• Monday, 16 Oct 2023 9:25 pm

  Stockholm kanelbulle ranking

  I've made no secret of my abiding love for Sweden's kanelbulle, and while we were in Stockholm this fall I just about gorged myself. But even in the throes of cinnamon joy, I managed to jot some quick notes on the bullar that passed my way; here they are, presented in order of best to worst.

  Note that even the very most abysmal kanelbullar, are, by British standards, still pretty good. Kanelbullar are, like pizza and pancakes, still good even when they're bad.

  Skansen

  

  Skansen makes kanelbullar the way that kanelbullar want to be made: tied in a knot, dense and chewy, tall, a little stocky, with plenty of flavour and just the right amount of pearl sugar on top. Magnificent.

  Under Kastanjen

  

  Not quite enough sugar on this one, but the flavour was there, and the shape was right. Maybe a bit more crust than I'd like but the perfect texture on the inside. Absolutely marvellous with a coffee: an excellent fika bulle.

  Skeppsbro bageri

  

  I expected much worse from such a touristy spot, but Skeppsbro knows their bullar! Plenty of character forgives this one its flatness. Sticky, super-dense, with a heaping helpful of cinnamon. An ideal bulle for Americans.

  Thelins

  

  A respectable bulle. Very light on the inside—almost a cake. Delicate flavours as well. Feels like it was made by a French person. That's not a bad thing, but it's not quite what I'm looking for.

  Bageriet Kringlan

  I regrettably forgot to take a picture of this one. To be fair it was pretty much middle of the road. Not a ton of character, no real flaws, went well with coffee.

  Bröd & Salt

  

  Surprising amount of cardamom in this one. Cardamom bullar are a thing on their own, but I can appreciate a bit of experimentation. Maybe a bit too much cardamom, though. And not enough pearl sugar. I think there was more sugar on others in the display—maybe I just had bad luck of the draw.

  Gateau

  

  Points for its novel shape, but this was an otherwise unexceptional bulle. Picked up in a hurry at the train station on the way to the airport.

  Pressbyrån

  We are now proceeding into the realm of the not good kanelbullar. Pressbyrån is a convenience store and this was a convenience-store-grade bulle. Dry, a little stale, not particularly flavourful. I neglected to take a picture of this one either, so bland was it.

  Airport

  

  This was mostly a formality. Dry, light, cake-ish. The only thing to recommend it is the correct shape and the generous helping of pearl sugar.

  Lidl

  

  Lidl is perhaps famous in the UK for its bakery section, but it did not fare well in the bulle ranking. You can tell from this picture how dry and flavourless it is. Using the conventional spiral shape helps, perhaps, in cranking out prodigious numbers of these things to ship out to grocery stores nationwide, but it does not recommend them to me.

  7-Eleven

  

  Not a bulle, and neither particularly nice to look at nor to eat. The guy who sold it to me called me maestro, though, and that was a lot of fun.

  Sweden Food

• ---

  Tuesday, 3 Oct 2023 1:45 pm

  Stockholm: Tuesday

  This is the sixth & final post in a multi-part series about our trip to Stockholm in fall 2023. All entries here.

  Nothing left to do in Stockholm but pack our things and head back to the airport. A final hotel breakfast, a final wheat cracker with cream cheese and honey, a final bowl of yogurt poured from a carton. We briefly consider trying to rig up our luggage somehow for a final ride to the Centralstation, but abandon the idea when it becomes apparent that it just ain't gonna fly.

  At the station I dodge between rivers of communters and grab a kanelbulle from an empty café. It looks exactly like what you'd expect from a café in a train station. We sit in the minimalist Arlanda Express waiting area and I munch on my bulle. There are solid birch tables scattered throughout the room and a little mobile coffee stand parked up between two tall plants I couldn't name. The overhead lighting is dim and very warm-coloured. As far as final experiences in Stockholm go, this one's alright.

  

  We board the train and rocket back to the airport. We've given ourselves plenty of time, but we already have our boarding passes (on our phones, natch), have no luggage to check, and security is a big empty room. We pass through a customs checkpoint and post up for the long wait for the plane. I purchase a final kanelbulle. It's not very good.

