Texas Kolaches

The savory donuts America needs more than anything right now

Why aren’t there any savory donuts?

I’ve always wondered that.

When I was heading out to Austin from Clarksdale, Mississippi after a visit last fall, my friend told me I should stop at Shipley Donuts in Greenville if I wanted a quick breakfast along the way.

So I did.

This was the first time I had ever encountered a Texas Kolache. They had two sections of the pastry case — a sweet side with a nice-looking array of the usual jelly-filled and sugar-coated options, but also this donut shop had a savory side. With stuff like this.

Simple. Perfect. Glorious.

There it be. Why isn’t this standard for when you’re hungry for more than just sugary dough in the morning? I bought two different sausage options of the above, which has dough that’s baked, not fried. The poofy puff was super fresh, yeasty-scented, and pillowy soft. The sausage was hot and juicy. One was just a basic hot dog, the other was coarser, with flecks of jalapeno and melty cheese.

The paper sleeve was easy to eat from as I drove along munching. I could just squeeze up my hot dog kolache to get the next bite with one hand. Touching nothing but the paper. Tidy. I can’t think of a better morning on-the-go snack. Two kolaches and a (horrible) coffee at Shipley cost me less than six bucks.

I mean, ok, this was rural Mississippi, but still. Why are we up here messing around with giant crumbly muffins dressed up with tulip wrappers or poorly-aligned pre-packaged, Turbo-Cheffed breakfast sandwiches?

WHY?!!!? That kolache (pronounced "ko-lah-chee.") shown above was $1.99 and it was five times more satisfying than the stupid six dollar Starbucks breakfast sandwich you have to take apart and reassemble so as to properly line up the top and bottom layers before you eat it. While driving. Sandwich integrity is crucial.

As my road trip continued, taking me to Austin, then up past Dallas to Tulsa, I started seeing these savory breakfast handhelds (you can shoulder-punch me next time I see you) everywhere. It’s a whole vibe! There were billboards advertising them along the highways.

I had no idea, Texas! Impressive, actually. Why have you been keeping this to yourself? Kolaches should be a national trend. This, my friends, is the substantial, soul-satisfying on-the-go breakfast snack 2026 USA America needs.

Wowsa! Suffice to say, I was enthused to discover the existence of savory kolaches. A new food thing! This kind of finding makes my month. So of course, I went down all the rabbit holes, visited a few key spots, and did internet research until my eyes got squinty.

The origin story on these guys comes from Czech immigrants settling in Texas and bringing along their taste for kolaches, which are sweet pastries with a dimple in the center containing a smear of fruit—often prune or apricot—maybe some poppyseeds, and/or fresh cheese. Similar to a danish, but with a soft, raised, pillowy dough, rather than buttery laminated layers.

Some history—

These tasty morsels arrived in Texas along with the tens of thousands of Czech immigrants who came through the port of Galveston in the 1850s through the early 1900s. Determined to farm, these new Texans settled mainly in the coastal plain and rich blackland areas of Central Texas, setting up the churches and fraternal organizations that ended up doing such a good job of preserving their heritage. By the latter half of the 20th century, celebrations of Czech culture and the kolache—among them Westfest, in West, and the Caldwell’s Kolache Festival—had become popular annual events. —Edible Austin

So that’s why kolache culture is so strong in the area. Czechs brought their sweet pastry treat recipes and made them for bake sales and church functions, sustaining their cultural traditions in their new country. Soon enough, bakeries started making them too.

But American (specifically, Texas) culinary history was made when someone made the leap and wrapped that kolache dough around a sausage.

That someone was Wendel Montgomery, owner of Village Bakery in West. And technically, the term for these savory versions is a Klobásník (or klobasnek).

From a 2022 piece in Texas Monthly:

In its purest form, a klobasnek (the singular form of klobasniky) is just kolache dough wrapped around a sausage, a savory delicacy that is said to have been first created in 1953 at Village Bakery in West, the little town about twenty miles north of Waco that is widely recognized as the kolache capital of Texas.

