Wienerbrød in Copenhagen: what it is, what to order, what to avoid

Overview

The pastry the rest of the world calls a Danish is called, in Denmark, the opposite: wienerbrød, “Viennese bread”. It is a laminated yeast dough, folded around cold butter again and again until the bake turns it into hundreds of thin, shattering layers, then shaped, filled and usually glazed or iced. The test of a good one is the inside, not the icing: it should flake when bitten and show open, airy layers when torn, rather than a close, bready crumb under a sweet lid.

It is not a Copenhagen dish in any narrow sense. Wienerbrød is baked in every Danish town, and a bakery in a small Jutland village takes it as seriously as one in the capital. What the city has is density — a bakery on nearly every residential corner — and the origin story, which is set here.

That story runs as follows: in the middle of the nineteenth century the city’s journeyman bakers went on strike, their masters hired bakers from Austria and other German-speaking lands, and those bakers brought the Viennese way of folding fat into dough. When the strikers returned they kept the technique and pushed it further, with more butter and richer fillings. It is the account every Danish source repeats, and it is best read as a tidy explanation of a real borrowing rather than a documented sequence of events: the name proves the Viennese debt, the strike’s role in it is the part told more confidently than it is evidenced. Vienna, for its part, returned the compliment and calls the same family of pastries after Copenhagen.

What to order

Nobody walks into a bakery and asks for “a wienerbrød”; the word is the category, and the counter is ordered by shape. The ones worth knowing:

• kanelsnegl — the cinnamon “snail”, a rolled spiral of dough, butter, sugar and cinnamon, often iced or brushed with chocolate. It is the everyday default and the most common thing sold as a Danish abroad.
• spandauer — a square of dough folded into a round with a dollop of custard or jam in the center and a ring of white icing. The name is usually traced to Spandau, outside Berlin, though nobody has a convincing account of why.
• tebirkes — the plain-looking one: a folded pocket of dough covered in poppy seeds with a thin layer of remonce inside. It is eaten at breakfast, sometimes split and buttered, and it is the least sweet thing on the counter.
• frøsnapper — a twisted strip of the same dough, poppy or sesame seeds and remonce, crisper and flatter than tebirkes.
• kringle — a large pretzel-shaped pastry filled with remonce, raisins or custard, bought whole and cut into slices for a table of people. It is what Danes bring to a workplace or a family coffee, not a solo snack.
• wienerstang or smørstang — a long bar of filled, iced dough sold by the slice or whole.

Remonce is the word that unlocks most of these: a creamed filling of butter and sugar, often with almond paste or cinnamon. If you want to know what is inside something, asking what kind of remonce it carries is the precise question.

The one order that marks you out is the word “Danish”. Everyone behind a counter will understand it, but it names nothing in particular here — point at a shape or use its name.

What to avoid

The thing to steer around is not a bad bakery so much as a pastry that was never folded in the room it is sold in.

Bake-off is the word to know. Gas stations, convenience chains, train-station kiosks and many supermarkets sell wienerbrød baked on site from frozen industrial dough. It can be warm and it can smell right, and it is still a different product: the layers are uniform and tight, the snail is perfectly round, and the icing sits in identical zigzags across a whole tray. A real bakery’s spirals vary slightly from one to the next.

The fat matters as much as the folding. Much industrial dough is laminated with margarine or blended fats, which survive freezing better and taste of nothing; a bakery that uses butter tends to say so, with smør or smørbagt on the sign or the label. A pastry that leaves a waxy film on the roof of the mouth is the margarine version.

Be wary of the heavily iced. A thick slab of fondant on a spandauer or snail is often there to hide a dough with too little lift. The better versions are more restrained, and the seeded ones — tebirkes, frøsnapper — have nowhere to hide, which is why they are a good test of a counter you do not know.

Packaged supermarket “wienerbrød” in plastic sleeves is a shelf-stable cake and can be ignored. So can the “Danish” on many hotel breakfast buffets, which is usually the bake-off product under a cloche.

Practicalities

Wienerbrød is a morning food first. Neighborhood bakeries open early — often around six or seven — and the first trays come out then; by mid-afternoon most of what is left has been sitting since breakfast, which flatters nothing laminated. On weekend mornings expect a line: buying fresh bread and pastries for a late family breakfast is a fixed habit, and the popular corner bakeries are busiest from about eight until ten. A weekday morning is the calmest time to choose from a full counter.

A single pastry costs roughly 20 to 45 kroner, the top of that at the bakeries known for their dough. A whole kringle or wienerstang runs well above that and is priced for sharing.

The pastry also turns up in two seasonal guises. In the weeks before Fastelavn, usually in February, many Copenhagen bakeries make their fastelavnsboller from wienerbrød dough filled with custard or cream. And a kagemand, the birthday “cake man” of Danish children’s parties, is often built from the same dough.

Payment is by card or phone nearly everywhere, including the smallest bakery, and some no longer accept cash at all; there is no tipping. Bakeries are takeaway counters by default, so eating standing on the sidewalk or on a bench with the paper bag is entirely ordinary.