Polish Treats

While Poland is not known for pastries in the same way France is, or for chocolate like Belgium, or for apple strudel like Germany, they have plenty of delicious sweets worth mentioning.

Our hosts left these rather dangerous candies in our room. "Cream fudge" tastes like caramel but has the firm, breakable consistency of fudge. I kept a stash in my pocket for hunger emergencies while walking around the city.

 

 Sernik is traditional Polish cheesecake, made with a thick crust and studded with nuts. We had this one in a café, but the one our host made was even better. 

 

At the old city market…

 

…we found these little cookies filled with dried fruit paste. Quite tasty with coffee.

 

We stopped by a grocery store to use up the last of our Polish money, and grabbed a few chocolates with mysterious fillings. One turned out to be orange gingerbread – delicious.

 

The other turned out to be a chocolate covered prune! Since I love sweet, juicy, chewy prunes (or, marginally more glamorously, “dried plums” as the industry prefers to call them), adding chocolate only made them more tasty.

 

And my favorite, surprisingly not even a dessert. I spied this package of Pumpernickel vollkornbrot, a dense, German-style loaf that my mom had recommended from her travels in Germany. It was the darkest bread I’d ever seen and I was so curious to try it. Plus, if you would believe the picture on the package, eating it would incite some sort of romantic activity - not something usually associated with the consumption of large amounts of German food.

 

It was incredible. I ate some for lunch on the bus with an apple and smoked Swiss cheese, a perfect trio. It was less a bread than a flavor experience in itself, matching that of the cheese and the apple. Moist, flavorful, and slightly chewy, five thin, fragrant slices of this beautiful bread weighed half a pound. The complexity rivaled that of beer or chocolate, with malty notes of barley and the slight bitterness of rye, and a hint of molasses-like sweetness. 

  
 Baguettes, in comparison, are a bland, one-dimension vehicle for cheese (though still amazing). Wonderbread? A culinary joke that should not be allowed to bear the same name as this marvelous foodstuff. I warned Wes not to touch it if he wanted a late-night snack, lest my small stash be depleted before I could find more in Germany.

Inciteful of lust indeed.