Turns out the town of West, Texas (which, counter-intuitively enough, is not in the western part of Texas) is officially known as the state’s “Czech Heritage Capital” and is widely considered to be where the savory kolache was invented.

NPR tells the story thusly:

Mimi Montgomery Irwin owns and operates The Village Bakery in West, Texas. In a town full of Czech immigrants, her father, Wendel Montgomery, opened the bakery in 1952 on a dare from a high school football coach and local priest, she says.

“People thought he was crazy. At that time, in our town of West, it would be like ... selling ice to Eskimos, because everyone made them. But something interesting was happening in society,” Irwin says.

Kolaches, a staple among these Czech communities, appeared at church dinners, bazaars and family gatherings, but were fairly unknown to outsiders. Irwin’s father found a market in traveling salesmen as they stopped in for food and gas. The pastries soon became a favorite of passersby.

Apparently, the concept came to Wendel while he was eating a hot dog. He eventually trademarked this bread encased sausage snack as a klobasniki, a Czech word meaning “little sausage.”

Since they own the legal rights to this official nomenclature, only THE Village Bakery in West can legally sell a klobasniki. So everyone else just calls both the savory and sweet versions kolaches, but with a descriptor to let you know what flavor it is. Which, frankly, seems better than having to learn how to say klobasniki. So….thanks, Wendel? I guess.

When I’m new to a whole genre, I tend to defer to experts.

A traditional klobásník wraps soft, yeasty, milk-and-butter-enriched double-risen dough around smoky, garlicky homemade or Texas Czech meat market–made sausage and is liberally brushed with butter during the baking process.

The dough absorbs the rich flavor of the butter from the outside and the smoky aroma and fatty juiciness of the sausage from the inside in a way that distinguishes the finished product

A sausage and kraut kolache. Photo by .Andrew Janjigian

Village Bakery in West closed for nearly 7 years and underwent a recent change in ownership, but as of May 2026, they’re newly re-opened and back carrying the klobasniki torch.

Village wasn’t open when I was in the area last fall, so I couldn’t sample from the originator, but since kolache culture in this part of Texas is nearly ubiquitous, it wasn’t hard to find plenty of tasty specimens to enjoy in their natural habitat — gas stations just off the interstate.

It's a Shell station! It's a Czech bakery! It's crowded as fuck!

That line was at about 10:30am on a random Tuesday. The line wrapped all the way around the three outer walls of the square building, not quite all the way to the door. It took about a half hour for me to get up to the counter. Nobody complained. Czech Stop aka Little Czech Bakery is iconic.

Here’s why:

If you know me at all, you already know I got a Hot Chubby

Wow. That’s a lot to choose from. Also, yes, those are fall of 2025 prices. Since I waited a super long time to get up there, I had so much time to ponder what I wanted to try. How do I NOT get a massive freshly-baked pecan roll for $1.79? Very difficult to avoid buying way, way too much.

But I resisted. I took sample bites and didn’t feel compelled to finish even the really tasty items. Because just around the corner was Gerik’s Ole Czech Bakery, which should not be confused with Old Czech Bakery, located directly across the street. Lots of options. Texas-size carb-loading on offer.

I also went to Gerik's which features cinnamon rolls the size of a toddler's head

Why can’t the rest of the USA have this? Our gas station dining options relegate us to choosing between desiccated roller-grill hot dogs and factory processed crap like Tornado Tacos. [Sad face emoji]

Texas, on the other hand, gets a whole bakery brigade of Austro-Prussian grandmas punching down fresh, buttery, yeast raised dough balls at 6am every morning and stuffing it with apricots and farmers’ cheese so it’s fresh and hot by the time I need coffee. Up north here in “the city that works?” We get an Eggwhite Wakeup Wrap nuked in a plastic tray by an untrained teenager using a cardboard cup sleeve as a spatula.