  

  Sweden Stockholm '23 Travel

• ---

  Monday, 2 Oct 2023 11:00 pm

  Stockholm: Monday

  This is the fifth post in a multi-part series about our trip to Stockholm in fall 2023. All entries here.

  Up early for a final run in Stockholm: so far I'd explored north and west, so it was south-east for me on a morning I could only describe as brisk: chill, dry, a faint blue tinge to the air. Commuters on bicycles flying silently past, trailing chic scarves.

  Straight down to Hammarby sjö, a lake pretty much only in name, a series of marinas lining a shallow lagoon connected by canals north and west to the other watercourses of Stockholm. Lovely running through here: broad paved promenades fronted by modern barbecue joints and design agencies.

  

  

  Something Stockholm does that I've never seen anywhere else: put their open-plan offices on the ground floor behind massive plate-glass windows. You can just look in and see everyone going about their days: powerpoints and Figma and emails. If these agencies produce physical media, they'll usually have it on the back walls, or otherwise mounted on the little radiator pedestal in front of the window, almost as if to advertise their acumen. To the side of the bullpen, also before massive windows, will be a meeting room, where (I assume) agencies compete to see who has the most progressive lounge chairs.

  Around the corner from our hotel, between a single 12-foot pane of glass and a rear wall covered literally floor-to-ceiling in awards, four chairs supported exclusively by braided leather in tension. On the merit of these chairs alone would I hire these folks to design my house, had I but the money.

  I run past a pile of rusty old bicycles and grime-coated electric scooters. They have apparently dredged from the shallow mud of Hammarby sjö and left here for collection.

  

  We've checked nearly everything off of our list of tourist spots to see, so we decide to make our last full day in Stockholm, appropriately, a smörgåsbord. We head, against our better judgement, back to Östermalm to visit the Saluhall, which is by a broad margin the fanciest market, indoor or outdoor, that I have ever seen. There is fish, meat, cheese, fruit & veg in abundance. A trio in exquisitely-cut suits sip cortados in a cafe making extravagant use of gold leaf. Kanelbullar in bell jars leer at me. I cannot muster the courage to ask for one. A pair of Canadian men are chatting up a lobstermonger. The lobstermonger is explaining that some lobsters have barnacles on them. I sneak a peek: the lobsters are, indeed, covered in barnacles. We steal away.

  

  Hungry for bullar, we stroll over to a nearby Thelins on the advice of a listical detailing the best bullar on offer in Stockholm. Thelins feels like it's catering to Japanese people's idea of France. It's a bit fancy for a chain cafe, and the clientele are exactly the kind of people who'd be frequenting a fancy cafe at 11 am on a Monday—that is to say, old folks. The kanelbulle is alright, very light but with a decent chew. Top three, but nowhere near first place, which still goes to Skansen.

  Seeking once again the highs of that first bulle, we head immediately to Bröd & Salt, Stockholm's homegrown response to Starbucks. I'd seen their advertisements on the Stockholm Metro on our first night in town, and I've been lobbying for a visit ever since. The lady behind the counter greets me with a "Hej hej!" which strikes me as both friendly and charming. I am, unfortunately, compelled to answer in English.

  I don't ask for a "cinnamon roll", however—here, as elsewhere in Stockholm, I ask for a kanelbulle. I think it's polite, at least, to try using the local language when abroad, and besides, kanelbulle is only interchangeable with cinnamon roll in categorical terms.

  On the way back to Södermalm, we stop at an outdoors store, a sort of Swedish Shūgakusō. At least half of everything they sell is Fjällräven. We abscond before I'm tempted into making a foolish purchase.

  Lunchtime finds us back on Södermalm on the doorstep of Bruno's korvbar, Stockholm's premier korv-vendor. Bruno & his disciples elevate simple hotdogs into works of art: double-length sausages folded in half—hell, why not two of them!—and wedged into the carved-out butt of a baguette and stuffed with sauerkraut. We retire to a nearby bench to eat and recover.

