Danish Pastry (Wienerbrød)

About Danish Pastry (Wienerbrød)

Denmark's greatest export — a laminated dough of flour, butter and yeast folded 27 times to create 729 paper-thin, buttery layers that puff and crackle from the oven; the Danes learned the technique from Viennese bakers in the 1840s and then perfected it; the kanelsnegl (cinnamon snail) and spandauer (custard envelope) are the canonical forms.

Denmark's most famous baked export is technically Austrian in origin — Vienna bakers arrived in Denmark in the 1840s during a bakers' strike and introduced the laminated pastry technique. The Danes took the method and evolved it into something entirely their own: more buttery, more precisely layered, and with specific forms (the kanelsnegl, the spandauer, the kringle) that don't exist in Viennese baking.

Danish pastry is made by folding cold butter into a yeasted dough through a series of turns and rests, producing 27 or more paper-thin alternating layers of dough and butter. Baking causes the water in the butter to steam, separating the layers into a honeycomb of thin, crisp sheets that puff and crackle from the oven. The smell of fresh Danish pastry from a Copenhagen bageri at 7 a.m. is one of the city's most reliable pleasures.

What to Expect

At a Copenhagen bageri the kanelsnegl (cinnamon snail) is still slightly warm from the oven, the laminated layers visible at the cut edge — hundreds of thin sheets compressed into a centimetre of pastry. The cinnamon sugar filling has caramelised at the edges. The butter smell hits before anything else. You eat it in three bites.

Why Try It

Danish pastry in Copenhagen is one of the clearest examples of how a borrowed technique becomes, over generations, an entirely original tradition. The city's bageri culture is serious about its pastry in the same way Vienna is serious about its coffee.