How Racine Turned a Danish Pretzel Into Wisconsin's State Pastry

If you have lived in Wisconsin long enough, someone has handed you a white bakery box or flat, waxed paper bag and told you to cut a slice for the table. Inside is an oval of pastry, glazed and filled. That is a Racine kringle, and since 2013 it has been the official state pastry.

Racine once claimed to be the most Danish city in America. Beginning around 1850, thousands of Danish immigrants settled there, many for factory jobs. The J.I. Case company recruited workers in Denmark, and the Mitchell Wagon Company employed Danes almost exclusively, according to the Society of Architectural Historians' account of Dania Hall, built in 1904 for a society founded in 1867 to keep the language alive. On the west side, near the plants, the bakeries multiplied and the neighborhood picked up the nickname Kringleville. The Racine County visitors bureau still calls the city America's Kringle Capital.

The pastry those bakers made is a Danish, in the technical sense: laminated yeast dough, butter folded in, then rolled and chilled and folded again until the layers stack up. The work takes days, not hours. Visit Racine County describes an authentic Danish kringle as 32 layers of flaky, buttery dough. Lehmann's Bakery in Sturtevant says it rolls, folds and rests the dough over three days and gets more than 48 layers. Racine Danish Kringles, on Golf Avenue, says its bakers hand-fold the dough into 81 layers and let it rest three days before it is filled, shaped and baked. However many layers a house claims, the idea is the same: the butter steams in the oven, and the pastry shatters a little when you cut it.

Racine bakers tell an older story about the dough itself. Around 1850, O&H Danish Bakery writes, a bakers' strike in Denmark brought in bakers from Vienna, who introduced the method of layering pastry with butter. When the Danish bakers returned, they added their own ideas, along with eggs, fruit and richer fillings.

The old-country kringle did not look like the one in the box. It was a pretzel. Bendtsen's Bakery, which has stood on the same West Racine corner since 1934, says the pastry got its name from that pretzel shape and was first made with raisin and almond paste, then raised like a doughnut in a steam box. "Because of the high demand for the flakey, delectable pastry, they shortened the process of raising them and shaped them in the oval shape we have now," the family writes on its history page. O&H tells a similar story from the counter. Customers of German, Polish, Italian and other backgrounds began asking for blueberry, prune and apple. The pretzel had more ends where there was less filling and more dough. The oval left only one overlapping section.

Almond is still called the original filling. The case did not stay that simple. Pecan, raspberry, cherry, apple, cream cheese and seasonal rounds like pumpkin and cranberry now share space with it. At Bendtsen's, pecan with a butterscotch base is the flavor people ask for most.

The bakeries that still make it are family places, and not every old name is still on the door. Laurits Bendt Bendtsen was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1905, learned the trade there, came to an Iowa farm on a sponsorship and then moved to Racine, where he knew he would find other Danes. He opened Bendtsen's in 1934 at 3200 Washington Ave. The family says four generations have now worked the shop, and they still hand-roll the dough.

Anton Olesen left Denmark in 1921 and, two years later, had saved enough to bring his teenage son Christian to Racine. Christian spent 25 years in local bakeries before opening O&H with a partner in May 1949. His son Ray and daughter-in-law Myrna bought the business in 1963. The bakery is now in its fourth generation, with shops on Douglas Avenue, Durand Avenue and Washington Avenue, plus a stand at the travel plaza in Sturtevant.

Lehmann's Bakery, now at 9117 Durand Ave. in Sturtevant, is what the visitors bureau calls the oldest continually operating bakery in Racine. It says the house has made the original Danish kringle for more than 80 years, following a process used since the 1930s: roll, fold and rest the dough, spread the filling by hand, shape the ring into an oval, bake it and ice it while it is still warm.

Racine Danish Kringles, a family bakery on Golf Avenue that dates to 1981, says it uses the recipes Danish bakers brought to town in the late 1800s. The rings are hand-shaped and hand-iced, and the company ships them across the country.

Larsen's Bakery, which opened in 1960 and billed itself as Racine's original kringle, closed its longtime Washington Avenue shop in 2023.

The state's official blessing came in the budget. On June 30, 2013, Gov. Scott Walker signed 2013 Wisconsin Act 20, the biennial budget bill. Buried among the appropriations was a new line in the state symbols law: "The kringle is the state pastry." It is still there.

By then the pastry was already traveling farther than West Racine. O&H says Ray and Myrna began sending kringle by mail, and that the bakery has taken mail orders since the late 1960s. It ships across the United States and to most international addresses. Christmas became the crush. The bakery once asked customers to order by Oct. 31 to have a ring by Christmas. In 2001 it opened a building dedicated to baking kringle and could take holiday orders deep into December. Lehmann's ships daily. Racine Danish Kringles ships to the door. Visit Racine County says the city's bakers now send kringle around the world, especially at Christmas.

The Olesen family at O&H has a line for it. "There is nothing quite as comforting as a slice of delicious Kringle and a cup of hot coffee." In Racine, that has been true for a long time. Now the rest of Wisconsin has it in writing.