Racine, WisconsinThe drive: 1.5 hours

Among travelers whose plans center on food, I’m of a particular subset: I map out trips around baked things. And if we’re talking a hyperregional specialty, all the better. (Ask my husband, whom I’ve dragged on tours of the sfogliatelles of Naples, the bagels of Montreal, and all the clangers in Bedfordshire.) And so while Racine has plenty of draws — tidy, sprawling North Beach; the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed SC Johnson campus, with its space-age forest of columns and Pyrex tubing; the compact Heritage Museum, which probes the city’s Underground Railroad ties — it’s the kringle that calls me.

For the uninitiated, a kringle is a shareable ring of delicate, buttery pastry encasing fillings that run the gamut from a staid smudge of almond paste to a fusion of cherry, brandy, and caramel. It evolved from Danish baking traditions brought to the city by 19th-century immigrants. While the kringle was once widely represented in the area’s bakeries, it’s now made by just a few. In other words, if you brake for pastry, your Racine itinerary is ready-made.

There’s the long-running bakery Lehmann’s, which, following a 2023 consolidation, also houses its former competitor, Larsen’s. (The two continue to maintain separate brands.) There’s old-school Bendtsen’s, which rolls its pastry by hand, and its inverse, O&H, a major operation that has scaled up to five locations while preserving its family-run bona fides.

So which is best? Each spot had something I liked: Bendtsen’s for flakiness, Larsen’s for its vegan-friendly offerings, Lehmann’s for an assertively tart cherry filling, O&H for sheer breadth of choice. But it’s not picking favorites that draws me. While at Bendtsen’s, I ordered a slice of pecan and listened as the shop clerks debated at length the merits of the piece that comes where the kringle ends meet. I was charmed, for that exchange was the essence of why I love local specialties: deeply considered opinions on minutiae barely perceptible to outsiders.