Lakrids by Bülow
Bornholm is a Danish island in the Baltic closer to Sweden than to Copenhagen, known for smoked herring, round churches and a slow summer light that draws painters. In 2007 a young man named Johan Bülow started cooking licorice there, in a small kitchen in the fishing town of Svaneke, and selling it from a shop so small that customers watched him stir the pot. The licorice was soft, sweet and made from raw licorice root rather than extract and flavoring, and it was good enough that the shop developed a line before it developed a sign.
Within a few years the company, Lakrids by Bülow, had a factory outside Copenhagen, and within a decade its heavy black tins were in department-store food halls from London to Tokyo and in every Danish airport. The product that carried it there was not the plain licorice. It was the idea of putting a shell of real chocolate around a soft licorice center and dusting it with something that had never been near licorice before: raspberry, passion fruit, salted caramel, peach. This guide covers the founder, how the licorice and its coating are made, what the letters on the tins mean, and which tin to buy first. For licorice as a category, our licorice guide is the place to start.
The founder
Bülow was in his early twenties when he started, with no confectionery training, a loan, and a conviction that licorice deserved better than the dusty black wheels in Danish supermarkets. His first product was a simple sweet licorice, then a salty one, and his early customers were the Bornholm summer crowd, Copenhagen's design and food people on holiday. They took the tins home, and the brand's reputation grew the way good food reputations grow in Denmark, by word of mouth among people who cook. The company's own account of its history, on its website, still opens with the small kitchen in Svaneke.
How the licorice is made
Real licorice begins with the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra, which the company sources as raw licorice and cooks into its base. The root's sweet compound, glycyrrhizin, is many times sweeter than sugar and lingers, which is why a small piece of good licorice lasts. The base is cooked with sugar, syrup and wheat flour into a soft, dark, pliable paste, extruded into ropes and cut into short pieces or small balls. Lakrids' licorice is deliberately soft, closer to a chewy candy than to the hard, brittle Nordic styles, which is what lets it sit inside a chocolate shell without fighting it. The company's salty versions use ammonium chloride, salmiak, in the Nordic tradition, and the sweet versions do not.
Panning: the chocolate shell
The coated products are made by panning, the same process that makes a malted milk ball or a Jordan almond. Licorice pieces tumble in a rotating drum while melted chocolate is added in thin layers; each layer sets before the next is added, and the shell builds up gradually until it is thick, even and glossy. The process can take hours for a single batch. The final layer is a dusting of flavored powder, freeze-dried fruit or a colored chocolate that gives each tin its identity. The chocolate is real chocolate, tempered, which is why a Lakrids ball snaps rather than bends and why the tins should be kept cool and away from the refrigerator, as our licorice guide notes.
What the letters mean
The tins carry single letters, A, B, C and onward, and each is the company's shorthand for a specific recipe rather than a grade or a ranking. The system began with the earliest coated products and grew with the range, and limited editions and seasonal tins take names rather than letters. On our shelf the letters currently mean: B, passion fruit, a white chocolate shell with a sharp tropical dusting over the sweet licorice center; and C, sour strawberry, which is the one exception in the range because its center is a sweet red licorice rather than black. The peaches tin, in the larger size, is a named edition, white chocolate over black licorice with a peach and cream dusting, and it is the tin that has converted more licorice skeptics at our counter than any other.
Why it works on people who hate licorice
Order matters. In a Lakrids ball the first thing on the tongue is the flavored dusting, then the chocolate, and only after a second or two the licorice, by which point the sweetness and fat have set the stage. The licorice reads as depth rather than as the medicinal note that people remember from childhood. It is the same trick a good salted caramel plays with salt: put the difficult flavor last and small, and it becomes the reason for the whole thing.
Which tin to buy first
For a skeptic or a gift: peaches. For someone who already likes licorice: passion fruit, where the acid pulls the licorice forward. For children or the strawberry-minded: sour strawberry, with its red center. All three are on our licorice shelf, and the salty and dark chocolate tins come and go with the Danish importer; ask. A tin dropped into a mug of dark drinking chocolate, one ball at a time, is our unofficial serving suggestion.
The design
The tins are half the reason the brand traveled. Matte, heavy, a single color per recipe, a single letter on the lid, and a shape that stacks. They were designed to sit on a counter rather than in a cupboard, and they do: empty Lakrids tins are among the most reused containers in Danish kitchens. That design sensibility, restrained, tactile and slightly playful, is the same one that runs through the country's furniture and its fermentation labs, and it is why a tin of licorice from Bornholm belongs on the same shelf as Copenhagen's sparkling tea and Noma's garum.
Lakrids by Bülow tins are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Open one and watch a skeptic's face.
