Kleinur: Icelandic Twisted Doughnuts

There are two facts about kleinur that everyone who has eaten them in Iceland knows and no recipe seems to write down. The first is that they are made with baking powder, so from a standing start you can be eating one in ninety minutes. The second is that they go stale faster than any fried thing I have encountered — genuinely disappointing by hour three, cardboard by the next morning. Kleinur are a same-day proposition. Icelandic households make thirty at a time and thirty disappear.

I would add a third: they are the most satisfying dough shape in the Nordic repertoire. A diamond with a slit, one point pushed through, and the thing twists into a shape you could not achieve deliberately. It takes about four seconds per doughnut once you have the knack, and after the first five you stop thinking about it.

Where they come from, and the fat they were fried in

Kleinur are a member of a large European family — the German Kräppel, the Norwegian and Danish klejner, the Swedish klenäter, the Pennsylvania Dutch Fastnachtkuchen. All of them are fried twisted dough eaten around Shrovetide, and all of them descend from the same medieval Northern European practice of using up fat and eggs before Lent.

They reached Iceland from Denmark, almost certainly during the trade monopoly, and the earliest Icelandic printed recipe appears in Einfalt matreiðsluvasakver fyrir heldri manna húsfreyjur — the first Icelandic cookbook, published in 1800 by Marta María Stephensen. That book is a good marker for when Danish bourgeois baking arrived properly on the island.

What made the Icelandic version distinct was the frying medium. Iceland had almost no imported oil and no local plant oil whatsoever, and it had an enormous quantity of sheep. Kleinur were fried in tólg — rendered mutton tallow — and older Icelanders will tell you, correctly, that this is the taste they remember. Mutton fat has a high smoke point around 200°C, it sets hard and clean, and it gives the finished doughnut a savoury, slightly gamey undertone that sugar plays against surprisingly well.

Most people now use vegetable oil. If you want the real thing, beef dripping is the accessible compromise and it is genuinely better than oil — the flavour is rounder and the crust is crisper, because animal fats contain small amounts of free fatty acids and mono-diglycerides that speed up browning. If you can get mutton fat, render it and use it, and you will understand what the fuss is about. Otherwise dripping, or lard.

Baking powder rather than yeast

This is a chemically raised doughnut, and that decision shapes everything about it.

A yeasted doughnut — a Berliner, a jam doughnut, a bolle — proves for an hour or more, develops a gluten network, and fries into something light, open and bready. A kleina fries into something denser, closer to a scone in the middle, with a short crumb that snaps rather than tears. The two are different foods that happen to share a fryer.

The chemistry is a double-acting system. Baking powder gives you an initial gas release when the liquid hits it, and a second, much bigger release when the temperature climbs past about 60°C. Since the dough goes from a cold worktop into 180°C fat, essentially all the lift happens in the first twenty seconds in the pan, which is why kleinur puff visibly as they fry and why they flip themselves over — the underside cooks, expands and becomes buoyant on one side, and the doughnut rolls.

The bicarbonate is there for the buttermilk. Half a teaspoon reacts with the buttermilk’s lactic acid for extra lift, and — more usefully — it raises the dough’s pH slightly, which speeds up browning. Kleinur made with milk instead of buttermilk come out pale and need longer in the fat, by which point they are greasy.

Do not overwork the dough. Thirty seconds of kneading, and one roll. There is no long ferment to relax the gluten, so any network you build stays built, and the kleinur come out chewy and tough. If you must re-roll the scraps, gather them gently, press them together and let them rest for ten minutes before rolling again.

Cardamom, and why two teaspoons

Two teaspoons in 500 g of flour is a lot, and it is right. Kleinur should smell of cardamom from across the room.

Grind it fresh. Cardamom’s aroma comes almost entirely from volatile terpenes that dissipate within weeks of the pod being cracked, and pre-ground cardamom in a jar is a shadow. Twenty-four green pods, bashed under a knife, seeds picked out and husks discarded, ground in a mortar for a minute — four minutes of work, and it is the difference between kleinur and vaguely sweet fried dough.

Buy green pods and never the bleached white ones, which are green pods that have been sulphur-treated for appearance and have lost most of their oil in the process. Black cardamom is a different plant entirely and tastes of smoke and camphor; it has no business here.

