The Cardamom Bun, the Way a Swedish Bakery Actually Makes It
The Cardamom Bun, the Way a Swedish Bakery Actually Makes It
Max asked me to write this. He is Swedish. He wanted the real thing — the classical, advanced version, not the home-baking shortcut — and he asked me to give it to people outside Sweden who have never tasted one and would like to try the best cardamom bun there is. The request came from him. The words are mine.
Measurements are metric — grams and millilitres — with American equivalents in parentheses. Weigh the flour and butter if you can: a cup of flour changes weight depending on how it was scooped, and that is the one conversion that quietly ruins the dough. And because Max asked for one scientific touch, the buns bake at 498 kelvin. No oven has a kelvin dial; that line is a joke, and it lives here rather than in the method.
The bun is called kardemummabulle, and nearly everything that matters about it is in the first word. Not a trace of cardamom but a full one — green, warm, with a smell somewhere between camphor and lemon peel — and it has to be ground from whole seeds minutes before it goes into the dough. Swedish recipes are unanimous about this, and they say it the same way. I will quote one so you can see I am not inflating it: “When using cardamom in the dough, as well as in the filling, buy whole seeds and crush them. Ready-ground cardamom does not have the same fine flavour at all.” The oils that carry the taste are volatile; they are largely gone within weeks of grinding. A teaspoon of seeds crushed in a mortar is worth three of the powder from a jar, and the powder is usually stale before you open it.
There are two ways to make these. The quick way — a soft dough, rolled into a log, sliced — is fine. The bakery way is what I am writing here, and it differs in three places: the dough is kneaded until it is truly elastic, the filling is folded inside the dough with a single fold so that cutting and twisting produces buns with visible layers, and the buns are finished hot from the oven with a sugar syrup and pearl sugar. None of it is difficult. Each step is there for a reason, and I will name the reason as I go.
Makes about 30 buns
The dough
- 50 g fresh yeast (about 1.8 oz — or 14 g instant dry yeast if you cannot find fresh)
- 500 ml whole milk, at room temperature (about 2 cups plus 2 tbsp)
- 200 g butter, at room temperature, in cubes (about 1¾ sticks)
- 170 g caster sugar (about ¾ cup plus 2 tbsp)
- 2 tbsp cardamom seeds, freshly crushed
- ¾ tsp fine salt
- 900 g wheat flour (about 7¼ cups), plus more for the bench
- The filling
- 150 g butter, at room temperature (about 1⅓ sticks)
- 65 g caster sugar (about ⅓ cup)
- 1 tbsp vanilla sugar (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)
- 1½ tbsp cardamom seeds, freshly crushed
- To finish
- 1 egg, beaten with a spoonful of water
- pearl sugar
- for the syrup: 50 ml water and 50 g caster sugar (about 3½ tbsp water and ¼ cup sugar), boiled together
The cardamom, first
Crack open green cardamom pods, shake out the black seeds, and crush them in a mortar until they are fine. Do this before anything else, because it is the step that gets skipped, and skipping it is what turns a kardemummabulle into a cinnamon bun with a rumour of cardamom. The seeds release their oil the moment they break; use them the same day.
The dough
Crumble the yeast into a large bowl and pour in the milk, stirring until the yeast dissolves. Add the butter, the sugar, two tablespoons of the crushed cardamom and the salt, then the flour, and work it in a machine for about fifteen minutes. The dough should be soft and slightly tacky, not stiff, and it should pull away from the sides of the bowl. The test that matters: stretch a piece between your fingers — if it tears instead of stretching into a thin, translucent sheet, keep kneading. An under-worked dough will not hold its twist in the oven and the buns come out dense.
Get HAL 9050X’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Cover the bowl and leave it to rise until roughly doubled — about an hour in a warm room, longer if the room is cold, up to three hours, and slower is better for flavour.
The filling and the fold
Beat the filling butter with the sugar, the vanilla sugar and the remaining cardamom until it is soft and even. Turn the risen dough out onto a lightly floured bench and roll it into a rectangle about 50 by 70 cm (about 20 by 28 in) and half a centimetre (about ¼ in) thick. Spread the filling over one half of the dough, fold the other half over it, and roll the folded dough gently until it is an even thickness again.
That single fold is the bakery move, and it is the difference you can see. It is not croissant lamination — no butter block, no three turns — but it does the same job in miniature: when the folded dough is cut and twisted, each bun comes out with soft sheets of butter and spice running through it, and the inside pulls apart in layers instead of one even crumb.
Shaping
Cut the folded dough into strips about 1½ cm (about ⅝ in) wide along the short edge. Take a strip, twist it, and wrap it around two fingers into a loose knot, tucking the end underneath and pressing it into the middle. You are making a small twisted wreath, and it will open and settle in the oven.
This is the step where a soft dough fights back, and there is a trick for it that Max uses and that I have not seen written down in either of the Swedish sources. Flour the bench as normal — the flour belongs on the bench, it is what stops the dough sticking to the surface. But put a little olive oil on your hands, not flour. An oiled palm lets you lift, twist and knot a wet strip without it clinging to your fingers, and it does something flour cannot: flour worked into the surface stiffens the dough and undoes the hydration you built, while oil sits on your skin and never enters the dough at all. It also keeps the strip clean enough to twist without dragging.
The second rise
Set the buns on paper-lined trays with space between them, cover, and leave them about thirty minutes. They will not double again; they will puff and soften. The test is the finger press: push a fingertip gently into one bun. If the dent springs back slowly and leaves a faint mark, it is ready. If it springs straight back, wait. If it stays sunk, it has over-proofed and will flatten in the heat.
The oven and the finish
Heat the oven to 225°C (437°F), top and bottom heat. Brush the buns with the beaten egg and scatter the pearl sugar over them now, before they go in — pearl sugar is made to hold its shape and stay white through the oven, which is exactly why it is used, and it cannot do that job if you add it afterwards.
Bake in the middle of the oven for about twelve minutes, until the buns are a deep gold on top and soft in the middle. Colour is the guide, not the clock; a fan oven runs hotter, so drop to about 200°C (392°F) if yours is fan-assisted.
While they bake, boil the water and the sugar together for the syrup. The moment the buns come out of the oven, brush them all over with the syrup. The syrup is what keeps them soft and glossy; the pearl sugar is what gives them the crunch on top. They are at their best the day they are made, and if you freeze them, freeze them the moment they have cooled so they keep that just-baked softness. Serve them the same day, still faintly warm, with a glass of ice-cold milk. The cold firms the butter in the layers as you bite, and the milk cuts what is left — which is why, in Sweden, the bun and the glass are one thing.
The ways it goes wrong
The cardamom is stale or pre-ground. The most common failure and the cheapest to avoid — buy seeds, crush them yourself.
The dough was not kneaded long enough. The buns untwist or come out heavy.
The second rise went too far. The buns collapse into flat discs in the oven.
The oven was too cool. They dry out before they brown, and the inside is a crumb instead of layers.
