Pączki day facts

By Ryan Percy

Shrove Tuesday is also known as Fat Tuesday, Pancake Day and Mardi Gras but is commonly known as Pączki Day in Windsor. This is the last day of the Christian Shrovetide season before Lent, starts on Ash Wednesday, which falls on Feb. 14 this year.

Since Lent is a time of fasting, the day before Ash Wednesday was traditionally one where Christians would empty their pantries by eating all of the best foods they had. This was so that they would not be tempted during the fast.

Making pączki and pancakes worked well because they would use up all of the lard, eggs, sugar and milk in the pantry.

Pączki are a Polish type of doughnut. They are essentially the big brother of jelly doughnuts — deep fried, glazed or sugared and filled with custard or jelly and twice the calories of the normal jelly doughnut

Windsor has fallen in love with these calorie bombs over the years, buying the doughnuts in significant quantity. Each doughnut generally has between 500 and 700 calories according to Tourism Windsor-Essex.

Various bakeries in Windsor, such as Stiemar Bakery and Blak’s Bakery, get such demand for pączki they need to be ordered a week in advance.

If sales are comparable to the bakeries’ numbers from last year, Windsor will produce a little more than 134,000 pączki in the week heading into Shrove Tuesday.

That will be nearly 81 million calories in one type of doughnut in one week. This is one day’s caloric intake of almost 36,000 people or 16 per cent of Windsor’s population.

With pączki selling for $2 each or $18 a dozen, on average, pączki alone put between roughly $201,000 and $269,000 back into the economy of the city.