The same rule applies across Nordic baking. It is why semlor taste of anything at all, and it is the making of kanelbullar.

The fryer, and the temperature that decides everything

180°C, measured. The bread-cube test that most recipes offer covers a range of about 25°C dressed up as a technique, and 25°C is the entire difference between a good kleina and a greasy one. Buy a thermometer.

Here is what the number controls. At 180°C, the moisture at the dough’s surface flashes to steam immediately and pushes outward, and that outward steam pressure is what stops fat getting in. The doughnut cooks through in roughly two and a half minutes and absorbs perhaps 8–10% of its weight in fat, mostly in the outer millimetre.

At 160°C, the steam barrier is weak, fat migrates inward from the first second, and you get a greasy, heavy kleina that leaves a slick on the plate. At 200°C, the outside is mahogany before the centre is above 70°C, and you bite into raw dough.

Two practical consequences. Never crowd the pan — five or six at a time in a large pan. Each cold kleina drops the fat temperature by several degrees, and a dozen at once will take it down to 150°C and hold it there. Wait between batches for the fat to recover to 180°C. The thermometer stays in the pan.

Fat depth matters too: at least 8 cm, so the kleinur float freely and never touch the base. A shallow pan gives you a scorched flat side.

Cutting and shaping

The pizza wheel is the tool. A knife drags the dough and distorts the diamonds, and distorted diamonds twist unevenly. A wheel cuts cleanly through 5 mm of dough in one pass with no drag at all.

Work out the geometry once and it becomes automatic. Cut the rolled sheet into 4 cm strips running left to right. Then cut diagonally across those strips at roughly 10 cm intervals, at about a 60-degree angle, and every intersection gives you a diamond. There is very little waste, which matters because re-rolled scraps make inferior kleinur.

Thickness is the variable people get wrong. Five millimetres. Roll to 3 mm and they fry into crisps with no interior; roll to 8 mm and the outside is dark before the centre has set. If your dough is springing back and refusing to go thin enough, it is over-kneaded or under-chilled — give it ten minutes in the fridge and it will roll out without a fight.

The slit wants to be genuinely central and genuinely 3 cm. Too short and there is no room for the point to pass through, so the doughnut stays flat. Too long and the diamond is essentially two strips joined at the ends, and it tears in the fat. Cut it with the wheel as well, in one confident pass.

Push the point through from underneath and let go. Resist the urge to arrange it. The twist happens on its own as the dough relaxes, and a kleina you have fussed with will come out looking fussed with.

Faults, storage and variations

They came out heavy and greasy. Fat too cold, or the pan overcrowded. Same fault, two causes.

They came out tough. Overworked dough, or too many re-rolls.

They came out pale. Not enough bicarb, or you used milk rather than buttermilk, or the fat was under temperature.

They did not twist. Your slit was too short or too close to one edge. Three centimetres down the centre, with 2 cm of solid dough at each point, gives the dough enough room to turn as the point comes through.

Storage. There is not really any. They are best at fifteen minutes and acceptable at two hours. If you have leftovers, they are genuinely good crumbled over ice cream the next day, which is the only honest suggestion I have. Freezing them raw does work: freeze the shaped diamonds on a tray, bag them, and fry from frozen with 30 seconds added per side.

Reusing the fat. Strain it through a coffee filter or a doubled square of muslin while it is still warm and it will do three or four more batches. Dripping and lard keep for months in the fridge once strained; the enemy is the burnt flour and sugar left behind, which lowers the smoke point and turns everything after it bitter. Discard the fat when it darkens, foams at the edges or smells sharp.

Variations. Some Icelandic households add a tablespoon of brandy or Brennivín to the dough — alcohol evaporates fast in the fryer and the escaping vapour makes for a slightly crisper crust. Others skip the cinnamon entirely and go pure cardamom, which I prefer. A dusting of cinnamon sugar rather than plain sugar is common and closer to what a Romanian papanași does with the same basic idea.

Make them on a Saturday morning, put the pile on the table, and have coffee ready. That is the whole occasion, and it is why nobody in Iceland has ever needed to work out how to store them.