Polish Donuts - Easy Pączki Recipe

Poland gets through pączki by the million on Tłusty Czwartek, Fat Thursday, the last day before Lent starts closing things down. They are yeasted doughnuts, softer and richer than the ring sort, filled with jam and dusted with icing sugar, and this is the recipe we make at home.

The thing to look for is the pale band round the middle. In Poland it is called the obwódka, and it is the first thing anyone checks. A light dough floats high in the oil rather than sinking, so a strip round its waist never goes under and stays white. No band means they sat in the fat instead of riding on it and drank it up. There is a section further down on how to read it.

Pączki belong to one particular day, and my guide to Polish food explains which dishes belong to which occasion.

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Why You’ll Love This Recipe

• No waste The dough takes a whole egg, so you are not left with a bowl of egg whites and nothing to do with them. Plenty of pączki recipes use yolks only.
• Soft and light Two proves and a properly enriched dough, so they tear rather than snap.
• Less greasy The splash of spirit means the surface sets faster in the oil, which is the difference between light and heavy.
• The recipe we actually use This is what gets made at home, not a version written for a blog.
• Made for the day Fat Thursday in Poland, Fat Tuesday if you keep Paczki Day the American way.

Pączki, Paczki or Polish Donuts?

The Polish spelling is pączki, with the little hook under the a. Outside Poland almost nobody types that, so you will see them written paczki everywhere from American bakery windows to supermarket labels, and that is the spelling most people search for. Both mean the same thing. In English they are usually just called Polish donuts, which is fair enough, although a pączek is richer and softer than most donuts and is filled after frying rather than shaped with a hole.

One pączek, many pączki. It is said POONCH-kee, not pack-zee or panch-kye, and the singular is POON-check. The ą is a nasal vowel, so it comes out closer to own than to a flat an.

Fat Thursday or Fat Tuesday? It Depends Where You Are

In Poland the day is Tłusty Czwartek, Fat Thursday, the last Thursday before Lent. Bakeries sell them by the million and queues run down the street. That is the day I grew up with, and it is the one this recipe is written for.

In the United States it moved. Around Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and Buffalo, where Polish families settled in numbers, Paczki Day is Fat Tuesday, the same day as Mardi Gras and Shrove Tuesday, five days later than in Poland. Nobody is wrong. The Polish tradition marks the start of the last week before Lent; the American one folded it into the Shrove Tuesday everyone around them was already keeping.

So if you are baking for Paczki Day in the States, you want Tuesday. If you are keeping it the Polish way, you want Thursday. Either way the dough is the same and it is worth making twice.

Pączki Fillings, Beyond Raspberry Jam

While raspberry jam is a popular and widely loved filling for Polish pączki, traditional Polish bakeries often use róża (rose petal) filling - a genuinely different thing.

Rose Petal Filling - A Polish Classic

In Poland, one of the most traditional pączki fillings is róża, a fragrant rose petal jam made from wild rose petals (Rosa rugosa), sugar, and lemon juice. This unique filling has a delicate floral aroma and a slightly tart-sweet taste that cuts through the plain sweet dough. The jam is made by grinding fresh or dried rose petals with sugar to release their natural oils, creating a smooth, aromatic preserve that is commonly used in Polish pastries.

However, rose petal jam can be difficult to find in the UK and USA. Some specialty European food stores or online retailers may carry it, but if you want to try this authentic Polish flavour, you can also make your own at home using dried edible rose petals and sugar. If rose filling isn’t available, plum butter (powidła) or raspberry jam make excellent alternatives.

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Other Fillings Worth Trying

If you’re looking to experiment beyond raspberry jam and rose petal filling, here are the others worth a go:

Plum Butter (Powidła) - A rich, thick spread made from slow-cooked plums, offering a deep and naturally sweet flavour. This is a traditional choice, especially for those who prefer less sugary fillings.

Chocolate or Nutella - Richer and sweeter than a jam filling, and the one that disappears fastest in my house.

Custard (Budyń) - Polish vanilla or lemon custard is another popular filling, giving the doughnuts a creamy, pudding-like centre.

Apple Cinnamon - Cooked apple puree mixed with cinnamon makes for a lightly spiced and naturally sweet filling.

Dulce de Leche (Kajmak) - A caramelised sweet milk spread, sticky and very sweet. Use less of it than you think.

Blueberry or Blackcurrant Jam - These tart fruit jams add a refreshing contrast to the sweet dough.

Coconut Cream - A coconut-based filling, and the furthest of these from anything traditional.

