A kolache looks like a small version of the Danish pastry you’d have at breakfast in any diner. A really good one, still oven-fresh, as found on the shelves of bakeries in Czech communities of Texas and Oklahoma, leaves ordinary Danishes in the dust. It is so exquisitely tender that a too-eager grip will compress it into a blob. Its dough is sweet but ever so delicately so, and its filling is anything but cloying. Apricot, prune, and poppy seed paste are the traditional variations, but today’s bakers address the twenty-first-century sweet tooth by also offering brighter, fruitier flavors, such as apple, strawberry, and blueberry—as well as kolaches made with cream cheese in addition to the fruit.
A savory variant of the kolache was invented early in the 1950s, when Wendell Montgomery of the Village Bakery in the town of West, Texas, decided to do something to improve sales of sausage bread. He convinced his mother-in-law to come up with a snack-sized version of the bread using the slightly sweet kolache dough and including short lengths of the sausage that local butchers make. Her inspiration was the Czech klobasniki, which is customarily filled with ground sausage. Old timers still call them that, although most are currently sold as pigs in blankets, the term kolache being reserved for those with sweet filling. Klobasniki have become a staple of kolache bakeries throughout the state, often including cheese and jalapeño peppers along with the sausage.
Although its ancestry is Czech, the kolache has become a signature breakfast pastry throughout Texas.