Traditional Apple Kolaches
Sausage & Red Pepper Kolaches
Sausage Apple Gouda Kolaches
Mushroom-Swiss Kolaches
All 4 Recipes and Video
Sausage-Red Pepper Kolaches
I swear to Mob, getting this one to the finish line was like pulling teeth—the kind dentists dread until they realize they can charge more for the extraction. Bastards.
I’m not even sure why this one was so hard to get in the can. It just… kept slipping away. According to my schedule, it should’ve taken three weeks from concept to final product. But this one? Things just kept getting in the way.
I was chatting with a friend the other evening—he’s diabetic and thinking about doing live diabetic cooking and recipe streams. I shudder at the thought of a live shoot. It’s expensive. Not the streaming itself, but the prep. You’ve gotta get the recipes perfect, or at least know which corners you can cut mid-shoot. And you have to rehearse—over and over—because this is cooking, and things will go sideways. Maybe not catastrophically, but enough to derail you. You can have a plan, and you should stick to it, but variations always happen.
Take the first shoot for The Kolache Episode, for example.
I made a couple last-minute decisions that killed the process. First, a quick on-the-fly call: when I was making the streusel for the apple kolaches, I added cinnamon. Tasted great—but it matched the apple filling and completely disappeared visually. Unless you knew it was there, you’d never see it on camera.
The second issue was the klobasneks. Yeah, I made them—but because I baked two sheet pans at once, they didn’t brown properly and looked like hell on camera. So I threw them under the broiler… and got distracted. If they weren’t camera-ready before, they definitely weren’t after.
The gouda I used for the sausage-apple-gouda kolaches was also oilier than expected, so I had to reformulate. Cheese became cheese sauce. I’m happy with the final version—the published recipe has more apple than the video, and it’s better for it.
The only other major failure in the video was the apple kolaches. The filling got a little overcooked, and I skipped the streusel. But again, the published recipe is tight.
If I weren’t so damn tired of kolaches, I’d have eaten every last mushroom-Swiss one. Those are hands down my favorite—followed closely by the sausage and red pepper.
So what’s next? I think mac & cheese, but I reserve the right to change it. I had an egg fu yung the other night that was just wrong and I might want to do my own. I really never know.
Ya’ll go cook something.