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What Flour is Best for Yeast-Raised Doughnuts?

For that classic, airy texture in yeast doughnuts, go for flour with 10-11% protein like All-Purpose Flour (10-12%) or Plain Flour (8-11%). These flours provide enough gluten to hold the structure but keep the doughnuts soft and light - not chewy like bread!

That is the opposite of what you want in a bun you bake rather than fry. A dough that has to hold a spiral and climb in a tin needs the gluten, which is why my overnight Chelsea buns are built on strong bread flour.

Equipment You’ll Need

Frying at home is safe and simple with the right tools

A Closer Look at the Ingredients

Light, airy pączki come from an enriched dough:

• Flour, yeast, milk, egg, butter and sugar make the soft, enriched dough. Plain flour at 10 to 11% protein is what you want here, not strong bread flour, which gives you chew where you want tenderness.
• A splash of spirit (spirytus or vodka) is the traditional trick, and it is what my family has always done. Alcohol is more volatile than water and leaves the dough faster, which is the usual explanation for a lighter, less oily result. I would not oversell it: get the frying temperature right and you are most of the way there without it. Fifteen millilitres is enough and you will not taste it.
• The filling goes in after frying, never before. Róża, a rose petal jam, is the classic; powidła (plum butter) and raspberry are the everyday choices, and the card uses raspberry.
• Oil for frying, and icing or sugar to finish.

Chef’s tip: two pro tricks make lighter pączki. Get a thermometer and hold the oil at the right temperature - too cool and they soak up oil, too hot and they burn before cooking through. And add a splash of pure spirit (or vodka) to the dough: alcohol evaporates faster than water, so the pączki fry up lighter and far less greasy.

How to Make Pączki, Step by Step

The card has the quantities. This is the same six steps with the reasoning attached, which is where the difference between light pączki and heavy ones actually lives.

1. Start the yeast. Crumble the fresh yeast into the lukewarm milk and leave it for about ten minutes, until it is foaming on top. Warm here means 41 to 43C, which is warmer than most people go. Hand-hot rather than tepid. Being too cool is the risk worth knowing about: yeast brought round in milk that is merely lukewarm recovers badly and releases a compound that actively interferes with gluten forming later, so a cold start costs you twice. Genuinely hot milk will kill it outright, so do not overshoot either. If you are using dried yeast, half the weight does the same job. If nothing has happened after ten minutes the yeast is dead, and it is far cheaper to find that out now than after a failed prove.
2. Make the dough, and let it be sticky. Mix everything else into the yeasted milk, holding the melted butter back until last so the fat does not coat the flour before the gluten has started to form. Then knead until it is smooth. It will still stick to your hands, and that is correct. Do not add more flour to make it behave. This is the single commonest mistake with pączki: people knead on, chasing a clean bread dough, and end up with something dense and dry. A wet, slack dough is what fries up light. A stand mixer with a dough hook saves your hands and makes it much easier to leave the flour alone.
3. First prove. Shape it into a ball, put it in a lightly greased bowl, cover it with a cloth and leave it somewhere warm until it has doubled, which takes about an hour and a half. A cold kitchen slows it down rather than stopping it, so give it longer instead of giving up on it, or warm the bowl with hot water first. You can also do this prove in the fridge overnight and fry the next day. It will not collapse, whatever you may have been told, and a slow cold prove gives you a better-flavoured dough.
4. Knock back and shape. Turn it out, knead it briefly to press the gas out, then divide it into ten or twelve equal pieces and roll each into a ball. Weigh them if you want them to fry evenly, because a ball half again as big as its neighbour will still be raw when the small one is done. Set them on a floured cloth, well apart, cover them and leave them twenty-five minutes for the second prove. They should look puffed and feel airy rather than tight when you touch them.
5. Fry them, and watch for the ring. Heat the oil to 175C and use a thermometer, because this is the step everything else depends on. Lower them in top side down, only a few at a time so the temperature does not crash, and turn them once only. Two to three minutes a side. They should float high rather than sitting on the bottom, and you will see the pale band form round the middle where the dough meets the surface of the oil. Turn the heat down if they are colouring fast.
6. Fill and finish. Let them cool until they are just warm rather than hot, then push a long thin nozzle into the side and pipe the jam into the middle. Warm is right: piping into a hot pączek melts the jam thin and it runs straight back out of the hole. A tablespoon each is plenty. Dust generously with icing sugar, or roll them in cinnamon sugar. And do actually fill them. Because it happens after frying and after cooling, on a separate step, it is genuinely easy to get distracted and eat a tray of very good plain doughnuts.

