Make Kolaches Easy With Your Favorite Pie Filling

It's hard to resist the allure of freshly baked kolaches. Still warm from the oven, the slightly sweet, pillowy dough cradles a generous portion of fruity filling to accompany your cup of coffee on a leisurely Sunday morning. These yeast dough pastries of Czech and Central European origin arrived in Central Texas in the 1800s when Czech settlers established colonies in and around Fayette County. The most traditional flavors are fruits of European origin such as peach, apricot, cherry, prune, apple, sweetened cream cheese, and a paste made from poppy seeds. But if you don't have a local Czech bakery and want to make them at home, an excellent shortcut is to use a store-bought pie filling.

"People might be more inclined to try and make kolaches at home if they didn't have to mess with homemade fillings, so pie fillings seem like the next best thing," Dawn Orsak, a native Texan of Czech descent who has dedicated her career to documenting Czexan cuisine, told Tasting Table. It will be much easier than making your own fruit topping from scratch, and you can use pretty much anything. Today, it's common to find pineapple, lemon, blueberry, and other more "exotic" kolach toppings (according to Orsak, kolach is the correct Czech name), so you can get creative with whatever flavors you prefer.

"Pie fillings can be like fruit surrounded by gel, so to fake them being more like homemade kolach fillings, you might put the canned filling in your food processor and pulse a few times so you get more of a 'mash,' or use a potato masher for a chunkier consistency," says Orsak. "Some people also use commercial poppyseed filling, maybe thinned with a little milk or doctored up with your own enhancements... a little vanilla, a little cinnamon." Another trick to enhance a commercial pie filling is to add butter to it.

To make these tasty treats even easier, Orsak suggests you make the dough ahead of time, and then freeze it. You want to make dough balls and place them on a plate or pan that will fit in your freezer, very well covered. When individually frozen, transfer them to a ziplock bag to store. You can also store the dough in the fridge overnight, very well covered so it doesn't dry out. She mentions that for both of these make-ahead tips, you have to give the dough plenty of time to warm up again before shaping, filling, and baking. With these easy shortcuts, making kolaches at home should be faster and easier.