Hear hear! Fortunately HEB sells it so I don't have to make it all the way to a Prasek's store. Their sausage recipe is the closest flavor to the sausage my Czech Texan grandparents would make, although my grandparents often had venison mixed in as one of the meats.
Praseks has some with venison in it, too. :) Any other brands you like? I sense I can trust your tastes. I was out in the middle of nowhere near Tyler recently and got some “famous” sausage and it was the same bland, hot dog like texture I can’t stand.
HEB also has Slovacek's sausage which is not exactly the same but I still like the flavor. Some people I know are really into Chappell Hill and it's fine for me (just not exactly the same if nostalgia is leading me to go for that specific Prasek's flavor).
My kids have learned the precise term for the savory ones from me, but you're right that most Texans, even many Czech Texans, do not know it! To be fair, the origin is that Czech Texans used the same kolache bread and stuck meat in it. People might not think it matters, but many kolaches I've had from shops do not use the bread I'm familiar with from my grandmother (and cousins). I won't name names, but their bread doesn't taste very good, and only a few shops make the same bread I grew fond of at my grandmother's house, and that same kind of bread was used for both the sausage ones and the sweet ones at my grandmother's house.
Agree that the bread is origin and makes all the difference. Especially when compared to a normal “pig in a blanket” style which usually has biscuit/croissant bread the kolache dough is much sweeter. I’ve tried making it at home a couple times and have never been able to get it quite right. It’s either not sweet enough or not airy enough. I’m not a great cook though tbh.
For me, Shipley Donuts is pretty wide spread in parts of Texas and has good kolaches. There’s found at most donut shops but there’s a thing here too now where most donut shops are owned by SE Asian folks and it seems they all use the exact same dough premix and I think it all tastes pretty bad. Also, if you like cheese in it there’s a big difference as places like Shipley puts more in there and it’s quite a good meat to cheese ratio. The other places only buy sausages with cheese already mixed inside and it’s not cheesy enough IMO.
The kolache market in Dallas is abysmal compared to Houston and Austin and up to West, and pretty everywhere inside that triangle. It seems like Czech folks never ventured north of West lol. Pretty much ever road trip I take from Dallas I’m seeking out a “good” sausage and cheese kolache
I should just learn how to make that dough. I regret not buying that Church of the Visitation (Westphalia) Altar Society cookbook I saw on the counter at Green's.
I’ve not had luck following recipes I’ve found online. Could be my execution but it never turns out right. Most of the original immigrants have passed but if you can learn from someone in person you definitely should not let the opportunity slip by you.
As a child, I also ate them for breakfast every time I spent the night at my grandparents' house. I'm in Houston now, and this afternoon I was talking to a neighbor from the town of West (which is a few hours northwest of here). My Czech grandparents lived an hour south of Houston but the neighbor and I both agreed on how much we like prune kolaches. I also love apricot. Some places use canned fruit which might taste fine to someone who doesn't know better, but it's a terrible clash with memories of what my grandmother made (and what some of my cousins still make), and I refuse to pay for them at any shop which does that. We also talked about the poppyseed ones, and how for us it's so heartwarmingly nostalgic but often other people who didn't grow up with poppyseed struggle to understand the appeal.
I did the same at my grandparents in Crosby, just north of Baytown. That land was passed down through the family going back to our ancestors who were part of the Old 300. The Czechs that moved into the emerging area now known as Crosby passed along amazing recipes like kolaches and my grandmother befriended the wife of a Czech coworker of my grandfathers - now kolaches are absolutely part of the family recipe book.
Yes, I love those flavors and the cream cheese ones too!! If memory serves me, these ones were actually the most popular with our grands generations and they’ve become quite a rare treat these days. Many places don’t serve them and you really have to seek them out
I'm Polish-Irish-Czech, and my dad used to make poppyseed coffee cake. When I lived in Chicago, I'd often get poppyseed rolls made by local Polish bakeries. I miss those, that kind of food is hard to find around here, but at least I can get locally-made pierogi.
Back in 2011, I joined a software startup working on a product which aimed to prevent stuff like the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The founders talked about how throughout the industry and the world, tons more data was being generated than ever before (of course), but we (humanity) didn't have a good handle on making use of all of that data, so a lot of it was not being interpreted, reacted to, etc.
Not long after that, I found out that Palantir got their first energy industry customer. Some employees in Palantir thought it wouldn't be worthwhile to go after oil & gas companies because they viewed them as old school and slow to adapt to new ways of doing things. However, in those days Palantir was focused on acquiring no more than one customer per industry, because they were trying to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and wanted to demonstrate how many industries they could serve. And then, due to a contrarian within the company, they did get an O&G customer, and it was the biggest single deal so far in the company's history.
What I don't know is exactly how well they served that customer. What I do know is that they were selling the customer on the idea that they have sooooo much data and they're leaving tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily boost savings in the company. Stick all this data into Palantir's product and we'll help you on a million fronts and therefore boost your profits significantly. One example is the longevity of machine parts and all the data you can get about historical wear and tear, etc. Now, this is what they were selling, and I don't know which areas ended up being the most helpful, but yeah, as someone else in here said, they were insisting on customers putting in all the data they have and the product would make connections, or reveal insights, etc.
Even if it's a crude product by Star Trek standards, you've gotta admit there is probably a ton of low-hanging fruit like that in most companies, and a lot of the time they don't go after all that because they're making money, but just don't have extra manpower or expertise to look into all that, so if Palantir delivers on the promise to boost the bottom line, then I guess it's worth it. It also means there's room to compete, although a big problem is even if you're a sharp cookie, Palantir probably started with way more business connections than most nerds will ever have.
A year ago I started using them in the developer edition of Firefox on my Macbook, but then months later the Firefox developer edition started flaking out, e.g. I'd open a profile and it literally wouldn't navigate anywhere, or if it did it wouldn't last long. Bizarre. Even mentioned it to a college classmate who recently took a job at Mozilla but he's not working on anything close to that. So I started using profiles in Safari, and honestly, neither is perfect but some stuff worked a bit better in Firefox. I still go open up Firefox every now and then to retrieve a password I haven't yet migrated over to Safari. I probably should bite the bullet and get rid of Firefox developer edition and just install the regular build. I love using Firefox Focus on iOS since it feels faster than the other browsers.
edit: flaking out, since I can't think of a better way to describe what's happening :)
Pretty cool, I hadn't heard of Renarde and it looks promising. Around 8 years ago, I really wanted Aurelia to win the SPA wars but they're still pretty niche even though they've been growing lately. But honestly, after playing with everything over all these years, I still believe a server-side framework with minimal amounts of JS is ideal for most projects, especially all those internal corporate web apps but also for B2B stuff and even the average consumer-facing app. People say consumers are more demanding now, but how many developers are really working on something that caters to the most demanding consumers? Unless you need the most snazzy UX ever, just don't.
And honestly, using Rails or other server-side frameworks, you can get very far with way less effort than those expensive front-end teams by simply using Hotwire:
Sending down rendered HTML using Hotwire Turbo requires far less time, and HTML over the wire is in reality no heavier than sending down JSON. If you absolutely need a bit more interactivity on the front-end while avoiding a server roundtrip, it's easy to drop in little Stimulus JS controllers as-needed. From my journeys to and fro in the real world, I've seen most projects do not need more than that, and are arguably wasting budget trying to use heavier tools than that! For most sizeable projects, you can do more in Rails & Hotwire with fewer developers than a 6-person team using their favorite server side language and React. I'm not saying you have to use Ruby on Rails. I'm saying I wish the dev world would embrace this paradigm in whatever their favorite language/frameworks are.
I entered the working world in the aftermath of the dotcom bust when JS was a nightmare of footguns (much more than now) and Microsoft literally had zero developers working on IE, the most-used browser in the world, for YEARS. Web dev was therefore stuck in an archaic prison and there was much rejoicing the day Microsoft announced they were once again assigning a team of developers to work on the browser. Fast forward a decade and a lot of terrible things in JS were being rectified at the language level. A dozen years ago, I tried a SPA for the first time and it seemed cool to have a framework (Angular, the first version) to provide more abstractions than jQuery and Backbone. However, the groupthink bandwagony insanity that ensued was ridiculous, and I felt like such an old codger trying to tell the kids to just be grateful that JS was finally working pretty well and move on and build stuff instead for a while instead of spending so much energy remaking the tools every 5 weeks. I'm not trying to be dramatic--I really do feel like companies have no idea how much they overspent on web app development in the past decade versus how much more working code they could've gotten for the money they spent. It literally felt like people were creating extra work, and had no idea how much easier it was than a few years before.
Delightful how Rudyard Kipling lived above Harris the Sausage King! "...for tuppence, gave as much sausage and mash as would carry one from breakfast to dinner when one dined with nice people who did not eat sausage for a living."
Would've been a good place for me to live as a young man as I grew up on sausage. The most common variety I ate was made by my Texan-Czech grandparents and other relatives. It often had venison and pork if someone had gone deer hunting recently enough. The venison was a nice touch but the pork helped it to be less dry. So delicious, and the archetype by which I measure all other sausage. The closest recipe I can find is from Prasek's Family Smokehouse in Hill (original Czech spelling is Prášek). They have multiple varieties, with and without jalapeño, but the all-beef and pork & beef have a flavor extremely close to the kind made by my relatives. I'm extra fortunate since you can now find them in HEB in Houston.
This sounds more like indentured servitude, but it's not even as bad as that. As frustrating as this situation is, in the USA you are not sent to prison for this unpaid debt and still have agency over your time. But of course human trafficking throughout the world is still a problem today and I very much want to see it ended (as much as possible).
:edited my first sentence to clarify it's not quite indentured servitude :)
