Jagodzianki Season: When to Eat Blueberry Buns

The Polish season for jagodzianki is July and August. That is not a marketing window or a menu decision. It is the few weeks when czarna jagoda, the wild bilberry, is ripe on the forest floor and people are out picking it. Bakeries in Poland bake the buns while the fruit is coming in, food magazines run their annual rankings of who has done it best, and then the berries stop and so do the buns. Ask a Pole in August where to buy a good one and you will get an argument. Ask in November and you will get a shrug.

That honesty about season is worth keeping, and it is also worth being clear about what it does and does not mean for a kitchen in London. We bake Blueberry Streusel Buns all year, four to a box, £36, with 24 hours' notice. We do not call them jagodzianki without explaining what has changed and what has not.

Why the Polish season is July and August

The berry is Vaccinium myrtillus, the bilberry. It is small, dark, purple all the way through, and sharp in a way the cultivated highbush blueberry from a punnet is not. The name jagodzianka comes straight from jagody, the forest berry, and the bun is built around that fruit's acidity. The dough is enriched and sweet, the kruszonka on top is butter, sugar and flour, and the bilberries cut through both. Swap in a mild supermarket blueberry and the whole thing goes flat and sweet, which is the failure you taste in most versions sold outside Poland.

Bilberry bushes are low, maybe 30 centimetres, and the fruit has to be picked by hand or with a comb. Nobody farms it commercially anywhere in Europe, because the labour makes no sense against a highbush blueberry field that can be harvested by machine. So the supply is genuinely wild and genuinely seasonal: forests in Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and a short window in high summer. That is the whole reason the season exists. It is a supply fact before it is a tradition.

The same berry grows here. In England it is the bilberry, in Wales the whinberry or wimberry, in Scotland the blaeberry. It ripens on moorland in July and August, and British bilberry pies and tarts have been made for centuries. It never became a crop in Britain for the same reason it never became one in Poland. Anyone who has spent an hour on a Peak District hillside filling half a container understands the economics immediately.

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

What a London kitchen can and cannot do about that

Here is where the London answer diverges from the Warsaw one. In August a Polish baker can buy bilberries picked that morning. In London nobody can, and no amount of wanting to changes it.

What London has all year is the cultivated highbush blueberry: farmed, machine picked, firm, mild, green inside when you cut it. It is a good fruit and it is a different fruit. Baked into an enriched bun under streusel it gives something softer, sweeter and rounder than the Polish original, because it has less acid to push back against the sugar in the dough and the butter in the crumble.

That is what our Blueberry Streusel Buns are, and it is why we describe them as blueberry buns rather than borrowing a name that belongs to a specific berry in a specific fortnight. Four to a box, £36, 24 hours' notice, baked for the date you choose. If you grew up eating the forest version in July, you will taste the difference in the first bite, and you should: that is the honest position rather than a marketing one.

What that means for ordering them out of season

Nothing, in practice, except expectation. The buns are made to order the same way in February as in August, and the thing that matters most to how one eats is not the month but the hours since it left the oven.

An enriched bun with a wet fruit filling has a short best. On the day, the streusel is crisp against a soft crumb and the fruit is still distinct. By day two the crumb has drawn the juice, the kruszonka has softened, and the contrast that made it worth eating is gone. Nothing here is baked ahead and held, which matters more with this than with almost anything else we make.

Eat them the day they arrive. Warm them for five or six minutes in a low oven if they have cooled, and keep them out of the microwave, which turns the streusel to paste. The traditional Polish accompaniment is a glass of kefir or maślanka, buttermilk, and it is a better match than tea. The sourness of the drink does the job the sourness of the berry does in Poland.

Strawberry Vatrushki£32Cinnamon Rolls - 6 Pieces£48

Summer baking in London, and when our buns are at their best

July and August are still when these buns are best here, for two reasons. The supply chain is at its freshest, since the previous season's frozen stock is at its oldest in June and the new crop arrives shortly after. And the buns simply suit the weather. A sweet enriched dough with sharp fruit is a warm afternoon pastry. It sits alongside strawberries, not alongside chocolate and cinnamon.

That is broadly how the rest of our year moves too. Summer baking in London means the Strawberries and Cream Cake at £65, the Strawberry Tart at £51, Pavlova at £72 with fresh berries on top, and the Strawberry Vatrushki at £32 for people who want something closer to a bun. In autumn the fruit turns to apple: the 20 cm Apple Pie at £40, and the Apple Pies pirozhki, six pieces for £22. Midwinter belongs to Honey Cake, Napoleon and Prague, which are heavier and hold their own against cold weather. We have written more about how the collection shifts through the year in seasonal cakes and desserts, and the whole range with current prices sits on the cakes page.

A few practical points about ordering seasonal pastries in London from a kitchen like ours. Everything is baked to order for the date you choose, so the date matters more than the order time. Cakes need 48 hours. The blueberry buns need 24, which makes them one of the shorter lead times we offer and a reasonable thing to add to a Saturday morning. We deliver across London and Surrey, and the bread round to Virginia Water, Weybridge, Ascot, Sunningdale, Sunninghill, Egham and Englefield Green runs on Wednesdays.

If you want the closest thing to a Polish August in London, order a box for a July or August delivery date and eat all four within a few hours of arrival. If it is February and you want them anyway, order them and know exactly what you are getting: ripe forest fruit, frozen at the right moment, in a bun that was in an oven yesterday. Four for £36, 24 hours' notice, info@mikebakes.uk or +44 7922 122149.