Add this ingredient to faworki for Fat Thursday 2025. They will disappear from the plate in 5 minutes
Fat Thursday and the entire carnival period is a time when you can eat delicious delicacies. In the Polish tradition, these are most often faworki, also known as chrust, or donuts. In 2025, Fat Thursday falls quite late – only on February 27. During this time, you can fry your future faworki without any remorse. Virtually every housewife has her own recipe for faworki, which she guards like a secret. The secret to successful faworki is the dough. When aged, one of the ingredients is alcohol, most often spirit. Its purpose is to make the dough soft and not absorb too much fat during frying. Nowadays, when more and more people give up alcohol, questions arise whether it can be replaced with something in faworki. It turns out that yes. Beer is often recommended instead of spirit. It makes the faworki come out plumper and have more characteristic bubbles on the surface of the dough. For people who do not want to add alcohol to their faworki, vinegar is also recommended.
My grandmother never added spirit or vinegar to faworki. She had her secret ingredient that made her faworki the best. Grandma always added a small amount of lemon juice. It worked on a similar principle to vinegar or alcohol and prevented the dough from absorbing fat.
In some regions of Poland, faworki become fluffier. This is a slightly different version of traditional brushwood. They are equally delicious and melt in your mouth. My grandmother told me her secret for fluffy faworki. While kneading the dough, add a tablespoon of vanilla-flavored pudding powder. My grandmother’s recipe also includes 200 g of sour cream. This combination makes the faworki fluffy and soft after frying. The taste is in no way inferior to the traditional ones.
Where did faworki come from in Polish cuisine?
. In the past, faworki were fried in almost every Polish home during Carnival. The legend indicates that faworki were created by accident. A young confectioner accidentally dropped a strip of donut dough into the hot oil. Due to the high temperature, the cake took the shape of a braid, and the confectioner sprinkled it with powdered sugar. For many years, the recipe for faworki was similar to donut dough, but over time it was modified to make the brushwood lighter and more crumbly. The traditional recipe for faworki contains flour, egg yolks, a spoon of spirit (so that the dough does not absorb fat during frying), cream and sugar. Baking masters suggest that faworki should be fried in lard. Thanks to this, their taste is the best.
