Tag: tabor

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Noodles the Czech Way

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Beseda Hall was without kolaches. No dancers could be seen in Sokol Park, and downtown Tabor was devoid of polka music. Lidice Street seemed strangely empty and quiet when we rolled into town.”Are we in the right place?” we wondered.

If you’ve only been to Tabor during Czech Days, you might not recognize the little Bon Homme County town during the 362 days a year when quiet reigns. The silence we found on our Monday morning visit stood in sharp contrast to the bustle inside American Legion Post 183, where a chaotic scene was unfolding.

Members of the Czech Heritage Preservation Society and volunteers were in the Legion kitchen getting ready to start mixing on their annual noodle-making day.”It’s a little disorganized right now. It’ll get better as time goes on,” Ann Beran, one of Czech Days’ official kolache-making demonstrators, told us.

A pattern began to emerge from the clatter of mixers and chatter of 20-some people crowding the kitchen. One woman cracked eggs into ice cream pails — each bucket containing enough for a batch of noodles. Another measured flour. At a third station, eggs, oil and salt were being mixed. Next, a heavy-duty mixer brought the beaten eggs and flour together. Another team kneaded more flour into each batch of noodles, setting their bowls in the Legion’s double sink, a more comfortable height. Others sliced and rolled the dough into smaller portions, which were then fed through the pasta attachments on KitchenAids. A pair of young brothers carried the flattened dough out to a room full of sheet-covered tables, where the yellow ovals would dry slightly before returning to the kitchen to be cut into two sizes of noodles: thick and spaghetti-sizes.”I told that little boy we’re going to fill all these tables. He said, ‘Are you sure?'” Beran said.

Beran was sure. The society makes 20 to 22 batches of noodles every year for Czech Days, selling the noodles in Vancura Park and the Gift and Information Center, located on Lidice Street in the town’s community center. The noodle sales generate funds to help preserve the historic buildings and artifacts in Vancura Park. The park’s mini pioneer village contains an 1873 log schoolhouse, St. John the Baptist Pioneer Chapel, the original Tabor jail, a log house and other buildings that highlight what life was like in the community’s early days.

While Tabor residents have long had a passion for their roots, in recent years, Czech Heritage Preservation Society members have become more aware of the subtle nuances of saving history.”We are finding that some of the things we thought we were preserving aren’t being preserved enough,” said Susan Schroeder, a society member. Thanks to grants and the sale of personalized bricks that create a heritage walk through the Vancura Park village, the society has been able to oil the two log buildings and reroof two other structures. Volunteers are in the process of organizing the museum’s collections and digitizing photographs. The ultimate goal is to open the Czech village to the public three days a week.

Volunteers are also essential to making enough noodles to save a village, especially during the drying phase, when dough is ferried back and forth to the kitchen before cutting.”We need lots of runners because some of us are old and we run with a limp,” laughs Adeline Merkwan. She grew up speaking Czech, and once taught the language in the local school. She’s been one of the Czech Preservation Heritage Society’s stalwarts since noodle-making began about 20 years ago. She recommends using the noodles in soup.”Chicken noodle, beef noodle, anything you put a noodle in. It’s a farm thing.”

While noodles might not be the first thought that comes to mind when you think of Czech cuisine, many of the volunteers were raised in homes where their moms rolled the noodles out in a big circle and then hung them over a chair to dry.

Even with modern technology, it’s still a labor-intensive process. The Legion Hall group was friendly and sociable, but at-home noodle makers sometimes consider the project a good marriage test. Ann Beran said,”If a marriage survives making noodles, sorting hogs and doing plumbing, you’ve got it made.”

Czech Days Noodles

12 eggs

3/4 cup oil

4 teaspoons salt

9 cups flour

With a heavy-duty mixer, combine eggs, oil and salt until the eggs are thoroughly mixed. Switch to a dough hook attachment and slowly spoon in about 4 cups of flour, stopping when you have a pliable, kneadable dough. Knead in more flour by hand until you have a stiff, round ball of dough that is not sticky. You might not use all the flour. Cut the dough into egg-sized pieces and roll them out into a 2 x 5 inch oval, stopping when it’s thin and pliable enough to go through your pasta machine, about 1/8 inch thick.

