Fat Tuesday is just around the
corner and that means paczki's will be filling bakery shelves.
A Mishawaka donut shop was starting to make
thousands of the pastries on Sunday in preparation.
Owner of Stone's Old Fashion Donuts,
Chuck Stone said Fat Tuesday is, "by far our busiest day of the
year."
He's been in the donut business for
31 years. This time of year he'll put in
18-20 hour days making packzi's. "A lot
of people think you start two hours before you open and it just doesn't work
that way," said Chuck.
Chuck and his wife are the only
employees at the donut shop so she'll be clocking several hours with him
leading up to and on Fat Tuesday. "We
kind of consider this the Christmas of donuts," said Felicia Stone. They expect to sell two thousand of the
polish pastries. "We do about 12
days of business in one," said Felicia.
So they prepare months in advance. Ordering 10 times the amount of ingredients
they would for any other day. But
they're happy to put in the extra prep time that lets them have monumental
sales on Fat Tuesday because it's quite a different story during lent. "A lot of people give up sweets for
lent. Have to make all of our sales on
Tuesday cause it's slim pickins then for the next six to seven weeks," said
Felicia.
Paczki's make up so much of their
Fat Tuesday business that there won't be much else on the shelves that day
Felicia said, "we will not have any yeast donuts on Tuesday because these
will be the replacement for those."
You can still order paczki's from
Stone's Old Fashion Donuts until 6 p.m. Monday.
If you don't place an advance order Felicia said get to the shop early
Tuesday. Last year they sold out of
paczki's by 10 a.m.
