Bringing kringle to the world outside Racine ...

There's more -- and less -- to O&H Danish Bakery's kringles than you know.

As the company nears its 60th birthday, it is going off in big -- and little -- new directions. Be prepared to relearn a lot of what you thought you knew about kringle, "this hyper-sweet, O-shaped pastry that helped put Racine on the map," according to virtualtourist.com, which this year voted Racine the "quirkiest" place to spend Christmas because of kringle.

Since its founding in 1949 by Christian Olesen, grandfather of the generation now minding the store, O&H has made its mark with the kringle we all know and love. Racinians gobble more than 5,000 O&H kringles each week. Thousands more are sent out by mail order to customers all over the U.S.

But now O&H has gotten a new groove on: It is tackling the in-store market -- supermarkets in the U.S. and Canada -- as it tries to bring kringle to people who never heard of them.

This new direction started in 2001, when O&H moved into a new production facility on Rapids Drive. (The Douglas Avenue plant still bakes O&H's doughnuts and other goodies.) At 10 p.m. each night, production of "our" kringles begins, and the finished product is driven to retail stores starting at 4 a.m. But in the morning, a new shift of bakers comes to work...

When I toured the plant last week, O&H was making chocolate-covered cherry kringles at a rate of about 1,000 an hour, all for Valentine's Day. While you were baking Christmas cookies, they were baking 7,000 kringles a day, more than 50,000 a week! for supermarket sales two months hence.

These new kringles are identical to ours in almost every way, but the differences are also significant. While ours are 24-ounce circles, the new kringles are smaller 14 ounce ovals. And while ours are sold and served fresh, these new kringles are frozen right after baking. And these new kringles are branded Olesen's Family Bakery, not O&H.

One more thing: if you want to order them, you have to order at least 1,200 at a time. These are strictly for supermarkets; O&H's largest order so far: four truckloads comprising 200,000 kringles!

The basic kringle-baking process is unchanged. It's a three-day effort that begins with flour, butter, eggs, yeast and other ingredients mixed in 450-lb. batches. The dough is then rolled, with thick slabs of butter, and refrigerated overnight. On Day 2, it is rolled again, and again refrigerated overnight. On Day 3, the dough -- now in 32 layers -- is rolled down to 1/4 inch-thick sheets, then cut into strips. Filling is placed on top, the dough is folded over, and shaped by hand into the oval shape, then placed on huge baking sheets, and onto large racks.

They are baked 160 at a time, for 20 minutes in a walk-in-sized oven at 370-degrees. After cooling, each kringle is covered with icing, packaged and sent to the freezer.

"They're made the same way grandpa made them. We just make more of them and we're more consistent," says Eric Olesen, who runs O&H with his two brothers, Mike and Dale.

"It's a big challenge selling kringle in a market that's never heard of it," Eric says. "The consumer has to take a little risk. And you need a customer -- the supermarket -- that's excited about it, and will promote it."

Three generations: Eric, Mike, Dale, Ray and Christian (1982)

O&H is a family operation. Mike runs the stores, Dale is the facilities manager and Eric runs the overall business. They grew up in the business, working for their parents, who taught them to "be our own greatest critics; don't be afraid to find what you can do better, and acknowledge that you weren't doing it the best way before," Eric says.

About a dozen family members work at O&H. "We all started out in the bakery; you've got to touch it, feel it, taste it, know how it stretches, how it shapes," he says.

Eric went to business school at UW-Madison and came away with a new mantra, "A successful business is a growing business; a healthy business is a growing business." Out of that came the business plan to bring kringle to the masses. "It's important to have an element of challenge," he says. O&H is also working towards American Institute of Baking certification, like manufacturers' ISO certification. "It's a way to let customers know our high standards," Eric says.

Kringle 101: Everything you didn't know ...

--Kringle used to be shaped like pretzels, more of an almond-filled coffee cake, dusted with granulated sugar. "Racine bakers were geniuses to create the oval shape," Eric says. In Europe, the focus was on the pastry; here in the U.S., the focus is on the filling -- and with more filling it's harder to make the pretzel-shaped pastry. He credits the Ostergaard family -- they had a bakery in West Racine until the 1970s -- for popularizing the round kringle, which lets bakers focus on the filling: pecans, cherries, apples. "But they still have to have a light, tender pastry."

-- The most popular flavor is pecan, hands down, accounting for one-third of all the kringles sold. For the past two years, O&H has run a contest among its customers, challenging them to come up with new kringle flavors. The two winners so far have been raspberry lemonade, and French toast.

-- Calories: The government says there are 180 calories in a typical serving -- but it defines a serving as 2 ounces. By that reasoning, there are 12 servings in a kringle. Good luck with that!

-- Who's the "H" in O&H Bakery? Harvey Holtz was a bookkeeper in 1949 who found a location with ovens and suggested a partnership with Christian Olesen, a Danish baker who had come to the U.S. at age 14. Olesen would do the baking, and Holtz would be the bookkeeper. Ray Olesen, Christian's son, bought out the Holtz family interest in 1960.

-- It was Ray Olesen, and his wife, Myrna, who started the mail-order business in the 1980s. They retired in 1994.

-- O&H's best customer locally is Ruud Lighting, which sends out thank you notes accompanied by kringles in response to every order. Thousands of kringles a year.

-- Three other kringle bakers in Racine are Racine Danish Kringles, Larsen Bakery, and Bendtsen's Bakery, which claims to be the oldest family-owned bakery in Racine, having opened in 1934.

-- O&H kringles were featured in the Wall Street Journal's Catalogue Critic article last week. Go HERE for their review.