POTATO, EGG, AND CHEESE KOLACHES
Photo courtesy of the author.
Adapted from Epicurious’s Klobasnek Recipe
Ingredients:
For the Dough
1 cup whole milk
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon (1 packet) active dry yeast
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 egg yolks
For the Filling
4 eggs
2 egg whites
1 cup pre-cooked potatoes, roasted or smashed
¾ cup salsa
1 cup shredded cheese
Salt and pepper
Directions:
In a small mixing bowl, combine the wheat flour and bread flour and set aside.
Over medium heat, warm the milk and 4 tablespoons of the butter until the milk is just beginning to steam, about 100-110 degrees. Remove from the heat.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the yeast, sugar, salt, and 1 1/2 cups of the flour. Pour in the warm milk mixture and stir until a sticky dough has formed. Cover the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, beat together the oil and egg yolks. Pour the eggs into the flour mixture and blend until fully incorporated. In increments of ½ a cup, stir in the remaining flour until the dough comes together and is soft but not sticky. (You may not use all of the flour, in which case you can put away the excess for another baking project.) Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead for about 10 minutes, or until it is smooth.
Place the kneaded dough in a lightly oiled bowl and cover. Allow to rise until doubled in size, about 1 hour.
While the dough is rising, assemble your filling. Scramble 4 eggs and the 2 egg whites with salt and pepper to taste. Allow the eggs to cool for a few minutes before tossing them in a bowl with the potatoes, salsa, and cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste and set aside.
Grease or line a baking sheet with parchment paper. After the dough has risen, punch it down and divide into 8 even-sized pieces. In your hands, roll the pieces of dough into balls and then flatten them into disks 4 inches in diameter.
Place 3-4 tablespoons of filling in the center of each piece of dough, leaving enough excess dough around the edges to pinch them together to seal in the filling. As you seal them, place the kolaches seam-side down on the baking sheet. Cover and let rise for 45 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
Melt the remaining 4 tablespoons of butter. Brush the tops of the kolaches with half the melted butter. Bake, uncovered, for 15 to 18 minutes, or until lightly browned. After you remove them from the oven, brush each kolache with the remaining melted butter. Serve warm.
The Story Behind the Dish:
If you’ve ever been to a church that prides itself on its musical worship, especially a southern one, you know that service can be a bit of a production.
My husband has played in the band at every church we’ve ever attended, and I’m usually on the tech or hospitality teams. In the past, we were almost always at church an hour or two early, him to rehearse with the band and fix whatever technological failure happened the week prior, me to straighten chairs, project slides of sunbroken clouds overlaid with song lyrics onto giant screens, or haul around anything from Edison bulbs to Christmas trees. By the time church began we’d been awake for hours, minds reeling with details and to-do lists and contingency plans in case something went awry. Over time the busyness of our Sunday mornings grew to the extent that good breakfasts became the reward for the lazy mornings we gave up.
When we lived in Austin we used to stop at Kolache Factory, a local staple with more varieties and heartier, less sweet doughs than your average kolache shop, to order the whole wheat version of their potato, egg, and cheese kolaches. (Complete with salsa, because we were in Texas.) We ate them while we listened to Sunday morning NPR, which was usually poetry or interviews with little-known authors whose soft, melodic voices spoke of bittersweet childhoods or the thrill of finding a faith you love at an old age. Often the quiet time we spent in the car, munching on our kolaches in relative silence, was the extent of our spiritual contemplation for the morning.
Nowadays we attend a quieter church and we try to do less. We try not to worry so much about things that Jesus might not find particularly important, so long as the singing is joyful and people, in general, are trying to spend their Sundays loving each other and learning something. Still, every so often I crave the kolaches and the stolen moments of peace, so I make these while the radio plays something beautiful.
