C openhagen is famed for its innovative gastronomy and elaborate dishes. But these days its hottest food is its most basic: just bread, butter and hard cheese. And Copenhagen’s top bakeries are in a dead heat to make the best one around.
It’s called a bolle med ost (bun with cheese), shortened by many to BMO, an abbreviation that was entered into the biggest Danish dictionary this year.
Often served open-faced, this sort-of-sandwich is all about the fundamentals – sparer than smorrebrod and a test of how sublime the simple can be. That’s a 180 from the best-known Danish cuisine, which has been foraged, fermented and tweezered into submission over the last two decades.
The BMO has become a calling card for Copenhagen’s best bakers. Batch after batch, they experiment with the bread, the cheese and, yes, even the butter as they strive to stand out in a city obsessed with understated excellence. The BMO is hard to mess up, but almost impossible to perfect.
“You can’t pretend with BMOs,” says Anne-Sophie Lahme, a Danish trend researcher who focuses on food. “You can’t fake it. It has to be really, really good.”
Danes grab BMOs almost anytime – after run club, before dates, between meetings. They’re a filling snack and not all that expensive. At many of the top bakeries they sell for about 45 Danish kroner (roughly €6), in line with other baked goods.
Now, thanks to a phalanx of influencers, tourists have it on their must-try list, along with a cardamom bun and a cinnamon bun.
And where there’s hype, there’s optimisation.
Two brothers have written a BMO cookbook with 25 recipes. In June, Burger King released its own “Gourmet BMO”, although this time the “B” stood for burger. And die-hards run Instagram accounts chronicling their search for the ideal specimen. For one popular account, a married couple who are both mathematicians spent months fiddling with an algorithm to fairly compare the bounty.
In July, the Danish newspaper Politiken joined the fray and published a ranking of the city’s 50 best BMOs.
“This is how all Copenhageners tell the quality of a bakery,” says David Dyrholm, the critic who masterminded the list. He’d pitched the project almost as a joke. But to his delight, his editor loved the idea, and Dyrholm found himself surprised by the variety.
“There are thousands of these being sold every day,” he says. “There’s a lot of money made on this. So why not take it seriously ?” Eventually, he ate about 65 bolle med ost, which cost more than 2,000 kroner (about €268).
Because bread is not just bread in Denmark, he had many questions along the way: What type of flour did any given bakery use? Did they mill their own? How long was the ferment? Did they roll the bun in seeds or cornmeal?
And what about the cheese? A beloved Danish cow’s cheese called Gammel Knas? Comté? Should that cheese be presliced or sliced to order? And should the butter be salted? Browned? Whipped?
“I like nerding out about this stuff,” Dyrholm says, a little sheepishly.
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The nouveau-BMOs first appeared a few years ago, in a post-peak-pandemic onslaught of bread-baking. Sourdough starters passed between friends and new bakeries opened, street by street.
At some point the abbreviation was born, and quickly proved divisive. To sceptics, the nickname sounds a lot like gentrification – dressing up a beloved family food in frippery.
“It is literally just a bun with butte…