T
exas is an expansive land of high speed limits, fi ne pit stop barbecue,
authentic Tex-Mex fare, and bakeries offering sweets of both the
deep-fried and delicately laminated variety. In other words, Texasis a gourmand road tripper’s paradise. Nothing, however, delights and
surprises travelers more than a certain round pastry, dented and fi lled, that
is offered in chains, hometown bakeries, and even the odd gas station. This
scrumptious yeasted treat is the kolache (pronounced koh-LAH-chee), a
Lone Star State treasure that enchants all who come across it but hasn’t hit
the mainstream circuit. How and when did the best-kept secret in pastry
come to Texas?
The kolache is a circular, fl uffy, fi lled pastry brought over by Central
European immigrants, particularly Czechs from the Old-World regions
of Bohemia and Moravia, around the mid-1800s. The term kolache comes
from the Slavic word kolo, meaning “wheel.” Central and Eastern Europe
have a number of championed round sweet breads and cakes with similar
spellings—like the Polish kolacz, a disk-shaped wedding cake fi lled with
cheese curd, or the Ukrainian kolach, a braided bread formed into a circle
and served on Christmas. But what makes the Czech kolache so special is its
iconic divot and the fi lling of choice: povidla, a rich plum butter made from
cooking down Italian plums (also called prune plums). The sweet dent fi rst
began to appear in kolaches in the 1800s, not long before a great migration
of the Czech people to a new land of promise.
Following the Revolutions of 1848, many Czechs came to the United States,
most settling along the fertile Blackland Prairie area in Central Texas,
cultivating a band of Czech communities and towns—referred to as the
Czech Belt—that still exists today. They brought their vibrant folk art,
Czech polka music, and, most deliciously, their Moravian-style kolaches,
a kolache normally fi lled with cottage cheese, poppy seeds, or that jewel-
toned povidla. In Willa Cather’s classic My Ántonia, kolaches are eaten by the
title heroine and her Czech immigrant family in their Nebraska homestead.
Cather describes a pastry with a base dough that needs to rise fi ve times
and is fi lled with a traditional plum butter, nearly a carbon copy of the
Old-World original. Baking kolaches and sharing them within their towns
became an important process of integration for Czech immigrants, a
sweet way to preserve a piece of their old homeland and become friendly
with their new neighbors. This interconnected Czech territory and their
celebrated pastries would transform into one of the great culinary pathways
of the US: the Texas kolache trail.
For the roaming sweet tooth, the kolache trail is a bucket list endeavor.
Made up of a rough loop of interstates, highways, and back roads, this
unoffi cial pastry path will lead travelers to some of the fi nest Czech-style
delicacies in the state. The stops along the way mostly highlight bakeries
that have been around for 50 years or more, selling down-home classics
alongside their specialty: row upon row of kolaches.