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.

A Day in Wroclaw

We spent New Year’s Day exploring the 600,000-person city of Wroclaw, Poland, starting with lunch at a hotel right on the river. The waitress was so friendly, and patient as I said very slowly, “Przepraszam, nie mówię po polsku, czy po angielsku?” (I'm sorry, I do not speak Polish, do you speak English?) which, to give myself a little credit, can in no way be pronounced intuitively. 

 

We ordered grilled vegetables with fresh cheese with herbs, soup, and roasted potatoes with cheese. Everything I’d heard about Poland suggested that it would be extremely meat heavy, leading me to assume that vegetables would be severely neglected. This, however, was one of the most delicious vegetable dishes I’ve had in a while.

It was a mixture of carrots, broccoli, peppers, zucchini, onions, and mushrooms, roasted with savory herbs and served with three little dollops of a light, creamy, tangy soft cheese flavored with dill and thyme. It was warm and hearty enough to be satisfying, but not too heavy, and the contrast between the warm, still slightly crunchy vegetables and the delicate flavors of the cheese was wonderful. The potatoes were delicious too, roasted until just crispy and served with the same type of dip. 

 

 

(They all disappeared.)

 

They still had Christmas decorations up too! I liked their tree decorated with glass bulbs, lace angels, and stained glass-like dried orange slices. Our hosts also had a tree, and told us about how the tradition came from Germany and was very popular here.

   

I saw these decorations in another shop.

 

The old town square area was lovely – it reminded us of the tall, narrow buildings in Leuven and Brussels.

The Old Town Hall is one of the most famous buildings, with an intricate façade and clock face.

 

There were many old churches; this one by our apartment was especially beautiful.

The city was gorgeous at night, with bridges and church steeples lit up.  

Our hosts were absolutely wonderful – welcoming, friendly, and warm. They wanted to take a picture with us before we left, and hoped we would come back to Poland. I certainly hope to, and I would definitely recommend it. People are friendly, there are beautiful old buildings, and the food was, contrary to my uninformed prior belief, quite tasty.

Arriving in Poland

We just spent a wonderful two days in Wroclaw, Poland. The train ride there was pretty and it was a fun way to see the country.  

I had no idea what to expect. I thought no one would speak English, I thought we wouldn’t find any vegetarian food, I thought every building would be communist concrete gray, I thought the people would be unfriendly and impatient with tourists. I was so wrong.

Our Airbnb hosts greeted us warmly, welcoming us into their home like family. Andrzej made us green tea and we sat in his cozy kitchen talking about life in Poland. We'd been pronouncing it "ro-claw," but realized how terrible our Polish pronunciation was when our host referred to some city that sounded like "Brotslaf." It took me a minute to realize that that was, in fact, where we were. 

When his wife came home from work, she heated a bowl of soup for herself and offered some to us as well. Tomato basil with noodles, served with 2% yogurt, because, they noted, it was healthier than cream. 

 

Then, since we had asked about Polish food, the soup was followed by the Polish speciality pierogi. I’d never had them, despite living in a city with a significant history of Polish immigration and a handful of Polish restaurants and delis, but they are marvelous and I quickly realized that I’ve been missing out. The three little dumplings that appeared in front of us were steaming hot and fragrant, golden brown after being fried in butter. The filling was simple, just cabbage, carrots, and spices I think, and after a day of traveling and a long walk in the cold, they were like little pockets of heaven. Absolutely, absolutely delicious.

They were having friends over for New Years Eve that night, and in preparation Liliana had made three kinds of cake: chocolate with nuts, cheesecake, and a northern/eastern European traditional kind made with a thick layer of poppy seeds on top of a pastry crust. I was most excited to try the last one, after hearing my mom's description of poppy seed pastries in Germany. If I hadn’t known they were poppy seeds I might not have guessed, the flavor was mild and sweet and the texture was like a crumby, dense cake. It was tasty, and totally different from most things I've had before.

That night was New Year's Eve, so after a celebratory shot of Polish vodka flavored with Bison Grass with our hosts (Andrzej was very enthusiastic about this), we walked around the town center as fireworks went off from every direction (most definitely not done by professionals). They effect was beautiful nonetheless as we were surrounded by bursts of light.

More soon on our day in the lovely town center, filled with plenty of treats.