Though inflation has jacked the price of an obwarzanek up to around 3zł (sacrilege!), you’ll still see countless people on the go munching these braided pretzel rings. Tasty and filling when fresh, the art of truly enjoying an obwarzanek leaves a lot up to chance. Cracovian bakers produce up to 200,000 obwarzanki daily in the summer, despite the fact that on leaving the oven the baked goods have a sell-by date of about three hours. As such, finding a fresh one is essential. To ensure you do, consider a trip to the Obwarzanek Museum, where you can make your own.
Enjoyed by people of all ages, obwarzanki also feed Kraków’s entire pigeon population when in the evenings the city’s 170-180 obwarzanki carts essentially become bird-food vendors. If you are a vegan or kosher pigeon, take note that the PGI-certified traditional obwarzanki recipe uses animal fat, so you may actually want to avoid the officially licensed 'obwarzanki krakowski' in favour of the more prolific ‘precel krakowski’ (Kraków Pretzel) or ‘bajgiel krakowski’ (Kraków Bagel) instead (it's complicated).
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