  

  A final bulle for the day at Skeppsbro bageri in Gamla Stan: a bit flat, nice and dense. Free refills on coffee. Skeppsbro abuts a touristy area and caters to tired Europeans looking for an authentic fika experience. At the next table, someone says, "Isn't this nice? Or would you rather be sitting at home all day?" I take it that the question is rhetorical. On the other side of the window, a couple are feeding the remnants of some pastry to a flock of voracious-looking finches. I polish off the bulle and we skedaddle.

  Stop for a beer on the way back to the hotel. Drinks down the pub (or down the bar, I guess) are a lot more expensive in Sweden than in the UK, and you only get 80% of what you'd get in a festival pint, which makes it worse. We drop by the Coop grocery on the ground floor of our hotel and grab a couple of Maristads(es) to enjoy in front of more weird Swedish TV.

  

  In the evening, we make our way back to Meatballs for the People, where we'd seen a huge lunch queue the day before. They'll make a meatball out of just about any mammal you can find in Sweden, but I go for the relatively-tame reindeer and a local stout. The meatballs are good, but I'm not sure they're good enough to queue for, and probably not as good as the price on the menu indicates.

  Before bed we watch, inexplicably to either of us, all one hundred and twenty-three minutes of Soderbergh's Out of Sight, a tonally atypical heist movie starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Apparently the critics went wild for it when it came out, but only Don Cheadle's performance could hold my attention. Looking back, I suspect that we only leave it on as a respite from the enthusiastic Swiffer commercials that occupied, without pause, nearly every second of broadcast on every other channel.

  Sweden Travel Stockholm '23

• ---

  Sunday, 1 Oct 2023 11:30 pm

  Stockholm: Sunday

  This is the fourth post in a multi-part series about our trip to Stockholm in fall 2023. All entries here.

  Sleep in. It's been a busy couple of days and we deserve it. Besides, the hotel offers breakfast basically unto the afternoon, so we're in no hurry to wander downstairs for a bowl of yogurt and and one of those wheat thins with cream cheese and a little honey. There are a surprising number of late-morning breakfasters with us; I'd been under the impression that the hotel was mostly empty, but suddenly from the woodwork come young folks in their multitudes wearing Luke Combs t-shirts. We gather that there was some sort of show last night that drew the youths from the hinterlands.

  We set out eventually on our bikes for the Vasa museum. On the way to the bicycle parking, we pass a great big hole in the road where the utility company is apparently doing some work on pipes laid three or four metres underground. There are no men from the utility company around. The hole is cordoned off by plastic fencing, but it occurs to me that a distracted cyclist could wind up at the bottom of the big hole without too much trouble. As we walk past, Sam and I chant, "Big hole, big hole, big hole," at increasing volumes.

  The Vasa is a huge 17th-century Swedish warship, built at great expense to the Swedish crown and meant to signal Sweden's naval superiority in the Baltic, but which was blown over in a stiff wind about a mile into its maiden voyage, where it sank into the salish mud of Stockholm harbour. It was rediscovered in the 1960s and floated back to the surface, then transferred to a purpose-built museum where it's been preserved, almost totally intact, ever since.

  

  

  The museum itself is a big concrete thing kept at a precise temperature and humidity, and shrouded in wood-preserving darkness. The lobby is perhaps deliberately claustrophobic in contrast to the soaring space that houses the ship itself. Which, if it it isn't obvious to you (as it isn't obvious to me), 17th-century warships are big.

  They let you get surprisingly close to the boat. Not touching distance, mind, but close enough to smell the wood, to see the grain, to look through the cannon ports at the shadowy belowdecks. The whole ship has been stripped bare—no paint, no trimmings, no furniture—but it's been partially rigged, which lends a lot to its majesty. It's big in the same way cathedrals are big. It looms, literally and figuratively. The museum spans five or six mezzanines alongside the ship itself, but on all but the top two you're craning your head Copernicanly to the gunwales, the shrouds, the transom. A few hundred people all walking around this way makes for easy collisions between the multicultural crowds—what language do you use to say excuse me?—but we come out unscathed.

