Victoria Rittinger, a Houston-based finance director at a manufacturing company, has earned such a reputation for her amazing kolaches that friends and family always expect her to bring some to special events. “Oh, we just had a baby, we get kolaches, right?” she says, jokingly imitating them. “I just adopted a cat. Kolaches?”
This kolache recipe goes back generations in the family of her stepmother, Karen Rittinger, who grew up in Texas’ Czech belt. Victoria has fine-tuned it over the years. For the filling, she always uses whatever fruit looks good at the farmers market.
2 packages yeast
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 cup warm water
1 cup sour cream
1 cup whole milk
8 cups flour, divided use
1/2 cup melted butter
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup melted butter for brushing
Your favorite preserves or filling
Instructions:
Combine yeast with 2 tablespoons sugar and warm water directly in mixing bowl and allow it to proof until foamy. Mix in the sour cream and milk. Measure out 2 cups of flour and add just enough to get a pancake-batter texture. Mix in melted butter, eggs, sugar and salt.
Then, either mixing by hand or with a countertop mixer’s dough hook, add just enough of the remaining 6 cups of flour to achieve a texture that changes from sticky to slightly tacky to smooth. Pat the dough to feel it as you go. When you’ve got it right, the dough should feel smooth and satiny. (It’s better to add too little flour, which can be supplemented, than too much, which toughens the dough.)
Let the finished dough ball rise in a buttered bowl, brushing it with butter and covering it with a tea towel. It can proof nicely in an oven with the light turned on. It should proof in about an hour and a half, or until doubled in bulk, depending on the ambient temperatures and humidity.
Butter the cookie sheets, or bacon-grease them, if you like. Punch down the dough ball. Break off pieces of dough to make 1½-ounce balls, weighing them on a kitchen scale covered with plastic wrap.
Shape the balls into smooth rounds with seams on the bottom. Place on greased cookie sheets, brush with butter, cover with a tea towel and allow to rise until double in size. Then take each ball of risen dough and use your thumb to make an indentation in the center, turning, tugging and shaping the circle until the depression is big enough to hold several tablespoons of filling.
Line up unbaked kolaches shoulder to shoulder on greased cookie sheets and fill with mixtures of choice. Brush with butter, cover with a tea towel and set aside to rise again until they regain the size they reached previously.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees if it’s conventional, 350 degrees if it’s convection.
Note:
During these final risings, you can mist the kolaches with olive oil to keep a crust from forming on the dough. When the kolaches are puffy, brush them with butter again and bake them for 10 minutes in the preheated oven, then rotate the pans and bake 5 minutes more until golden brown.
Brush with butter one last time when they come out of the oven.
Makes 4 dozen kolaches
From Victoria Rittinger
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Houston Recipes: Victoria Rittinger's Fruit Kolaches - Houston Chronicle
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