How I spent my winter break

I learned to make kolaches in the kitchen of my parents’ 100-year old ranch house in southwest Texas.

Kolaches (ko-LOT-cheese) are Czechoslovakian pastries traditionally made with dried fruit or dried cheese fillings and topped with a crumb topping called posipka (po-SIP-ka), or posypka in Czech.  Tex-Czech kolaches, like those found at the Kolache Factory, can be filled with meat and a variety of other fruit, cheese, egg or meat combinations.

Making kolaches takes a minimum of 4 hours because the dough has to rise three different times.  I made around 20 dozen kolaches over four days to get the technique down and I will post the four pages of instructions later.  If I can figure out how to squeeze a four hour process into a 2-hour cooking class, we’ll make Kolaches at Wiess one Saturday.