  

  

  Tucked into corners are full-size replicas of different parts of the ship—the middle deck, the crow's nest, the interior of the aftercastle. There's a little diorama of how they raised the ship from the bottom of the harbour. I'm coming to realise that Swedes (and I) love a diorama. There are artifacts that they pulled from the mud. There are wax reconstructions of sailors and real skeletons. There are the remains of rope and yarn. There are sea chests and canteens. It's easy to forget in the majesty of the old boat that its crew were regular folks. Most of the crew escaped when the ship sank, on or above deck—and those people have disappeared into history. Their abandoned belongings, left for hundreds of years in the mud and ogled now by tourists of every stripe, is all that's left of their time here.

  

  The dim atmosphere and the plentiful seating makes the museum a lovely place to spend time, but the humidity control starts to wreak havoc with my sinuses after a little while, and we've made it to the top floor anyway, so we head back down to ground level via a hidden set of stairways and browse the gift shop. Outside, the wind's picked back up and is blowing the leaves about. Our bikes are where we left them.

  Seeking novelty, we ride up to Östermalm, in the north east part of the city. We're advised by our guidebook that this is the most expensive part of the city and we want to see what that looks like.

  It turns out that it looks like midrise apartments punctuated by hip, expensive cafés and the kinds of stores that sell immaculate navy blue toques and t-shirts for 800 kronor. A couple sitting outside a café look like Patrick Bateman and his girlfriend Reese Witherspoon, except for they're taking turns shooting photos of each other on their new iPhones: with sunglasses on/off, with/without lipstick, legs crossed/uncrossed. Untouched lattes with technically complex foam art sit untouched between them. The café, Bageriet Kringlan, is stylish and historic. Their coffee is good and comes in nice big cups; the kanelbulle is a bit dry and is the traditional spiral shape, rather than the elaborate knot of a truly artisan bulle. It's still better than anything we can get back home, and the currency conversion math is difficult enough that I don't second-guess the cost anyway.

  Deciding that Östermalm isn't really for us, we ride back to Södermalm and pop in at the decidedly more accessible shops around our hotel. We duck into a couple of colourful vintage clothing shops, the kind of places that you have to sort of pack yourself down to fit between the aisles of rayon and leatherette and gabardine. Another shopper and I come to an impasse in a doorway and we engage in an elaborate exchange of waves and embarrassed smiles as we try and yield without assuming anything about what languages the other speaks. Later on, in another part of the shop, I overhear her in conversation with a friend: she's British. In the next store we visit, an English bookshop called The English Bookshop, we overhear the clerk recount the days of his youth spent in Minnesota to a couple of American tourists.

  

  We decide to retire to the hotel without purchasing anything, but stop off at the Coop grocery at the end of the street first, for a couple of beers and a spur-of-the-moment pick'n'mix. The beers, by law, are not a hair above 3.5% ABV—only the government-owned alcohol store, the Systembolaget, is allowed to sell stronger stuff—and the pick'n'mix, while at first glance far superior to the UK's home grown Candy King brand in variety and colour, winds up being mostly made up of different styles of hard liquorice covered in ammonium chloride.

  For those of you keeping track at home, now-erstwhile Wilko had the greatest pick-n-mix of them all: excellent variety, never stale, binnacles always full to the brim. RIP in peace Wilko.

  Back at the hotel w doze off the beer-and-candy comas while more Swiffer ads play on the television in the background. I'm reminded of why we don't have a television at home. There are only so many times you can watch someone shout a highly-European-accented "Wow!" at the tidy path left in the dust piled artificially high on a black coffee table.

  We venture back out into the cool dusk for dinner at Meat on a Stick, a celebrated local kebab place. The kebabs here tend to the fancy, loaded with exotic pickles, tahini, harissa, jalapeños. No paying extra for a tub of garlic sauce here. When we're seated, we're handed two Swedish-language menus. I wonder dimly if they only have Swedish menus.

