Fritule: the little fried doughnuts that take over Zagreb in December

Overview

Fritule are small round fritters, roughly the size of a walnut, made from a loose yeasted or soda-raised batter dropped into hot oil by the spoonful. They come out irregular and knobbly — never spherical, whatever the picture on a stall suggests — and they are eaten hot, in a paper cone, under a great deal of icing sugar.

What is in the batter is what distinguishes them from every other fried dough in the region: grated lemon and orange zest, raisins soaked until they plump, and a slug of rakija or rum. The spirit is not for flavour so much as for the fry — alcohol in a batter reduces how much oil it takes up — but the smell of citrus and spirit hitting the fryer is the reason you find the stall before you see it. Some versions add a little brandy-soaked dried fig or a spoon of yoghurt; none of that changes the essential thing, which is a soft, steaming, faintly boozy interior inside a thin crust.

They are not a Zagreb dish and no one here pretends otherwise. Fritule belong to the coast — Dalmatia and Istria, where they are the standard festive fritter and where nearly every family has a version. What is genuinely Zagreb’s is the occasion. The city’s Advent market, which fills the squares and the park chain through December, turned fritule into the capital’s winter street food, fried in the open at temperatures where standing still is unpleasant and hot sugar is the point.

The wider Croatian context matters for ordering, because two related fritters sit beside them at the same stalls and are often confused: krafne, which are large filled doughnuts, and kroštule, thin ribbons of twisted fried pastry. Fritule are the small round ones.

What to order

At a stall the whole transaction is a size and a topping. Portions are sold by the paper cone or by weight — the usual units are a small cone of six or eight and a larger one of a dozen or more, and a dozen is plenty for two people who intend to eat anything else.

The toppings, in the order of how much they interfere:

• Icing sugar. The default and the right answer. It melts into the surface and the fritter still tastes of citrus.
• Chocolate sauce. Everywhere at the December stalls, popular, and it drowns the zest entirely. Fine if you want a chocolate thing; do not order it first.
• Nothing. Worth trying one plain if the seller will let you, purely to find out how much rum and lemon are in the batter — that is the honest measure of the stall.

The word to use is fritule; the singular fritula is rarely needed since nobody buys one. If you want them straight from the oil rather than from the warming tray, the phrase to point at is the pan itself, and any stall frying continuously will simply serve you from the batch in front of you.

Drink: mulled wine at the winter market — kuhano vino — or a small rakija. Coffee works, but the sugar-and-spirit combination is what the stalls are built around.

What to avoid

There is exactly one serious enemy here and it is time. A fritule that has been sitting in a heap for twenty minutes has gone from crisp-outside-molten-inside to uniformly chewy and greasy, and reheating does not bring it back. So:

Buy from the pan, not from the pile. At a busy stall there is always a pan working; at a quiet one there is a mountain under a heat lamp. The mountain is the warning.

Watch the oil. Clean frying oil is pale gold and the fritters float and turn quickly. Dark, smoking oil produces fritule with a bitter edge and a dark, hard crust, and it means the stall has not changed it that day.

Weigh the sugar. A very heavy blizzard of icing sugar, applied before you can see the fritters, is often covering a batch that has gone flabby. Good ones are dusted, not buried.

The other thing to think about is where you buy them. In December the stalls are everywhere and competition keeps them honest. Outside that season, fritule sold from a permanent kiosk on the main square to a slow trickle of visitors are being fried in small batches and held — the same object, several hours older, at a higher price. In the warm months the honest place to find them is a bakery counter or a family kitchen, not a tourist stall.

And treat the mixed “traditional sweets” plate in a restaurant with suspicion: three fritule, cold, arranged with a mint leaf. This is street food that has to be eaten within a few minutes of leaving the oil, and a plated version has already lost the argument.

Practicalities

Cheap. Reckon on roughly €3 to €6 for a cone at a winter market stall, depending on size and topping, and a euro or two less from an ordinary bakery. There is very little in them — flour, sugar, eggs, oil — so a high price is buying the square, not the fritter.

The season is the real practicality. Fritule are a Christmas and carnival food, and in Zagreb that means the Advent weeks from late November to early January, when the squares are full and the stalls run from late morning until late at night. Around carnival, in the weeks before Lent, they reappear. Outside those windows they exist but are not an event, and the coast eats them across a wider part of the year than the capital does.

Zagreb’s December is properly cold, often below freezing after dark, and that is not incidental — it is why a paper cone of hot fried dough works there and why it is a disappointing thing to buy on a mild afternoon in April.

Market stalls take cards almost without exception now, and most also take cash; the sums are small either way. Eat them walking, immediately, and do not buy more than you will finish in ten minutes — this is a food with a very short life, and the leftover cone in your coat pocket is the thing that gives fritule an undeserved reputation for being heavy.