Not fair.

Why are you hoarding this culinary development, you Texas Lone Star pieces of…. ah. Wait a minute. There it is. Lone Star State culture. Y’all Texans have never stopped wanting to be separate from the rest of America, have you? Maybe you’ll even secede, right? Isn’t that the root of the term “lone star” in the first place?

Fine, then. We see how you, are, Texas. Hiding the kolache town of West, Texas in the northeastern part of your state? Very tricky! Just so you can hoard all these delicious savory kolaches? Just seems like yet another salvo in the ongoing grudge you’ve held against the good ol’ USA since 1845. “Texas is a Whole Other Country”, eh? Wow, that’s petty.

“Don’t Mess With Texas”. Ok, fine, then share your delicious pastry pockets so we won’t have to mess with y’all.

I’m just goofing around. Savory kolaches are a revelation, so of course some enterprising folks have tried to make them work, exporting them far and wide. Thus far, though, they don’t seem to have really caught on much beyond the region.

There’s a chain called Kolache Factory with around 60 US locations spanning from California to Virginia, although nearly all (49 of 60) are in Texas.

There’s also St. Louis Kolache which is known outside that market as American Kolache. And now that I’m researching all this, I’ve learned there was a place called Howdy Kolache (which also went by Howdy Breakfast Buns) here in Chicago but they’re now closed. I missed the boat on that one.

Dang. I snoozed, I losed.

Side tangent — this is just dawning on me — it seems that many kolache shops have multiple names. We’ve got Czech Stop aka Little Czech Bakery. Gerik’s aka Ole Czech Bakery, and the two other double-named spots in the paragraph above.

That seems like a lot to ask of consumers, what with the name of the signature item already being a foreign term most are unfamiliar with.

Not only do I have to learn how to say kolache and maybe klobasniki, but now I have to remember two different names for the same bakery? Perhaps this is why y’all haven’t broken through to mainstream America yet.

(Guys — I do restaurant consulting. Branding, concept development, menu, recipes, connecting these kind of dots. Let’s talk. lakin.ed@gmail.com)

Also —if you’re interested in supporting my writing here but don’t want to commit to an ongoing subscription, you have the option of making a one-time contribution at my BuyMeACoffee. Thanks for considering kicking in a few bucks to help me offset my 5G bill.

Anyway, with regard to rolling out the nationwide kolache love, it’s good to see that at least people have tried!

So that’s somewhat of a relief because I feel like these little poofy pastry pockets with sausage and cheese inside are just what folks need. Maybe it’ll take the edge off everyone a bit.

To be honest, reader, [turning to look you squarely in the eyes], a lot of y’all seem way too tightly wound lately, almost like you’re just itching for an excuse to flip the fuck out on some poor cashier, flight attendant, or crossing guard.

I’ve seen how you behave in traffic, Green Subaru Mom. Put down the GLP injector, back away from the Botox and have a warm, cheesy sausage-bread puffy pocket, instead, killa. Dial your bad self down a notch or two once in a while. You’ll thank me, I promise.

Also, as I’ve been pointing out in a number of my recent posts, due to the current challenges in the costing model of many restaurants, carb-driven concepts are super hot right now (Crave/Crumbl Cookies, PopUp Bagels, Stan’s Donuts). So kolaches are still a trend that could very well grab some of that sweet sweet private equity money and become the next doughy carb shop to roll into your friendly neighborhood suburban stripmall.

Let us all hope. For the sake of Green Subaru Mom.

Although, I’ve gotta say, the overly-styled photos of the menu items on the websites of both the kolache chains linked above look far worse than my own photos of Czech Stop, so they may just have corporatized and focus-grouped all the delicious soul out of those tasty puffs during the scaling-up process.

Maybe that’s why they’re not breaking through. They should fire all the coroporate food stylists and marketing firms and bring in a team of Czech grandmas to mix dough and make prune preserves.