Streusel-Topped Blueberry Coffee Cake
Plus: Toronto blueberry buns. IYKYK. (And if you don't know, I'll tell you!)
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Have you ever tried a Jewish blueberry bun? Did you even know they were a thing? If not, you are not alone. The fruit-filled pastry is a specialty of Toronto’s Jewish community (by way of Poland)—a treat often enjoyed, like a Danish, with coffee for breakfast or an afternoon snack.
I first stumbled across blueberry buns when I was researching diasporic Jewish recipes for The Jewish Cookbook. As it turns out, the sweet little pastries have a fascinating Jewish journey. Here’s the recipe headnote from The Jewish Cookbook:
In the 1920s, a Polish Jewish immigrant to Canada named Annie Kaplansky started selling small, yeasted buns stuffed with blueberries at her bakeshop, Health Bread Bakery. The tender, fruit-filled pastry had roots in Eastern Europe (a similar sweet called jagodzianki is still enjoyed in Poland today), but quickly became a hallmark of Toronto’s Jewish cuisine. Soon, other bakeries across the city started selling the buns too, helping shape generations of culinary memories for Toronto’s Jewish community.
Blueberry buns are essentially unknown outside of Toronto, and do not, at least to my knowledge, show up in bakeries in other parts of Canada or the United States. (If I am wrong about that, please let me know in the comments!) Aside from being tasty, their rarity is what makes them so special. They are a treasured, historical Jewish dish that could easily have been lost—along with 90 percent of Poland’s Jews—during the Holocaust. Instead through a miracle of chance, they travelled across the Atlantic and took root in a new Jewish community.
According to Mimi Sheraton’s book, 1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die, blueberry buns are also known amongst Toronto’s Jewish community by their Yiddish name, shritzlach. Sheraton’s description of blueberry buns is utterly tantalizing. “Crisp-crusted, yeasty pastry enfolds a luscious squoosh of juicy, glistening, tart-sweet blueberries,” she writes. (Um, yes please.) “Although proper shritzlach can be made with frozen or canned blueberries,” Sheraton writes, “the best examples are available in summer when the fresh, winey Canadian blueberries are in season.”
For decades, as Sheraton’s writeup suggests, blueberry buns were primarily a seasonal pastry. And some Jewish bakeries continue to offer them as a summer-only specialty. But others bake them year-round and last week, I had the distinct pleasure of eating one (okay, two).
I was in Canada for a Portico book event at the Toronto JCC. The event itself was a blast, but the unexpected highlight of the trip happened earlier in the day while at lunch with three Toronto Jewish food icons: cookbook author, Bonnie Stern, chef and restaurateur Anthony Rose (Fat Pasha, Fet Zun, Schmaltz Appetizing) and Nathan Ladovsky, who is the fourth-generation owner of the beloved United Bakers Dairy Restaurant.
A few minutes before my plane took off for Canada, I texted Bonnie to ask if she knew where I might pick up some blueberry buns while I was in town. By the time I landed an hour and change later, she had coordinated with Anthony and Nathan to bring half a dozen blueberry buns along to lunch. (Anyone who knows Bonnie would not be surprised by this story—she is a magical person who makes things happen!)
The buns were from Gryfe’s Bagels, a 109-year old Toronto institution. From what I was told, Gryfe’s blueberry buns are baked with the same dough used for bagels, just rolled very thin, brushed with a shiny egg wash cap, and sprinkled with coarse sugar.
My expectations were not particularly high—I have been burned by Jewish bakeries before. (I am looking at you dry, oversized hamantaschen!) But Gryfe’s blueberry buns far exceeded expectations. The filling was essentially blueberry pie filling—a wobble of blueberries cooked with sugar and cornstarch. But it did not have that cloying, artificial taste that plagues so many old school bakery pastries. The buns were tender with nuanced flavor and utterly delightful—a deliciously messy bite of Jewish history wrapped up in dough.
Annie Kaplansky’s Health Bread Bakery is no longer in business, but this article lists a few Jewish bakeries, including Gryfe’s, where you can find blueberry buns the next time you are in Toronto. If my Toronto-based readers have any intel about where you buy blueberry buns, please share it in the comments!
Streusel-Topped Blueberry Coffee Cake
So…after all that talk about blueberry buns, I am actually not sharing a recipe for them in this week’s newsletter. If you want to try baking them, you can find the recipe on page 37 of The Jewish Cookbook. (Or, if you are a paid subscriber of The Jewish Table and don’t have the cookbook, just drop me a note and I’ll email you the recipe.)
But I couldn’t let this week go by without giving you something tasty and blueberry-centric to bake for breakfast. So instead, here is a Streusel-Topped Blueberry Coffee Cake that I think you should bake right now. Like, “turn off your computer and go preheat your oven,” right now.
There’s so much to love about coffee cakes, with their plush and tender crumbs and sky-high piles of crisp, buttery streusel. In Ashkenazi Jewish homes, coffee cakes are traditionally served on Shabbat morning, for the Yom Kippur break fast, on Shavuot—or really anytime when coffee is served. This coffee cake is loosely inspired by last week’s encounter with blueberry buns in that it is filled with tons of the juicy, sweet-tart fruit. But since a single cake is much quicker to make than a bunch of individual, blueberry compote-stuffed buns, it gets you from kitchen to table with a cup of coffee and something sweet much faster.
Streusel-Topped Blueberry Coffee Cake
Serves 8
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