The White Ring, and Why It Matters

A properly fried pączek has a pale band running round its middle. A light yeasted dough floats rather than sinking, so it sits half in and half out of the oil and has to be turned once. The band is the waterline: the strip that sat right at the surface, where the dough cooks less thoroughly than the parts fully under. In Poland it is called the obwódka, and it is the first thing anyone looks for. It is not decoration. It is the clearest sign you can see that the oil was at the right temperature and the dough was light enough to float high in it.

It is also the most useful diagnostic in the whole recipe, because the two ways of getting it wrong look completely different:

• No ring, pale and greasy The oil was too cool. They sank instead of floating, sat in the fat and drank it up. This is the one people usually blame on “too much oil”, and it is really a temperature problem.
• Ring there, but doughy underneath The oil was too hot. The outside browned and pushed the ring out before the middle had time to cook, so the band looks right and the dough beneath it is raw. Turn the heat down partway through the batch.
• Dark all over The oil has been going too long and is starting to break down. Let it come back to temperature between batches rather than pushing on.

Recipe Card for Polish Donuts (Pączki)

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Storing, Freezing and Reheating

Pączki are a same-day thing and there is no getting round it. They are at their best an hour or two out of the pan, still faintly warm, and every hour after that costs you a little.

Day two. They will have gone softer and heavier overnight in an airtight tin. The fix is one Polish households use constantly and I have never seen written down in English: give a pączek ten to twenty seconds in the microwave before you eat it. It comes out close enough to fresh that most people cannot tell. Any longer and the jam turns to lava, so keep it short.

Freezing. They freeze well for up to three months. Freeze them unfilled if you can, because jam does not freeze and thaw as kindly as the dough does. Layer them in a rigid container with baking paper between the layers so they do not weld together, then defrost in a low oven or the microwave and fill afterwards.

Making the dough ahead. The easier route is to prove the dough in the fridge overnight and fry fresh the next day, which is covered in step three. You get better flavour and you get them at their best rather than reheated.

FAQ for Pączki

Why are my pączki greasy, and what temperature should the oil be?

The two questions have the same answer. Hold the oil at 175C (350F) and use a thermometer. Too cool and the dough sits in the fat instead of floating on it, and drinks it up. Too hot and the outside is dark before the middle is cooked. If yours came out heavy and pale with no white ring round the middle, the oil was too cool, and no amount of draining afterwards fixes it. The splash of spirit in the dough helps a little, but temperature is doing most of the work.

Can I make the dough ahead?

Yes - you can do a slow first prove in the fridge overnight, then shape, prove and fry the next day. They are best eaten fresh on frying day.

How do I fill them?

Fry them plain, let them cool a little, then pipe the filling (rose jam is traditional) in through the side with a nozzle. Roll them in sugar to finish.

When do Poles traditionally eat pączki?

Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek), the last Thursday before Lent, is the big day - Polish bakeries sell them by the million. The same enriched yeast dough also makes oponki (little rings) and drożdżówki.

Why don’t mine have the white ring?

Almost always the oil temperature, and it is worth knowing which way. No ring at all, with pale greasy pączki, means the oil was too cool and they sank instead of floating. A clear ring with raw dough underneath it means the oil was too hot and the outside set before the inside caught up. Many people assume a missing ring means they used too much oil. The depth of the oil is not the problem, the temperature is.

Do I really need the spirit or vodka?

No, and I would rather be straight about it than oversell a trick. Alcohol boils off faster than water, so the surface sets a little sooner and takes on slightly less oil, and it is what my family has always done. But plenty of people make excellent light pączki with no alcohol at all. If you get the frying temperature right you are most of the way there without it. Leave it out if you would rather, and do not substitute vinegar, which is a different thing doing a different job.

Can I fry them in lard instead of oil?

Yes, and traditionally that is exactly what was used. Lard (smalec) has a high smoke point and gives a faintly savoury richness that oil does not. You need the same volume, so around a litre of melted lard, which is four or five 200g blocks. Butter will not do, it burns long before 175C. Clarified butter or ghee would technically survive the heat but it is an expensive way to fry a dozen doughnuts.

A Few Words from the Chef

Now you know how to make soft, fluffy Polish Pączki at home! Whether for Tłusty Czwartek, Shrove Tuesday, or a sweet treat any day, they are worth the rise. Give them a try and let me know how they turned out! If you like a sweet, spiced treat, my dirty chai latte cinnamon buns are worth the rise.

Smacznego! 🍩😊