  My answer comes before long: a waiter, seeking to rearrange some tables in order to accommodate a crowd of seven or eight university-looking guys 20 minutes before closing time, asks for the table in Swedish (I assume; I don't speak Swedish (yet)). I say, as smoothly as I can manage, "Ja, okej." This both means, and is phonetically indistinguishable from, "yeah, okay." He takes the table; the exchange has either gone so fluently that he didn't notice I'm not Swedish, or so poorly that he couldn't be bothered to correct me. When the waiter's out of earshot, I grin like a goofball at our fortune: either way, we have been mistaken for locals. The waiter returns to provide the university lads, now clustered tightly around two adjoining tables, with a single English menu. "I'm sorry, we only have one English menu." The lads ask for a recommendation from the beer list. The waiter says, "I don't drink, I'm underage."

  

  Satisfied at the end of our meal, we drop a "Tack så mycket!" on the way out the door, and walk back to the hotel. We pass the big hole at the end of the street; it's been filled with rubble while we were out during the day. We chant, "Big hole, big hole, big hole," anyway.

  

  Back at the hotel, the Swiffer ads end and Apollo 13 comes on. I've seen this movie enough times that I can recite large portions of it by heart, but we stay up late watching the whole thing anyway.

  Sweden Travel Stockholm '23

• ---

  Saturday, 30 Sept 2023 11:45 pm

  Stockholm: Saturday

  This is the third post in a multi-part series about our trip to Stockholm in fall 2023. All entries here.

  Up early for another run. I wind through suburban Södermalm and up to the north shore of the island, the Söder Mälarstrand. Boats are tied up along the paved promenade—medium-size things from the sixties or seventies that have all been converted into floating hotels or restaurants or, usually, both. I pass a few runners going in the other direction; they're steely-eyed and move with intimidating speed and power. I briefly entertain an image of them barrelling into me and hurtling me body & soul into the river.

  

  The water here, strictly speaking, isn't a river, though it flows from inland to the Baltic Sea, west to east. This water—I don't think to check whether it's salty—is actually the easternmost bay of Mälaren, a many-islanded lake stretching from Stockholm westward into the great forest expanses of Sweden. Many hundreds of years ago, in the days of the Vikings, Mälaren was apparently a bay of the Baltic Sea, but post-glacial rebound caused the bed of the lake to rise so much that it was cut off from seagoing trade—prompting the Swedes of yore to found Stockholm on the spot that the lake meets the sea. Neato!

  

  Anyway, I round the western tip of Södermalm and make my way down the south shore of the island, past more marinas and a cramped, deserted beach, under bridges and through parks where early-risers are walking their dogs. I'm utterly struck by the quiet, here in the not-quite-suburbs of one of Europe's great cities. Okay, it's 8 am on a Saturday morning, but where's all the noise?

  I shower and get breakfast with Sam and then we head right back out. We've booked a day out at Birka, the oldest town in Sweden and an important trading centre for Viking culture. The site is abandoned now—a farm now sits where the town stood—but its thousands of burial tumuli remain to attract curious tourists from the north east of England. We board the boat that will take us to Birka, some thirty kilometres west, across Mälaren, and sit down next to a pair of Australians wrapping up a tour of Europe in celebration of their fortieth wedding anniversary. They make for wonderful company while we ogle the countryhouses lining the craggy, forested shores of the lake.

  

  At Birka, the wind has picked up, blowing yellow birch leaves all over the place. The air is early-autumn cool. We're herded into a little museum-slash-gift-shop while we wait for the guide to get prepared. We'd spotted him on the boat in Viking period get-up: a linen jerkin, wool trousers, and New Balance sneakers. When he emerges from the museum backrooms to guide the tour of the burial mounds on the hill, he's got a green wool cloak wrapped tightly around him as well. "This might look cool, but it's very itchy," he tells us. "I'm an archeologist, not a reenactment actor, and I don't like wearing these clothes." He's also holding a small stick with a leather pouch attached to it by a bit of string; he uses this stick and pouch to gesture to things but never explains what it is. It doesn't occur to me to ask.

  

  We follow the guide up a little track and then cast off up a hillside. Above us are a handful of big tumuli, which is a fancy word for a lump on the ground with a body inside. We've got them in the UK as well, but not so many, with such regularity, as here. He tells us that the water level used to be a lot higher—because of that post-glacial rebound!—and that where were standing used to be the old shoreline of the lake. The tumuli above us were constructed over a span of two hundred years or so, more than a thousand years previous; since Vikings didn't keep written records, the only contemporary accounts of the tumuli, or of Birka at all, were written by foreigners. We follow the guide up the slope and stand amid the mounds. There's a standing stone between them, erected around the same time. It's hard not to imagine the hands that lifted the stone and put it here.

