Poppy Seed Buns, and the Baking They Come From

There is a kind of poppy seed bun sold in British bakeries that consists of a plain sweet bun with poppy seeds scattered over the top. It is a perfectly nice bun and it has nothing to do with what a Central or Eastern European person means by the words.

In Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Hungary and across the region, a poppy seed bun contains a thick dark paste of ground poppy seeds, and that paste is the entire point. There is more of it by volume than most people expect the first time they cut one open, and it is what gives the bun its colour, its weight and its faintly nutty, faintly bitter flavour.

Why the seeds have to be ground

A whole poppy seed is a sealed thing. Its oil and flavour are locked inside a hard shell, and eating it whole gives you crunch and very little else. That is fine on top of a bagel, where crunch is the job.

To get flavour you have to break the seed, and to break something that small in quantity you need either a dedicated poppy seed mill, which exists and which every household in Poland used to have, or you have to scald the seeds and grind them repeatedly in a food processor, which takes several passes and never quite gets there.

Ground properly, the seeds release an oil that turns the mass dark grey going on black, thick and slightly sticky, and the flavour changes completely: nutty, faintly bitter, almost like a very mild almond.

The filling is cooked

Ground seeds are then cooked, usually with milk, sugar and butter, until the mixture thickens and the bitterness rounds off. Honey often goes in. So do raisins, candied peel, ground nuts or a little semolina to bind it, depending on whose grandmother wrote the recipe.

This is a slow process and it cannot be rushed. Undercooked poppy filling tastes raw and harsh. Overcooked, it goes grainy and dries out. The window in between is where a good bun lives.

That is the real reason these are hard to find. The dough is easy. The filling is a day's work before the baking even starts.

Poppy Seed Buns - 4 PiecesPoppy seed buns, four to a box. Soft enriched dough with a generous poppy seed filling.£30Order this

Where the tradition comes from

Poppy seeds carry a great deal of symbolic weight across the region, and most of it is about abundance. A single seed head holds thousands of seeds, which made it an obvious emblem of plenty and of fertility long before anybody wrote any of this down.

That is why poppy appears at exactly the meals where abundance is the message. Kutia, the wheat and poppy dish eaten at Christmas Eve supper in Ukraine and Poland. Makowiec, the rolled poppy seed cake that is on every Polish Christmas table. Poppy seed strudel in Hungary. And the everyday version of the same idea, which is the bun.

The enriched dough

The dough around it is the same family as our other sweet buns: flour, milk, egg, butter, sugar, yeast. Enriched, which is the technical word for a dough with fat and egg in it, and it behaves quite differently from a lean bread dough.

Fat coats the flour proteins and slows gluten development, so the dough takes longer to come together and rises more slowly. It is also softer and stickier to handle. What you get for that trouble is a crumb that is tender rather than chewy, that keeps better, and that is rich enough to stand up to a strong filling.

Every bun in our range uses a version of this dough: the blueberry streusel buns, the vatrushki, the cinnamon rolls and these.

Blueberry Streusel Buns (Jagodzianki)£42Strawberry Vatrushki£32

How to eat them

Warm, ideally. Ten minutes in an oven at 150 degrees brings back the softness of the dough and loosens the filling, and the difference between a warmed poppy seed bun and a cold one out of a box is considerable.

With black coffee rather than tea, which is the one place these depart from the Soviet tea table. The bitterness of the poppy and the bitterness of coffee do something interesting together.

They are also good the next day, better than most enriched buns, because the filling is wet enough to keep the crumb around it soft.

The tinned filling question

You can buy poppy seed filling in a tin, sold as makowa masa or mohnback, in most Polish and German shops in London. It is a real thing that real bakers use and it is not a cheat in itself.

What varies is what else is in it. The good ones are ground poppy, sugar, and something to bind. The cheap ones are largely breadcrumb or semolina with poppy in it, sweetened heavily, and the ratio can be well under half poppy by weight.

The way to tell without opening it is the colour through the glass if you can see it, and the ingredient order on the label. If sugar or breadcrumb is listed before poppy seed, you are buying sweetened crumb with a poppy note.

The texture gives it away once it is open. Real ground poppy filling is dense, slightly oily and almost black. A filler heavy one is lighter in colour, drier and fluffier.

A bun made with the cheap kind is not bad. It is just a sweet bun with something dark in it, and it is why so many people think they do not like poppy seed.

Common questions

How many buns are in a box?

Four.

Do they contain nuts?

The declared allergens are gluten, eggs and milk. Some traditional poppy fillings include ground nuts, so if there is an allergy at the table, message us before ordering rather than assuming.

Are poppy seeds a problem for drug tests?

Poppy seeds can produce a positive result on some opiate screening tests. If you are subject to workplace testing, this is worth knowing. It is a well documented effect and it has nothing to do with how the buns are made.

How should I warm them?

Ten minutes at about 150 degrees. Not a microwave, which makes the dough tough.

How long do they keep?

Two to three days, and they hold up better than most enriched buns because the filling keeps the crumb moist.

Are these the same as makowiec?

Not the same shape. Makowiec is a rolled log sliced into rounds. These are individual buns using the same style of filling.

Ordering in London

Baked to order in Belgravia and delivered across London and Surrey. Forty eight hours notice, £12 delivery in central London and £15 elsewhere, £50 minimum order.