What Is Actually in a Jagodzianka

Most weeks somebody writes to ask whether the blueberry buns contain nuts, or whether there is butter in the dough, or whether a child who reacts to milk can eat one. Those are reasonable questions and they deserve a straight answer rather than a line about how everything is made with love. So this is the ingredient list, the allergen position, the things we handle in the same kitchen, and the things we will not promise.

If the bun itself is new to you, a jagodzianka is the Polish summer bun: sweet yeast dough wrapped around blueberries under a crumble called kruszonka, and the full story of the berry and the season is written up at what jagodzianki are. This piece is about what is inside one.

The six things in an enriched dough, and the job each one does

An enriched dough is bread dough with fat, sugar and usually eggs added. That is the whole definition. The additions make it softer, richer and slower to rise, and they are the reason a bun tears rather than tugs.

Flour is the structure. When flour is hydrated and worked, the proteins in it form gluten, and gluten is what holds the gas the yeast produces. Without it the dough would not rise into anything; it would spread.

Milk does three things. It hydrates the flour like water would, its fat softens the crumb, and its sugars brown the crust. A bun made with milk goes a deeper gold at the same oven temperature than the same bun made with water, and it stays soft a day longer.

Eggs bring fat, protein and emulsifiers. The yolk is the useful part for texture: it carries fat into the dough and keeps the crumb tender. Eggs also colour the crumb, which is why an enriched dough looks yellow in section against the white of a plain loaf.

Sugar feeds the yeast at first and then gets in its way. Past a certain level sugar draws water away from the yeast and slows fermentation, which is why sweet doughs take longer to prove than lean ones. It also holds moisture in the finished bun.

Salt controls the rate of fermentation and tightens the gluten. In most enriched doughs it sits around two per cent of the flour weight. Leave it out and the dough ferments too fast and tastes flat, no matter how much sugar is in it.

Yeast is the leavening. It converts sugars to carbon dioxide and alcohol, the gas inflates the gluten network, and the heat of the oven sets it.

Then there is the filling and the topping. The filling is blueberries. The kruszonka, in the Polish tradition, is flour, butter and sugar rubbed together into crumbs, sometimes bound with a yolk. Butter is dairy, so any bun with a proper streusel on it contains milk twice over.

Blueberry Streusel Buns (Jagodzianki)Jagodzianki, Polish blueberry buns, four to a box. Soft enriched dough, blueberry filling, buttery streusel.£42Order this

What is in our blueberry streusel buns

Our Blueberry Streusel Buns are made with eggs, sugar, salt, yeast, flour and milk, with a blueberry filling and a buttery streusel crust on top. Four to a box, £36, 24 hours' notice.

The declared allergens are eggs and milk. They are in the dough and, in the case of milk, in the streusel as well. There is no version of this bun without either.

The buns are made with flour and are not gluten free. Nothing in the buns and babka section is gluten free, because enriched dough is the point of every item in it. If gluten is the issue, the things we make without it are the Esterházy cake at £75, which is built on almond meringue layers rather than sponge, and the gluten free peach pie at £46, which is also made without sugar or lactose. Those are the two, and it would be dishonest to imply a longer list.

One thing worth saying plainly about the fruit: ours are cultivated blueberries, which are larger, sweeter and milder than the forest bilberry a Polish jagodzianka is built on. We say so rather than borrowing the name and leaving it there.

What else the kitchen handles

This is one small kitchen in Belgravia. Everything is made by hand on the same surfaces, with the same mixers and the same ovens, and baked to order for the date chosen. That has advantages. It also means there is no separate allergen free room, and there is no such thing as a batch made in isolation.

Alongside the buns, this kitchen handles sulphites, lupin and molluscs. Sulphites are preservatives found in a range of dried and processed ingredients and are one of the fourteen allergens that must be declared in the UK. Lupin is a legume whose flour turns up in baking and which can cross react with peanut allergy. Molluscs are shellfish. All three are present in the kitchen, and so the buns are made in an environment where they are present, whatever is or is not in the recipe.

Nuts are a separate question and the most common one asked. Several products we make contain them: the caramel mousse desserts state nuts on the label, the carrot cake has walnuts in the sponge, the Kyiv cake is built on hazelnut meringue and the peanut rings are coated in roasted peanuts. Those are made in the same room as the buns. If a nut allergy in the house is severe, that is the fact to weigh, not the ingredient list of the bun on its own.

Strawberry Vatrushki£32Cinnamon Rolls - 6 Pieces£48

How to ask about a specific allergy, and what we cannot promise

Ask before ordering rather than after. Email info@mikebakes.uk or call +44 7922 122149, say which allergen, and say how severe the reaction is. Those two pieces of information change the answer. Someone avoiding dairy by choice and someone who carries adrenaline for it need different replies, and we would rather give the right one.

Because everything is baked to order, there is room to answer properly before anything is mixed. Buns need 24 hours' notice, cakes 48. Send the allergen question in the same message as the order and the date, and it gets dealt with in one exchange.

What we will not do is guess. If we are not certain about an ingredient, we will say we are not certain. What we cannot do is guarantee the absence of traces of anything handled here, because there is no separate line and no testing regime behind that kind of claim. Any small kitchen telling you otherwise is telling you something it cannot know.

What we can do is tell you exactly what is in a product, exactly what else is in the room, and then let you make the decision. For the blueberry buns that comes to this: eggs and milk are in them, gluten is in them, and sulphites, lupin, molluscs and nuts are in the kitchen around them.

If that works for the person eating, order 24 hours ahead and say the date. If it does not, write anyway and say what the restriction is; there may be something else on the list that suits, and if there is not, we will say that too.