  Smooth, undulating bedrock emerges from the turf at the top of the hill, where a hillfort once stood. The ramparts on the flanks of the hill are clearly visible. Some of our tour group break off and wander along them, hopping across the stones scattered about. The tour guide is gesturing across a broad field in the basin on the far side of the hill, saying, "That farm is probably the most evil farm in all of Sweden." He explains that the uncurious ancestors of the current farmers ploughed up whatever remained of Birka after it was abandoned just before the end of the first millennium; all that we know about the location and size of the town has been discovered through LIDAR scans of the terrain. He's right: there's not much to see in the field. In the trees beyond, more tumuli stretch off into a mixed forest. I'm sorry that we can't see the old settlement but the vista is nice to look at anyway.

  

  The tour ends sort of abruptly and us tourists scatter. Sam and I cast off across the field. I want to see what the forest is like. It's a bit sparse, and there's a remarkable amount of deadfall just sort of lying around, but otherwise it's just a regular old forest full of massive Viking burial mounds. We take the long way back to the museum, meandering through the evil farm and a couple of cottages. The island is small enough that there are no cars here—only quad bikes and a couple of tricycle contraptions, like a motorised cargo bike with two wheels out front.

  

  

  The museum is alright. The gift shop is oriented towards a) families with kids who are into Vikings, and b) adults who would buy a welded-steel coat rack in the shape of a Younger Futhark rune. The exhibit tends towards the larp-ish, though there are a couple of extremely detailed miniature town dioramas that I could spend hours looking at.

  

  Our feet are starting to get tired by this point, though, so we meander over to the cafeteria—sorry, beer hall—for coffees in tiny handmade cups. Luckily refills are free. After a few cups, I decide to graduate to something more ambitious, and order a bottle of liquorice stout, much to the confusion of the lady behind the counter, who seems hesitant to sell it to me without informing me what I'm getting into. It's pretty good—but more importantly, it psychosomatically shortens the 2.5-hour boat ride back to Stockholm.

  We don't have plans for dinner, so we just wander around Södermalm until something catches our eye. Thai food carries the day in the end, though the chopsticks provided are not up to handling up the sauce-heavy rice bowls we order. Sam scopes out a "Whippet Lab" on Google Maps and the promise of hanging out with dogs proves too strong to resist. When we arrive we find a couple of hipsters drinking cloudy IPAs, but no dogs. We order a flight anyway, and rank the beers as we go. They don't hold a candle to the stout from Birka. As we stand up to go, a whippet materialises beside our table. We give her lots of attention, but as we've had literally every single style of beer they serve in the joint, we make our move. We follow the sound of guitar music down the street and enter a bar where a metal band is playing at what seems to Sam and I to be an extremely respectable volume. At the bar directly adjacent to the stage I order a couple beers and only have to yell a little. Everyone in the bar is wearing black, but no one is dancing, and certainly no one is moshing.

  We dip during an interlude and grab a hotdog—a grillad korv to the locals—from a street vendor. They put just enough mustard on it, which is to say, more mustard than any British person would think to put on anything, ever. This is, second only to kanelbullar, my favourite part of Swedish culture so far. I get mustard in my beard and my sleeve comes away yellow.

  

  The night is clearly winding down, but my bloodthirst for grillade korvar is unquenched. I duck into a 7-Eleven for another—and a kanelbulle for dessert, why not? When I step up to the glass with a cheery, "Hello!" to indicate that I'm a foreigner, the man on the other side counters with a smooth, "What'll it be, maestro?" I just about collapse. He tries to upsell me on a second kanelbulle for half off, which I decline; he gives me the second one for free anyway.

  I have never met anyone cooler than this 7-Eleven man, and I likely never will again. I will carry this moment with me to the end of my days.

  We go home and watch approximately the first 25 minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

  Sweden Travel Stockholm '23

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