Let the flattened dough dry, turning once, until the dough feels slightly leatherlike but is still flexible enough to be cut. Do not let the dough become too dry or it will become brittle. Using a knife or a pasta machine, cut the dough into strips. Lay noodles over a tablecloth for a day or two, tossing gently about two times a day, until they are completely dry.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Quest for the Czech Kolache

By Laura Johnson Andrews

Ed and Carol Radack make fresh kolaches daily, but there are Bon Homme County natives scattered far and wide. That’s no problem, because the Radacks will ship them out of state.

When the first Czech immigrants came to South Dakota in 1869, they brought a pastry as round as the wagon wheels that rolled them here — the kolache. In fact, the name derives from kolo, the Czech word for wheel.

These circular sweet rolls filled with fruit, poppy seeds or cheese and topped with a sprinkle of streusel have a passionate following. Along with pivo (that’s Czech for beer) and traditional dancing, kolaches are a star attraction at Czech Days, held in the little Bon Homme County town of Tabor every June. But Czech Days only comes once a year. Luckily, businesses in Yankton and Tyndall fill the void for the rest of the year.

At the Tyndall Bakery, Ed & Carol Radack honor local tastes and traditions with kolaches and other baked goods created from recipes that date back 70 to 80 years. The kolache dough is used in many of the bakery’s products, such as long johns, doughnuts, kuchen, buns and Carol’s original recipe, apple fritter bread. In November and December, the Radacks stir up peanut brittle, Klondike and anise-flavored Christmas candies using the bakery’s old copper pot and marble worktable.

The Radacks wanted to try something new when they bought the bakery from Bob and Judy Rueb in 2007. Ed had been with the state highway department for 11 years, and Carol worked at Chicago Rawhide in Springfield until it closed.”This is completely the opposite of what we were doing,” says Ed. The husband-wife team works 60 to 80 hours a week, with extra help provided by their sons, Tim and Ty, and local high school students who man the front counter while Ed and Carol bake in the kitchen.”You’re married to it,” Carol says.

Kolaches have a reputation for being difficult, but the Radacks make the process look easy. Using the bakery’s secret recipe, Carol mixes the dough until it reaches the right consistency.”It should be smooth like a baby’s bottom,” Carol says. It rests in a large wheeled tub for about 45 minutes before she pours the quivering, almost liquid mixture out onto a floured worktable. Carol then grabs a dough scraper, slices off a wide strip of dough and flours the top. To break down the dough’s plasticity, she rolls a spiked wheel called a docker over the surface, followed by a metal rolling pin. Ed uses a small, 3-inch round cutter to form the kolaches, then Carol arranges the pillowy circles on a metal pan, poking the center of each circle to create an indentation for the kolache filling.

Once the cutting is done, Ed and Carol gently press on the kolaches again to reinforce the hollow that will hold the filling. Working with swift, smooth motions, they then squeeze fruit, cream cheese or poppy seed filling into the indentations.”She’s faster than I am, but mine look better when they’re done,” jokes Ed.

The pans of kolaches then rest in a room called the proof box for 30 to 45 minutes. The proof box is like a sauna for baked goods. A water-filled pan placed over a burner provides heat and humidity, helping the kolaches and other yeasty desserts to rise.

After the kolaches have rested, they’re topped with a little streusel before entering the Tyndall Bakery’s enormous oven for 15 minutes. The propane-fueled behemoth contains six rotating racks, providing the Radacks with enough room to bake 30 full sheet pans or 120 kuchen at once. Once baked, the kolaches are allowed to cool before glaze is added. Then they’re ready for appreciative customers.

The Radacks have a time-honored system, but there are other methods of kolache-making. Drive east of Tabor, the Czech capital, on Highway 50 and you’ll soon arrive in Yankton where kolaches can be found at Czeckers Sports Bar and Grill, a joint venture of Matt and Kelsey Hunhoff and Matt’s parents, Dan and Jean Hunhoff.

Czech flair is evident at Czeckers in Yankton, both in its decor and its menu, which includes kolaches. Abbey Kokesh (left) was the restaurant’s kolache master before teaching the art to Kelsey Hunhoff, who owns the business with her husband, Matt, and Matt’s parents, Dan and Jean Hunhoff.

Czeckers, which opened in the former Elks Club in September 2013, blends the board game’s red and black colors with the family’s Czech pride.”Matt is very proud of his heritage, and Jean is as well,” Kelsey says.”He’d thought of the name and the theme several years ago.”

That pride extends to Czeckers’ menu. Since the Czech Republic is the birthplace of pilsner-style beer, Czeckers offers two varieties: Pilsner Urquell and Staropramen. Beer is also the key ingredient of their pivo-battered fries. On Friday and Saturday nights, the restaurant serves a Beseda meal: roast beef or duck, dumplings, sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, rye bread, and of course, kolaches.

