My Czech great-grandmother used to make yeast dough buns filled with a sweet poppy-seed mixture called Kolache. I remember the rich taste of the poppy-seed-filled centers. I remember the dough rising over the heating grate in the house I grew up in.
Ever since, I have yearned to taste Kolaches once again.
A month ago when I was cleaning out drawers and cabinets, I found a sheet of paper with the Kolache recipe typed up by my mother. I carefully placed it in a safe place with my other odd “personal favorites.”
Then this past Wednesday, the last day this summer that my granddaughter Rachel would be spending with me, I told her about finding the recipe.
“Before I die,” I said, “I want to make the Kolache buns.”
“Why don’t we make them today?” she said.
Wow, we could actually do that, I thought. “But we would need a lot of poppy-seeds,” I said.
Somehow in my mind, the quantity of required poppy-seeds had become huge. But when I got out the recipe and we looked at it, the amount was just one cup.
I’ve made lots of complicated recipes in my life, including Peking duck, but somehow I had put the Kolache recipe on a pedestal so high up it was unachievable.
Rachel made it all sound possible.
We first had to do a bunch of chores in the morning, including taking down sixteen paintings at the end of my art show in Lansing, but after lunch we tackled the Kolache.
After a quick scan of the recipe, we went to the grocery store and bought two bottles of poppy seeds and a packet of yeast.
Rachel had never made yeast dough before. This was an adventure for her as well as for me. I tried to explain the purpose of kneading the dough, the importance of dissolving the yeast in lukewarm water—not too hot and not too cold. I discovered I’m pretty dumb about yeast, actually, and not sure why it’s better than baking powder or baking soda, which are so much easier to use.
I never had much interest in chemistry until Breaking Bad, the show in which the chemistry teacher, Mr. White, does just that.
Then suddenly there was an ingredient I didn’t have: the spice, mace.
Rachel whipped out her iPhone and searched Google for “mace substitutes.” I had plenty of nutmeg, so we used that.
We shared the various tasks--mixing, whipping, scalding, cooling, stirring, kneading, measuring, sifting—until the dough was sitting in a greased bowl, covered and ready to rise.
Next, we started the poppy-seed filling. The recipe said to grind them in a poppy-seed grinder (?) but if we didn’t have one, we could use a blender.
“I didn’t know you had a blender,” said Rachel. Then she did the blending, and we just guessed when we thought the seeds looked like “ground coffee.”
Putting the rest of the ingredients together was easy, except that we had to boil the mixture on the stove on low heat and then cook it for 30 minutes, stirring continuously.
“I wish I could sit down,” said Rachel after five minutes of stirring. I brought her a kitchen stool and started to clean up the huge mess of dirty pots, pans, bowls, etc., that we had accumulated.
“I’ll take the last fifteen minutes,” I offered, but she ended up doing most of the stirring.
Then we waited for the dough to finish rising.
We barely finished our Kolache project—two sheets of poppy-seed filled buns baking in the oven—when it was time to make supper.
I was exhausted. I know now why I don’t make complicated recipes any more.
I wish I could tell you that the Kolaches tasted exactly as I remembered them, but my first bite after we took them out of the oven was disappointing. The poppy-seed filling tasted familiar, but not the bun.
I’m not even sure that this recipe my mother typed up was the one used by my great-grandmother. I think that one is lost to us forever.
But I am glad that Rachel got me to finally tackle this project. Maybe her first experience making yeast dough will be something she remembers years from now.
The disappointing outcome also made me want to hunt down other Kolache recipes, and there seems to be an abundance of them online.
A project for next summer?
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