This is the Pastry Basket, a Breakfast Week series in which Eater profiles noteworthy breakfast pastries. First up: the kolache.

Barbecue. Breakfast Tacos. Bringing guns to sit-down restaurants. All of these aspects help define the kitchen sink that is Texas's food history. But driving past one of hundreds of gas station-truck stop combos speckled throughout the Lone Star State highways, many visitors frequently overlook a quintessential relic from the past that's as Texan as riding your horse to school: the kolache.

A link to Texas' Old World heritage, the kolache (pronounced "koh-la-chee") came to America via Bohemian and Moravian Czech immigrants who emigrated en masse during the mid-to-late 1800s. Settling in what is now known as the Czech Belt, a range of territory stretching throughout East and Central Texas, at least one of these families had the right idea to continue producing the nostalgic pastry that they had enjoyed so much back in the motherland.

"I don’t recall my grandmother ever saying there were rules for what you put into a kolache."

"I think like any immigrant group, there's no way you're gonna figure out who the first person was that brought spaghetti or whatever over," said Dawn Orsak, a Texas-based food historian specializing in Czech culture. "It's just something that was made there, and when people got here, they did their best to recreate it with whatever ingredients they had."

When the first Czech families emigrated to Texas, the kolaches they baked at home strongly resembled those found in Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic). A kolache, according to the original Czech settlers' recipes, is essentially made with sweet dough, impressed in the center, and stuffed with traditional fillings such as preserved fruits, sweet cabbage, or poppy seeds. However, like any foreign dish that has been brought over to the States and passed down through the generations, pinning down the kolache's defining characteristics is no easy task. According to Andy Zubik, the Texas-Czech kolache expert behind Austin's Zubik Kolache House, the kolache is — for the most part — a free-for-all.

"I don't recall my grandmother ever saying there were rules for what you put into a kolache," said Zubik, who learned how to make kolaches by watching his grandmother knead dough in the kitchen. For him and several others, a kolache is simply any pastry made with sweet dough, with an impression in the center that has been stuffed with any range of fillings.

Although modern technology has made baking kolaches a breeze (thank you KitchenAid stand mixers and industrial-sized machinery), Orsak explained that one of the more integral facets to the kolache in Texas was the immense amounts of physical labor required. This aspect, according to Orsak, made kolaches a social and communal treat. During special occasions and large gatherings in the Czech community such as church events, weddings, funerals, or the holidays, kolache bakers — typically the women of the households — would congregate in the kitchen, dedicating long hours to pounding, kneading, and baking dozens of kolaches to fill their guests' gullets.

Eventually, members of the Texas-Czech community brought their culinary heritage to the masses in Texas, selling them along with a number of authentic Czech pastries at local bakeries such as the historic Village Bakery in West, Texas, and gas station-truck stop combos like Czech Stop. Located along the highways running throughout the Lone Star State, non-Czech visitors — and even some non-Texans — passing through these small towns caught on to the kolache craze.

"Everybody thinks sausage wrapped in dough is a kolache... but it’s not. That didn’t start until Czechs got to the U.S."

"We've been instrumental in spreading the popularity in the kolache because we have so much traffic," said Barbara Schissler, one of Czech Stop's original employees (and now-president). "And as far as I know, people have been jumping on the bandwagon."

Shops like the Village Bakery and Czech Stop may have helped familiarize the kolache to the rest of Texas, but they also facilitated a massive cultural confusion surrounding the kolache that continues to this day. The Kolache Factory, a franchise pastry shop founded in Houston in 1982 (it's since expanded as far as Indianapolis), is largely to blame. When first starting out, the company sold customers fast-food breakfast pastries that were essentially a variation on pigs-in-a-blanket — a circular sweet dough bun, filled with yellow cheese and sausage — but were called "kolaches." Even though these were nothing like the kolaches that you'd find in the Czech community, the Kolache Factory has continued to advertise their flagship product as such.

"Everybody thinks the sausage wrapped in dough is a kolache," Zubik lamented, stating that this pigs-in-a-blanket-style pastry sold by the Kolache Factory is actually known in the Czech community as a klobasnek. He added that "90 percent of the kolache-eating world is under the assumption that's a kolache, but it's not. That didn't start until Czechs got to the U.S., and from what I understand, it's indigenous to Texas."

Others, such as Paula Stevens and her brother Lucas Verret of Delicious Donuts & Bakery in Lake Charles, Louisiana, have perpetuated this nomological confusion of the klobasnek, and incidentally, the evolution of the kolache. The pair discovered the doughy misnomer during a road trip to Houston and ate the idea up. Following the beaten path of Americans taking culinary liberties with an ethnic recipe (previous notable examples being the Danish pastry and pizza), the pair went ahead and revamped the recipe for a much more savory take on the "Texas kolaches," which they advertise at Delicious Donuts & Bakery as "kolatchies." "Ours are fried, not baked; and it's not a sweet dough, it's a yeast-based dough," said Stevens. "That's why our spelling is different."

Recently, however, a new school of pastry chefs hailing from Texas have begun to reclaim the original Czech Belt kolache and bring it to a wider audience. Zubik carries on the family tradition back in Texas by educating Austin transplants on one of the state's culinary pride and joys. Meanwhile, Texas-Czech pastry chef Chris Svetlik of Republic Kolache in Washington, DC and the non-Czech (but still very Texan) Autumn Stanford of Brooklyn Kolache Company are introducing the locals in their new homes to their nostalgic treats.

Although these chefs are venturing off into artisanal territory by toying with nouveau flavors geared towards the millennial palate (candied jalapeño brisket kolache, anyone?), all parties involved are dedicated to maintaining a connection between their creations and the ancestral versions (including those infamous Texas kolaches).

"People in Brooklyn want something very artisanal, like always," Stanford told Smithsonian Mag in 2013. "If there's an American cheese in your sausage-cheese-jalapeño kolache, they're like 'ugh.' But I'm not gonna change something that somebody's been craving because it's not socially cool right now."

According to Svetlik, the kolaches at Republic Kolache are "somewhat thoughtfully and consciously moving outside the tradition," although he soon plans to put classic Czech flavors like poppy seed and sweetened cabbage on the menu, to provide customers a historical point of reference. "If we were being totally dedicated to traditional kolaches, we would be limited to... basically, flavors that are at the very least not terribly glamorous, and are possibly not great to eat," Svetlik laughed.

Despite the kolache's Old World roots that starkly contrast Internet-hype sensations like the ramen burger or the infamous Cronut, Svetlik noted there's been a growing popularity of the kolache over the past few years, especially with Matt Lauer announcing alongside Adam Rapoport of Bon Appetit that the kolache would be "a food we would crave in 2015." The prediction might have been a year off for Republic Kolache. When Svetlik rolled out the "cross-cultural combo" King Cake flavor for Mardi Gras Saturdays, the store had lines running all the way around the block. Two weekends ago, over 1,100 kolaches were sold, with the King Cake flavor leading the sales.

"I'm of course a little wary of kolache as a food fad, and we don't want to push it as that," said Svetlik. "But at the same time, this is an interesting cultural artifact from an ethnicity that is not very well known in the U.S., so we're all for it. The more people [that are] talking about and eating kolaches, the more likely they are to go try them and know where they came from."