DRIVING EAST FROM my home in Austin to my birthplace of Houston along US Route 77 and Interstate 10, there are almost as many billboards advertising kolaches and klobásníky as there are Texas bluebonnets blooming in the spring. However, in the stretches between those billboards and in the surrounding counties are small towns where Texas Czechs, including my family, are home baking a tastier, more traditional version of the pastry.
Whether meat market barbecue, hoppy beer, smoked sausages, or kolaches, foods of Texas’s Czech community have been of particular interest in food media. But it is the misunderstood pastry known as a klobásník in Czech (usually misnamed a sausage kolache by commercial bakeries) that may be the current darling.
Certainly thousands of klobásníky (the plural of klobásník) are sold daily across Texas andfillings such as barbecued brisket or sausage-egg-cheese, cannot be called traditional.
