It's time for potica! Up on the Iron Range, the pastry called potica is a holiday treat. Eastern European grandmothers have made it for generations. But it's hard work, and not many people make it at home anymore. A few bakeries still make potica by hand, the way the grandmothers used to. Mainstreet Radio’ Chris Julin visited Andrej's European Pastry, one of those bakeries, in the town of Chisholm.
CHRIS JULIN: If you don't know potica, here's what you're missing. Imagine buttery pastry dough rolled so thin you can see light through it. That's covered with a layer of brown sugar, spices, and walnuts. Then it's rolled up into a small log shaped loaf and baked. Each thin slice of potica is a spiral of pastry and the moist, sweet filling. Most people who taste potica like it a lot.
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It's a weekday morning at Andrej's European Bakery in downtown Chisholm. Customers are picking up kolaches and strudel. But the real draw seems to be the potica. Arlene Lorich is buying four loaves. She knows how to make potica. She learned how from her mother-in-law years ago. It took them all day to make a few loaves. That's why Arlene Lorich is buying potica to give to her grown-up sons.
ARLENE LORICH: It's too, too hard. I've tried it. Mine don't come out that good.
CHRIS JULIN: The man behind Andrej's European Bakery is Jan Gadzo. He named the bakery after his father and his son. Jan Gadzo and his two employees crank out 240 loaves of potica a day. He says you can't roll out real potica dough in a machine. When potica dough is right, it's wet and gooey. And it jams mechanical rollers, so they roll all the dough by hand.
JAN GADZO: And yes, this is very, very labor intensive. But after the first 10,000 poticas, you get so used to it that you see how you roll it up. And basically, it takes me about two minutes to make one.
CHRIS JULIN: If you want to know how Jan Gadzo came to be making potica in Chisholm, Minnesota, it's a good idea to pull up a chair. The story starts with Jan Gadzo as a little boy in Eastern Czechoslovakia. He harvested walnuts from a tree in the yard. His mother used them to make potica. Only it wasn't called potica.
JAN GADZO: In Slovak, we call this orechovnik. O-R-E-C-H means orech. Orechovnik means walnut roll.
CHRIS JULIN: The story moves on to a teenager in the 1960s. Jan Gadzo tried to escape from Czechoslovakia twice. Both times, he ended up in prison. The authorities beat him and threatened to kill him. He finally snuck out of the country and found his way to an uncle in New York. He became an engineer. He worked on heating systems at big industrial sites. That brought him to a mine on the Iron Range.
Before long, he met a woman from Chisholm. That's his wife, Jean. They settled down in Chisholm about 20 years ago. When they were newlyweds, they visited Jan's aunt out in Pittsburg. And they ate some of her orechovnik. Jean Gadzo recognized it right away as the potica she'd grown up with, and she declared it the best she'd ever eaten. When they got back to Chisholm, Jan decided to make his wife some potica.
JAN GADZO: So I called my auntie in Pittsburgh. And, you know, I knew how to make it, but I needed, you know, the English translation recipe and stuff like that. So she just sent it to me. I doctored up a little of it my way. And all of a sudden, I mean, you know, all her friends and everybody coming over says, this is good.
CHRIS JULIN: Jan Gadzo won a blue ribbon at the local fair. And he started selling potica during the holidays. He and Jean made potica at their house in the evenings. They turned the porch into a commercial kitchen. The business kept growing. Jan quit his day job a few months ago and opened the bakery in downtown Chisholm.
His son Andrej is working in the bakery over the holidays. Andrej goes to college in Saint Paul. He's been helping his dad market potica in the Twin Cities. Andrej has been spending his weekends at Lunds & Byerlys, giving out potica samples.
ANDREJ GADZO: At least half the people who come by my table have heard of it or remember it. Some people just take a sample. I've never tried it before. Their eyes go about the size of dinner plates, and they grab a potica.
CHRIS JULIN: Success has its costs. Jan Gadzo says he can't make enough potica to keep up with demand, but he doesn't think he can afford to hire more full-time staff. And if he starts using machines, the potica won't be the same. He says he'll sit down in January after the holiday rush and try to decide what to do. This is Chris Julin, Minnesota Public Radio, in Chisholm.
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