Berliner Pfannkuchen: the doughnut Berlin calls something else

Overview

The thing itself is simple: a soft, enriched yeast dough, proved twice, deep-fried in fat so that a pale ring stays around its middle where it floated, injected with jam, and finished with icing sugar, granulated sugar or a thin white glaze. No hole. The pale equatorial band is the mark of a properly fried one — it means the dough was buoyant and cooked on both faces without being turned too early.

The name is where the confusion lives, and it is a genuinely useful thing to get right before you open your mouth at a counter. Across most of the country this pastry is called a Berliner. In Berlin it is called a Pfannkuchen. And what the rest of the country calls a Pfannkuchen — a pancake — is here an Eierkuchen. So ordering a Pfannkuchen in this city gets you the doughnut, and ordering it two hundred kilometres away gets you a pancake. The local word is not a quirk to be humoured; it is simply what the thing is called here.

The classic filling is plum butter — Pflaumenmus, thick, dark and barely sweet — with apricot and rose-hip jam close behind. The modern bakery case runs to vanilla custard, egg liqueur and chocolate, which are all perfectly good and none of which is the traditional one.

The dish is native in the sense that matters — the city’s name is on it everywhere else in the country — though the honest historical position is that a filled fried dough of this kind is common across central Europe, and the various origin stories about an eighteenth-century Berlin baker who could not go to war and made cannonball-shaped pastries instead are folklore. It is a good story, repeated in a great many places, and there is no document behind it.

While we are on stories: the one about a visiting American president’s 1963 speech and a roomful of Berliners laughing because he had called himself a jam doughnut is also a myth. The sentence was grammatically correct, nobody laughed, and in this city the pastry is not called a Berliner in the first place — which is the detail that quietly dismantles the whole joke.

What to order

Say einen Pfannkuchen, bitte and point. The fillings are usually labelled in the case; the ones worth knowing:

• Pflaumenmus — plum butter. The traditional one, dark and tart, and the version that justifies the amount of sugar on the outside.
• Aprikose or Hagebutte — apricot or rose-hip. Both standard, both sweeter.
• Vanille — custard. Heavier, popular, modern.
• Eierlikör — egg liqueur. A local favourite and much stronger-tasting than it looks.

Finishing matters as much as filling. Mit Puderzucker is icing sugar, mit Zucker is granulated, mit Zuckerguss is the white glaze. The glaze is sturdier and travels better; the icing sugar is the one that ends up on your coat.

The test of a good one is the ratio and the position of the jam. It should be piped into the centre, not slumped at the bottom, and there should be enough to reach the middle of a bite — a gap of dry dough before you find it means it was underfilled or filled cold. Some bakeries will cut one in half; most will not, so the way to check is simply the weight in the hand.

Coffee is the pairing. In an old-fashioned Bäckerei the two are bought together and eaten standing at a shelf by the window, which is the correct setting.

What to avoid

The enemy is age, and a Pfannkuchen ages faster than it looks. Fried yeast dough is excellent for about four hours and stale by the next morning; the sugar coating hides the change until you bite. Signs to read through the glass: a dulled, damp-looking sugar coating that has begun to dissolve, a flattened base, or a glaze that has gone slightly translucent. All three mean yesterday.

The supermarket six-pack in a sealed tray is a different product engineered for a week’s shelf life, with palm fat, a stabilised filling and a lingering coating on the roof of the mouth. Cheap, and not what anyone here means.

Watch out too for the tourist-facing version sold near the main sights: the same pastry, made oversized, filled with something photogenic, and priced at three or four times what the bakery on a residential corner charges. This is a pastry that Berliners buy for small change on the way to work, and its price is one of the most reliable indicators in the city of whether you have wandered into a visitor economy.

And the prank, which is genuine and worth knowing about: at Silvester, the last night of the year, and around Karneval, it is a long-standing joke to slip one mustard-filled doughnut onto the tray among the jam ones. Bakeries do sell them deliberately. If you are handed a plate at a party at midnight and everyone is watching, that is what is happening.

Practicalities

Cheap. Reckon on roughly €1.20 to €2.50 apiece at an ordinary bakery, more at a café with seating, and considerably more at a specialist patisserie that has made the pastry into a project. There is nothing in a Pfannkuchen — flour, egg, fat, jam — so a high price is buying the room.

Bakeries fry in the small hours and the tray is at its best when the shop opens, which in Berlin is early: six or half past for the traditional ones, and the trays are visibly emptier by ten. The second-best time is the small afternoon batch some bakeries make, roughly between two and four. What sits between those windows is what did not sell.

The one moment the pastry becomes a ritual rather than a snack is the turn of the year: from late December through Karneval the bakeries make vastly more of them, the cases fill with novelty fillings, and people buy them by the box for parties. If you are in the city between Christmas and February you will not have to look for one.

Cash still matters here more than in most large cities in the region: plenty of neighbourhood bakeries take cards now, but a good number remain cash-only or have a minimum well above the price of one pastry. Carry coins. Eat it the day you buy it, standing up, and accept that the icing sugar is going to end up somewhere.