The Kringle

All About Food | December 28th, 2015

The French are our friends and we are playing nice with them right now. But oh those French and their upper-crust attitude about how superior their pastries are to others, and in the close quarters of the EU, that is pretty arrogant. Just look around you, France. You have the Swiss and their fine chocolate work, the Germans -- ok, well, forget the Germans -- the Italians who do some nice work, and then there is Belgium, that little jewel of a country that makes exquisite pastries and confections.

While the French toil over and brag about their multi-layered puff pastry, so do the Dutch. And the ones that settled years ago in Racine, Wis., are doing it with their to-die-for kringle, a delightful concoction consisting of layers of light pastry filled with a variety of jams, cheese or nuts, which is baked and then glazed. Does the croissant have a polka named after it? Of course not. Frenchie croissants are no match for the kringle.

The kringle is at home in Norway just as it is in Denmark. Originally a Scandinavian pretzel, it is served both savory and sweet. It is traditionally a twisted knot and is still served as a cookie in Norway. Over the years, the bakers in Racine dropped the pretzel shape and went to an oval, for good reason: time. It takes longer to shape a pretzel than an oval. The O&H Danish Bakery in Racine is typically shaping and baking 5,000 to 7,000 kringles a day, but in the holiday season they are cranking out 20,000 a day. Yes, 20,000. No wonder a polka is named after it.

Family-owned Bendsten’s Bakery has been making its pastries by hand for 81 years, still folding and rolling and folding and rolling many times over (36 times to be precise), to create that light, airy pastry. While others like the O&H have created machinery to simulate the folding, Bendsten’s and Larsen’s bakeries have remained true to the old ways of doing it by hand in their original locations. O&H has a 36,000-square-foot production facility to handle the national demand. But it was Larsen’s that starting shipping out its pastries, creating a kringle craze back in the 1950s.

Wisconsin actually made the kringle its state pastry in 2013, and along with cheese this must be one of the state’s economic engines. Taking the pastry concept to a whole new level, Nordic Distillers has created a Kringle Cream Liqueur, which might inspire me to enter the Cocktail Showdown next year (and maybe call my drink The Kringler?). So while I patiently wait for my kringles to arrive via UPS, I will brush up on my mixology. Have a wonderful “Kringle Kristmas.”

RECENTLY IN

Recently in: