Weekend Bake: Sausage Kolaches?

I went back to Houston for the holidays (squeaked out just before the snow caused mass cancellations) and had some sausage kolaches from the local bakery. Doughnut shops are one of the things I miss the most about Texas. In the DC area, just finding a doughnut shop that isn't Dunkin can be a challenge, and nowhere seems to make the deliciously light, airy yeast doughnuts that are par for the course in Texas bakeries. But worse yet, you will never, ever find in a DC doughnut shop that lovely and ambrosial breakfast item, the sausage kolache.

Some people claim that this isn't a kolache, it's a klobasnek. To which I reply: Maybe if you're in Europe. If it's here, and it's Tex-Czech, it's a kolache, damn it. There are no klobasneks with jalapenos.

Although one of my favorite Texan food blogs has a recipe for kolache dough, I had held back on attempting to replicate this foodstuff because the central ingredient, namely the sausage, posed a problem. If you go to a grocery store in Texas, you are likely to be confronted by a wall of sausage options (seriously, I wish I had snapped a photo when I was in H.E.B.---it was literally 10-15 feet of nothing but sausage). Here in DC, you are lucky to find decent kielbasa, much less something appropriately sized and worthy of encasement in sweet yeast dough. But then I saw someone mention New Braunfels Smokehouse, and I realized that mail order sausage might just be the ticket. Maybe not from there, but somewhere.

I will keep you up to date with the results of this experiment.