It’s 6:30 a.m. and I am calling Bendtsen’s Bakery to try to catch the baker. But I fail. Again.
“He’s making kringles,” says the woman on the phone, apologetically. “This is a busy time right now. We’re making thousands a day.”
The week before, I’d been told the baker and his lone assistant had come in just after midnight. This week, it was closer to 10 p.m. and staying well into mid-morning before heading home to rest. Such is the reality of creating Wisconsin’s official state pastry.
The Kringle Capital
Wisconsinites associate Racine, a city south of Milwaukee along Lake Michigan, with kringles. This magnificent, sharable, Danish-style pastry contains up to 36 flaky layers and a variety of fillings—traditionally almonds or raisins, but now a wider range of fruits, nuts, cream cheese, and more. Four famous bakeries with seven total locations produce them here in the Kringle Capital of America, and most residents are happy to share an opinion about which is best.
Bendtsen’s Bakery is the longest-operating bakery in Racine and makes up to 2,000 per day through November and December. At a factory with machines, that might not sound like such a big number, but these are kringles, not donuts or something quick, and this is Bendtsen’s, a bakery that prides itself by making everything by hand. And a couple of those hands belong to Bendt “Ben” L. Bendtsen III.
His father and grandfather were both also Bendt Laurits Bendtsen, but the founder, his great-grandfather, switched the names around—Laurits Bendt Bendtsen—and no one knows why. If not for this, Ben the third would have been the seventh.
Born in Odense, Denmark in 1905, Laurits Bendt Bendtsen immigrated to America and found an established community of fellow Danes that had settled in Racine, Wisconsin. In 1934 he purchased a business property on a street corner and opened a bakery, and there it still stands almost a century later, a fourth-generation family operation.
Born There, Perfected Here
Part of the origin of kringle is explained in the Danish word for the dough: wienerbrod, bread from Vienna. In Denmark in 1850, bakery owners replaced striking Danish bakers with their Austrian counterparts, who in turn brought their layered pastry concept to the Danes. The term “kringle,” however, refers to the pretzel shape, which originated much earlier among the Catholic monks in Europe and represented the Holy Trinity. Today, the symbol still hangs over the doors of Danish bakeries.
In Denmark, kringles are associated with birthdays as well as other special gatherings, and so it’s no surprise, with its frosted sweetness and shareable size, that here in the United States kringle sales blow up around the holidays. But the pretzel shape is less common.
“The shape took too much time, so it became the ring,” Bendtsen says. Kringles of old also called for more yeast. Today’s recipes use “about one-third of the yeast of what it used to be,” he says.
“And the raising of the dough is reduced. All the bakeries kind of changed in the ‘50s to save time.” Never mind the time saved—the dough still rests for two days before being painstakingly rolled out, layered, filled, and topped with icing.
Bendtsen’s Bakery offers more than 30 flavors, and ideas come through experimentation.
“We just try something. We eat it, we like it, so we sell it.” And also serendipity: A kringle topped with sugar-coated roasted ballpark pecans “actually happened by accident,” says Bendtsen. “Johnny [the assistant baker] dropped some roasted pecans on top of a pecan and sugar kringle. I was walking by and just grabbed them off the top. And I ate them because we weren’t going to sell it, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really good.’ It’s one of our best sellers now.”
The State Pastry
Mike and Mary Vande Walle opened their first bakery in 2001. Uncle Mike’s Bake Shoppe is unusual in the list of well-known kringle makers: It’s not from Racine. While it only started making kringle relatively recently, the De Pere-based bakery does have generational roots in the baking arts. “My dad [Mike] had started with his family bakeries in Shawano [and worked there] for his whole childhood,” says his daughter, Brittni. The Vande Walles soon opened a second in nearby Suamico, and a third in Green Bay.
It all started when the kringle became the official state pastry of Wisconsin in July 2013. Brittni says, “My dad decided he had to make the best one,” and he set to work perfecting it. In a competition that included all the big makers, Mike Vande Walle entered with a sea-salt caramel pecan kringle which was awarded Best Kringle in North America.
To this day, that original flavor is their best seller, but the kringle options have expanded to fill the daily deli counter. Since Mike passed away in 2020, Mary and their children, Nathan and Brittni, run the bakeries, and they have a large production facility in De Pere to keep up with demand.
And that demand comes from far and wide. Online orders at all of the kringle bakeries launch into high gear this time of year. If you want to enjoy one for the holidays, order quickly. But truth be told, they are good any time of the year.
Where to Find Kringles
Bendtsen’s Bakery 3200 Washington Ave, Racine, Wis. 53405 262-633-0365
Christian Olesen opened the bakery in 1949. Four generations later, this is still a family-owned business but now has five locations, three of them in Racine, one out on the nearby interstate, and another closer to Milwaukee in Oak Creek. O&H Bakery produces more than 20,000 kringles per day during the holidays. They started shipping in the late 1950s, and their production is enough to keep up with seasonal demand from the nationwide retailer, Trader Joe’s.
Einer Larsen sold his bakery to Ernie Hutchinson in 1969. Today, Debbie and Don, Hutchinson’s son and daughter, run the family business. In addition to traditional almond and the seemingly universally popular pecan, favorites include apple, cherry, and apricot. They produce vegan-friendly kringles.
Opened in 1981, the kringle maker won the first place award in Baker’s Best Kringle Competition from the Wisconsin Bakers Association for its sea salt and caramel cheesecake kringle. The bakery produces for distribution so there’s no storefront here, but visitors online have reported standing in the office while an employee ducks back into the production area to find one.
