Palaneț: A Stuffed Bun from the Transylvanian Plain
The signs in the window of a Cluj bakery were bilingual, and the English line was lying. "Pie with cabbage", "pie with potatoes", "pie with cherries" - if that makes you picture a thin bottom crust and a lattice on top, what lands in your bag is something else entirely: a round, heavy bun of yeasted dough, scored into wedges, that spills cabbage, potatoes or sour cherries the moment you break it open.
Palaneț is a filled pastry from the Transylvanian Plain - a sheet of yeasted dough with the filling piled in the middle and the corners pulled together before baking, so the filling stays sealed inside; in Romanian cuisine it is sold by the piece in bakeries, savory and sweet side by side. Three or four lei will buy you a whole lunch off the shelf. It just isn't a pie.
A Word for Bread That Somebody Filled
Romanian borrowed the word palaneț from Ukrainian palianytsia, a plain round loaf with nothing at all inside it. On the Transylvanian Plain the name then did what borrowed words do: people started putting cabbage, cheese and apples inside the bread the word named, and nobody bothered to give it a new name. It's pronounced "palanets", with the final ț sounding like ts, and the plural is palanețe. And no, there is no link to the Hungarian pancake palacsinta, tempting though that is in a city with Cluj's Hungarian past - the two words merely sound alike. The palaneț has one home: Câmpia Transilvaniei, the hilly farmland between Cluj and Turda, with the village of Ceanu Mare as its undisputed capital. The rest of Romania knows the same idea by other names - palancă in Moldavia, and more broadly as one of the many shapes of plăcintă, which is more often pan-fried and flat. Its bakery neighbors covrigi and gogoși are a different thing altogether.
Food for the Fields That Bucharest Now Drives Out For
Out on the plain it was food for poor people - bread that keeps, that you can carry in your pocket to the fields and eat cold at noon beside the furrow. That, at least, is how they tell it in Ceanu Mare, where nobody dates the first palaneț, yet everybody knows how it is put together. Then, not long ago, something shifted: the village renamed its village days the Festivalul Palanețelor, and a pastry hardly anyone had paid attention to became the calling card of the region - people drive in for it from Bucharest, Brașov and Sibiu. Which makes the Cluj bakeries the last stop on the line. Cluj sells the palaneț and eats it, but it was invented out in the countryside, a fair way off.
How a Palaneț Is Put Together and How to Choose One
The dough is bread dough: flour, water, yeast, a little oil, no butter and no laminating. It gets rolled out into a thin sheet, cut into squares at home, a mound of filling goes into the middle of each square, and then comes the one step that matters - the corners are drawn up and pinched shut so that nothing escapes while it proofs and bakes. A palaneț is really a savory sweet bun that somebody closed on every side. The bakery version in Cluj is round and scored into six wedges, but the principle holds: the filling is in the dough from the start, not pushed into a finished roll afterwards, which is how filled buns are made back home. The classics are cabbage and brânză cheese, in the villages quark, apples and poppy seed as well, while the Cluj windows add cheese with dill, cheese with chives, potatoes, whey-cheese urdă, sour cherries - and a "palanetul savuros" with ham, cheese, mushrooms and tomato sauce, which is really a pizza that has slipped in among the buns.
You eat it out of your hand, hot or cold, at any hour of the day, and anyone who buys one for lunch can forget about dinner: a piece weighs around 170 grams and it is dough all the way through. One tip for reading the window: the label with the Romanian cu ("with") tells you what is inside, so cu varză is cabbage, cu mere apples, cu brânză cheese. If you want the original, take cabbage or cheese.
A Paper Bag from a Cluj Bakery
I ate my palaneț in Cluj, in a bakery where a case of baskets and little black labels took up the entire window. I took the one with ham and cheese and ate it out of a paper bag on the sidewalk outside the shop. Then I went back for a second. The dough was fluffy and faintly sweet, the crust springy rather than crisp, and inside there was salty cheese and ham. According to the label in the window, the ordinary fillings cost 3 RON (0.60 EUR) and my savuros one 4.5 RON (0.80 EUR). So the whole "pie" mix-up came to 0.80 EUR.
