Gogoși: Romanian Doughnuts the Size of Your Palm
Romanian has a lovely turn of phrase for lying: a vinde gogoși, to sell doughnuts. If someone in Bucharest is selling you gogoși, he's probably pulling your leg - and if a bakery in Sibiu does it, it'll cost you four lei.
Gogoși (singular gogoașă) are yeasted doughnuts fried in oil, and in Romanian cuisine they are sold either plain with powdered sugar or filled with jam, curd cheese, chocolate, and in Transylvania even with salty cheese. The word itself has had more careers than most politicians: it also means a silkworm cocoon and, figuratively, empty talk. Three meanings, one shape - something round, puffed up and uncertain inside.
One Dough, Four Names and All of Central Europe
Where the word gogoașă came from, the Romanian academic dictionary honestly cannot say; the candidate cited most often is the Albanian gogëlë, a bud. The names the doughnut goes by from region to region, though, have much clearer origins: in Transylvania it is called pancove, in the Banat crofne, in Bukovina pampuște. Gogoși are not a Romanian invention but the Romanian branch of the Central European family of fried yeasted doughnuts - the Austrian Krapfen, the Hungarian fánk, Polish pączki and the doughnuts we fry back home are all built on the same dough of flour, milk, egg yolks and yeast. The details differ: Krapfen get a shot of apricot jam only after they are fried, pączki have a soft spot for rose jam, and gogoși have sheer size going for them.
What Is Inside and When Gogoși Get Fried
History here has no date, only a direction. The doughnut came to Transylvania and the Banat with the Saxons, the Swabians and Habsburg cooking, and Romanian sources describe it as centuries old without anyone being able to say who first dropped a piece of yeasted dough into hot oil. It is more honest to admit that nobody dates the first Romanian gogoașă. What can be dated is the calendar: gogoși belong to Lăsata secului, the last day before the fast. The rest of the year they are a street snack from a gogoșărie - and even that word can start an argument, because half the country writes gogoșerie and the official spelling guide patiently corrects them.
Anyone who has ever fried doughnuts knows the dough: flour, lukewarm milk, egg yolks, yeast, sugar and lemon zest, an hour of rising, rounds cut out with a glass, a little more proofing and then into the oil until golden. It comes down to the filling and the freshness. Jam and vanilla cream are the classics, chocolate and Nutella the newer standard, curd cheese with raisins the sweet middle ground - and in Transylvania, where they make a lot of cheese, you also come across gogoși with telemea, with cașcaval or with urdă and dill, which makes them something like a fried turnover with salty curd cheese. Freshness is the other half: a gogoașă lives for a few minutes after it comes out of the oil, and if you are buying one from a display case, you should ask when the last batch went in.
A Bakery Window in Sibiu Before the Ride to Cluj-Napoca
I ate gogoși in Sibiu, on the day I had a rideshare booked back to Cluj-Napoca. Until then I'd thought of Sibiu mainly as the open-air museum, which I walked around and which is genuinely beautiful; gogoși added a bakery to that picture, with a window where doughnuts the size of my palm were piled up behind a coiled rope - not round balls, the way we know them, but flat half-moons folded over the filling. The bakery had all sorts of filled versions, all of them 4 RON (0.80 EUR), and gogoși simple for 2.50 RON (0.50 EUR). I took a chocolate one, just out of the fryer. The dough was light and the oil soaked through the napkin before I could even take a bite, and the chocolate inside was still runny. There was as much filling in it as we would put into three doughnuts back home, and for 0.80 EUR it was a whole snack for the road.
