The Kolache Project

The census of a pastry nation.

The Kolache Project documents and preserves the kolache traditions of the Czech diaspora, one family recipe at a time. Your grandmother's version is data, heritage, and treasure. Register it before it is lost.

Begin with the 3-minute test
The Great Kolache Census opens this fall. Every family tradition receives a permanent number, forever. The first families get the low ones.
Why do we spell it kolache? Because Texas does, and Texas is where our table stands. But maybe your family says kolacky, like Chicago and Minnesota. Maybe it is kolachi, like the steel towns of Pennsylvania. In the old country it is koláč, and your babička will tell you every other version is wrong. The word is a map of where Czech families landed in America. However your family spells it, the way you say it, and bake it, tells us where you are from.

The Great Kolache Census

A permanent registry of how real families actually bake: the traits, the vocabulary, the who-taught-whom. Every tradition recorded with a numbered certificate and a family page. The founding cohort is being gathered now at festivals across Texas and beyond.

The Transmission Study

Does the recipe follow the mother's line or the father's? When two kolache families marry, whose version survives? We are answering these questions with real data and an annual public report. Every census entry is a data point in the first serious study of how heritage moves through kitchens.

The Recipe Ark

Handwritten cards, translated and preserved forever: a genealogical document that happens to be delicious. Plus the American Kolache Spelling Map, the Annual Klobasnek Referendum, and the State of the Kolache report.

Roll or Kolache Dough, a typed community-cookbook recipe by Anna Dobesh, with handwritten annotations, still in its comb binding
Roll or Kolache Dough, by Anna Dobesh. Still in its binding, annotations and all. The founder's own family line: Tradition No. 001 in the Great Kolache Census.

Be there when the census opens

One email when it goes live, and the annual findings after that. Nothing else.