FAT TUESDAY FOR ALL
Bakery creates gluten-free paczkis
No one has to be left out of the Fat Tuesday, deep-fried doughnut fest called Paczki Day.
Chris Brecka will start baking gluten-free paczki sometime after midnight and all through the early morning hours of Tuesday to fry up to 1,000 gluten-free goodies.
“We’ve had some people dancing in the store that they were so excited about it,” said Brecka who started her gluten-free bakery Healthy Creations Inc. in 1998 out of her home and opened her first of three stores in 2009.
Brecka has been making glutenfree paczki (the plural term pronounced “poonch-key”) for the last five years and sold out her inventory of more than 500 paczki within hours last year.
Her gluten-free version of the Polish pastry is smaller and round, and it comes with a bit less guilt. Her cherry, raspberry, lemon, chocolate and custard-filled paczki, which have no milk or nuts, have just over 100 calories and five grams of fat. A regular paczki can pack more than four times as many calories and triple the fat depending on the variety.
Fat Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday, comes before the start of Lent for Christians and it was a day to eat rich foods and use up ingredients before giving up some foods for Lent. That’s why some churches have pancake suppers on Tuesday and why, thanks to the Polish community in Detroit and Windsor, Paczki Day is celebrated here and in the county.
People who have Celiac disease or for other reasons avoid gluten, a protein found in grains, usually miss out but Brecka’s bakery is all about making the gluten-free version of the breads and treats people love. Customers have been asking her for weeks if she’s making paczki again.
“It’s fun, right,” she said of her upcoming baking blitz using two small deep fryers. “Nobody likes to go without.”
Her Healthy Creations — a gluten-free bakery — grew out of a mother’s heart, a quest to make food her son Derrick could eat after being diagnosed with Celiac disease at age three. The glutenfree alternatives tasted awful, she said.
“Here’s this three-and-a-halfyear-old kid and he’s looking at me with these very sad eyes. It’s like, ‘ Why are you doing this to me, mom? I can’t eat that,’” Brecka recalled. “Let’s face it, we all want to eat food that makes you feel good. You don’t just want to eat food to stay alive.”
Two of her three children, now in their 20s, needed gluten-free foods, and while Brecka was at a Celiac disease support group, other moms starting asking to buy her breads and cookies.
Healthy Creations Inc., which now includes her husband Dan and all three of their children, outgrew its first two bakeries and has three stores including a London store at 502 Sprinkbank Drive. In January, the bakery was voted the top Windsor bakery through the online Top Choice Awards.
The Windsor store is on the southwest corner of Dougall Avenue and Cabana Road at 333 Dougall Square and in 2016 her family opened a Lakeshore store at 33 Amy Croft Dr. They are open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
The paczki sell for $2.50 apiece or $13.50 for a box of six.
Gluten-free products cost more because of pricey ingredients such as gluten-free flour ranging from $80 to $300 a bag compared to about $22 for a large bag of regular flour, her husband explained.
The stores still get newly-diagnosed customers who are grateful.
“It’s really humbling,” she said. “You don’t always have an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. To me, I find that to be incredible.”