The Status of Bagels in Denmark
I have so much to say about my travels in Denmark and my search for a good bagel (notice I didn’t say great). But I believe the average blog post will hold a reader’s attention for about 3 minutes, so here is the edited story line.
Background: The holiday season of 2022 was the first without my husband. My daughter and I decided to do the holiday differently. Rather than be home and feel the very oppressive absence of our beloved, we had the privilege of traveling to Denmark. We stayed with my very good friend Ulla, a native of Copenhagen. This was my fifth trip visiting, but my first time at her apartment in Suborg, about 8 train stops from central Copenhagen.
During the months’ stay, I traveled to several other Danish islands (Funen and Jutland) and visited other friends in a heavily wooded and sparely populated area of Bromolla, Sweden. It was in Sweden that I ate the best dark rye bread ever, almost better than a bagel.
If I could have taken home the bowl of bread and butter, I would have. This brown bread and creamy butter spread is a close second to a fresh homemade bagel.
I promised Ulla that I would bake bagels for her family and friends. We arrived on December 23rd, the day before the Danish celebratory day for Christmas- December 24th. Aside from stopping for ice cream within one hour of landing, I ventured into the store to find some flour to make bagels. I brought yeast, malt powder and a few other key ingredients with me from home, but I couldn’t take 510 grams of flour in my suitcase. So I headed out to the neighborhood grocery store, Kvickly, and checked out the flour aisle. Ulla guided me to what she thought would be the correct flour (I couldn’t exactly read the labels).
This is not the bread flour I needed.. This is a whole wheat flour. My first attempt at bagels did not go well.
Not only were the bagels hard and dry (due to my lack of consideration for more water with whole wheat), Ulla used a convection oven. My 22 minutes in her oven should have been reduced to 15 minutes. Convection ovens cook more quickly and neither of us did a proper conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
After about 3 tries readjusting the temperature and another trip to the Kvickly’s where I found white bread flour more closely resembling what I use, we had a good bagel coming out of the oven. If you look closely at Ulla taking a bite, you can tell it was a chewy bagel. I actually mixed the whole wheat and white flour and enjoyed the flavor. I’ll be making some for the Pop-UP on February 4th!
I quickly learned from Ulla’s son, a baker and student for food sourcing, that the bagel to beat was Depanneur. We visited several times. Their bagels are Montreal style, boiled with water and honey using a sour dough starter and fermenting for about 2 days.
This delicious bagel with lox and cream cheese cost me about $12 dollars.
The Depanneur bagel is high up on the scale of a great bagel in Copenhagen. Most of the other bagel shops were actually not bagel shops. Often the bagel shop used the bagel as the backdrop for a sandwich and there were not freshly made in-house. Most of the shops that I visited purchased mass produced bagels elsewhere and used them as they would rye-bread or other sliced bread. Some of the bagels were round with a hole, and that my friend, was the only comparison I could make with a bagel.
I think it’s best to stick with the croissant when thinking about a French bakery…not a bagel. By the way, I spent hours walking in steady rain to find this bagel shop.
In the city of Odense on the island of Funen, I found a bagel shop a notch above Bagelstein. Like many of the other bakeries, a simple bagel and cream cheese request usually produced an odd reaction. People were generally searching for tasty fillings for the bagel sandwich rather than the traditional open-faced bagel itself.
What I loved most about my bagel adventure is what I love most about Sherry’s Bagels. I love the simplicity of baking in a kitchen and baking for friends and the community. In this short video I had three generations in the kitchen lending a helping hand.
I missed my friends back home and I worried about the havoc caused by the “atmospheric rivers”. But I too faced the wettest January recorded in Denmark’s weather history. I am smiling because this is one of the 4 days out of 30 where we had no rain.
I loved my month in Denmark, being with my daughter who stayed for part of that time and being with my good friend and her community. Using the bagel as a focal point for study actually transformed my relationship to traveling. I liked the role of a researcher. I ended up interviewing the Marketing Director of Depanneur and offering useful video footage to a Bay Area film maker working on a documentary about bagels. Maybe I can venture to Poland sometime in the near future. Poland is the home of the bagel and the home of my own ancestors. Now I bet I could find a great bagel in Poland!
