces about 5,000 of the Fat Tuesday treat.

ESCANABA — Back in December while most people were focused on the Christmas season, Art Ziebell, bakery manager at Elmer’s County Market in Escanaba, was already thinking about Fat Tuesday. Because of that early planning, local residents will again be able to enjoy a Fat Tuesday tradition today — the paczki.

A paczki, pronounced (puhnch-kee) is a deep-fried Polish pastry made of yeast dough that is glazed, iced or stuffed with a variety of fillings. Historically, making paczkis was a way for Polish families to use up butter, sugar, eggs, fruit and lard before the fasting days of Lent.

Although virtually unknown in the Delta County area 20 years ago, it has since become a favorite treat to indulge in before the start of Lent.

This year, the task of making sure paczkis were in plentiful supply on Fat Tuesday took some planning and logistics, according to Ziebell. Because the pandemic was creating supply chain problems, Ziebell was not sure the bakery would have all the necessary ingredients on hand in February to make the thousands of paczkis it produces. The bakery started to stockpile paczki ingredients back in December.

“We became pack rats,” Ziebell said. The end result was a paczki season that went off without a hitch.

Paczkis were not always a part of Fat Tuesday in the area, though. In fact, few people were aware that the pastry even existed.

According to Ziebell, about 20 years ago Elmer’s bakery manager at the time happened to see a billboard while traveling promoting something called a “paczki.”

“We didn’t know how to pronounce it let alone what it was,” Ziebell said.

The bakery crew started doing its homework and came up with a recipe for Elmer’s County Market’s very own paczki.

That first year, the bakery made about 50 of the pastry, Ziebell recalls. The Fat Tuesday treat has caught on in popularity locally since then. Today, the bakery produces about 5,000 paczkis. They are available and sold only one day a year — Fat Tuesday.

Despite the high demand for paczkis, Ziebell said he has to put a cap on the number made so the bakery can continue to produce its other goods such as doughnuts, breads, buns and sweet rolls, especially since Elmer’s is a made from scratch bakery.

Although a variety of pazcki flavors are made, some of the favorites include raspberry, custard and chocolate. Another appealing part of the Elmer’s paczki is that it is not only double staffed, but glazed.

The formula seems to be working based on the number of paczki orders the bakery receives each year. Although the number of orders varies, Ziebell recalls that the largest paczki order the bakery ever received was from a company that ordered about 42 dozen.

“They just kept ordering more and more,” Ziebell said.

Ziebell said making so many paczkis is truly a team effort in the bakery department. He said, however, the real success of the paczki is the bakery’s loyal customers who come back for the Fat Tuesday treat year after year.