Elleson’s Bakery in Sycamore made store record 5,640 paczkis for Fat Tuesday

SYCAMORE – Ken Elleson and his three sons baked 470 dozen paczkis – decadent polish pastries traditionally enjoyed the day before Lent begins – for Elleson’s Bakery’s busiest day of the year.

Ken Elleson, 63, has owned the Sycamore bakery for 35 years, but his son David said the paczki – pronounced “puhnch-kee” – craze hasn’t always been the boon for business that it is today. Customers filled the store for Shrove Tuesday, sometimes called Fat Tuesday, to get their sweet fix before Wednesday when Lent begins a 40-day Christian observance before Easter. The day is marked as a time to indulge in treats before Lent, where Christians might choose to fast or give up something, such as sweets.

“We started off really slow, and then it just sold so fast,” David Elleson said. “And then it just became this huge monster thing.”

Around noon Monday, the men of the Elleson family began preparing the largest patch of paczkis they’d ever made for their bakery. David Elleson said he estimated how much they made by keeping track of how many gallons of water they used. He said they used 25 gallons of water, which is enough for 470 dozen, or 5,640 paczkis.

David Elleson, 36, said because all the bakery doesn’t utilize machine mixers or slicers, each of the almost 5,000 paczkis were hand made. Even the vanilla and chocolate custard filled paczkis were made from scratch.

“These are all hand sliced too, so we don’t have any machines,” David Elleson said. “I do all the cinnamon bread, and I hand roll it. ... That’s why it takes hours and hours, because everything is done by hand.”

Vera Elleson, co-owner of Elleson’s bakery and Ken Elleson’s wife, came into Elleson’s bakery at 1 a.m. Tuesday morning to place the thousands of paczkis onto racks for the morning rush. About 4 a.m., Ken Elleson went to bed after more than a dozen hours of baking, and Vera prepared for customers to charge the store front, which opened at 5 a.m.

“I guess everybody loves my husband’s products,” Vera Elleson said.

“We started off really slow, and then it just sold so fast,” David Elleson said. “And then it just became this huge monster thing.”

—  David Elleson

Christina Sjulstad, a Sycamore resident, said she’s frequented Elleson’s Bakery for years and makes a deliberate effort to enjoy what has informally become known as Paczki Day.

“We have some Polish on one side of our family, so this was just something,” she said. “We always like to get a treat.”

David Elleson works seven days a week at his dad’s bakery and said, because he sets his own schedule, he’s happier now than he was when he was working on computers at Kishwaukee College.

Although he’s constantly working with sugary pastries, David Elleson said he doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth.

“It’s what they did before Lent. A lot of people in Poland give up sweets,” he said. “But Poland at the time was a poor country, and so they just found whatever they had and then they made a sweet treat before they give up [sweets] for 40 days.”

The polish tradition of filling paczkis with whatever they can lives on at Elleson’s, where paczkis are served with 13 different fillings: apple, blueberry, cherry, peach, strawberry, raspberry, pineapple, apricot, lemon, buttercream, chocolate butter cream, vanilla custard and chocolate custard.

Asked which paczki iteration is her favorite, Vera Elleson said she likes them all.

“It depends on the mood,” she said. “I kind of like custard but sometimes cherry. I don’t know, all of them. The peach is really good, apples also.”

Sjulstad said she prefers to stick to the basics.

“I’m kind of boring. I like the cream cheese,” she said. “But the kids tend to like the fruit-filled, strawberries.”

Because the Elleson’s sell paczkis only one day a year, there’s great fanfare surrounding the eastern European pastries, and that fanfare generates their busiest day of the year. Tuesday morning Vera Elleson said it was too early to tell how profitable the day was going to turn out to be, but the store’s biggest rushes of the day started as early as 5 a.m.

“This is a huge day,” David Elleson said. “We had over 160 dozen paczkis [pre] ordered today. This is the most we’ve ever had this year, so it keeps growing every year. As the word gets out, it keeps growing, growing and growing.”