Matt’s sister, Abbey Kokesh, was the restaurant’s kolache maker in the early days.”My grandma made them my whole life. I enjoyed eating them, but never learned how to make them,” Kokesh said. After her grandmother, Amy Rokusek, developed Alzheimers, Kokesh turned to Ann Beran, a longtime kolache-making demonstrator at Tabor’s Czech Days, for guidance. Now, Abbey teaches the Saturday kolache demonstration for beginners during Czech Days.

Kokesh tells beginners that kolaches aren’t fast food.”You really can’t be in a hurry. I usually put aside a half day because it takes time.” She also recommends patience.”Mom has made them, and hers don’t turn out right but she just doesn’t have the passion to bake them like I do.”

Here are some other tricks:

  • Keep the kitchen warm. That helps the dough to rise.
  • Use bread flour. They’re not sure why but that’s what the bakers do.
  • Be creative with fillings. Try chocolate, peanut butter, jelly or anything that might make a pie.
  • Pair dark fillings with dark and light with light so they cook evenly.
  • Find a mentor. Otherwise it may be frustrating.
  • Kolaches are best served hot but they will keep a week, or you can freeze the dough or the baked kolaches.
  • There’s no right or wrong way. Find out what works for you.

Czechoslovakian immigrants brought kolaches – round sweet rolls filled with fruit, poppy seeds or cheese and topped with streusel – to southeastern South Dakota when they began settling there in 1869.

Czeckers’ Kolache Recipe

2 packages or 2 tablespoons dry yeast

3/4 cup warm water

1 teaspoon sugar

2 cups warmed milk

3/4 cup potato flakes

1 tablespoon salt

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs, slightly beaten

1/2 cup vegetable oil

5-6 cups bread flour

Dissolve yeast in warm water and 1 teaspoon sugar. Set aside.

Heat milk and pour into mixing bowl. Using a mixer, add potato flakes, 3/4 cup sugar, salt, oil and slightly beaten eggs and mix well. Stir in 2 cups flour, then add yeast mixture. Continue adding flour until it’s a soft dough. Switch to dough hooks and add the rest of the flour. Move dough to floured surface and knead slightly until the dough is no longer sticky. Move to a greased bowl, cover and let rise until dough doubles in size and the dough no longer pops up when poked with a finger.

Shape dough into small, smooth balls about 2 inches in diameter. Thomas’ method involves manipulating spoonfuls of dough by flattening them into a disc, folding the edges into the center and popping them through her thumb and forefinger to create an uncreased dough ball. Place the balls on a greased pan, brush with oil and let rise for about an hour.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Using a stamper (the Hunhoffs use the bottom of a plastic bottle) or your fingers, flatten the dough ball into a circle by making an indentation in the center and fill with kolache filling. Sprinkle streusel on top of filling.

Bake at 400 degrees for 11 to 12 minutes. After baking, brush with melted margarine or butter or a combination of 1 tablespoon sugar and 3 tablespoons hot water. Yields 4 dozen kolaches.

Poppy Seed Filling

1/4 cup sugar

2 tablespoons flour

1 can Solo brand poppy seed filling

3/4 cup half and half

1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix sugar and flour together. Add poppy seed filling, half and half and vanilla. Microwave on high 3 minutes and stir. Heat 3 more minutes, stir, then heat one more minute. May also heat on stovetop.

Prune Filling

12 ounces prunes

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Cover prunes with water and cook until tender. Mash prunes and combine with other ingredients.

Streusel

1/2 cup flour

1/4 cup butter or margarine

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup finely-chopped coconut, optional

Use pastry blender to blend flour, butter and sugar together until crumbly. Add coconut, if desired. Sprinkle the mixture over kolache filling before baking.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Too Many Counties?

By John Andrews

South Dakota’s 66 counties have been arranged like this since 1983.

Does South Dakota have too many counties? It’s a long-discussed topic that resurfaced at Augustana College’s annual Dakota Conference in April. Bill Peterson, a former legislator from Sioux Falls, discussed the county consolidation proposal he brought to the legislature in 1998. It would have required South Dakota reorganize into no fewer than 15 counties and no more than 30 by 2005. Despite touting its cost savings — something that generally catches the attention of frugal South Dakotans — the plan got very little traction.

Neither did a joint resolution that appeared before the legislature in 2009. It would have placed a constitutional amendment on 2010 general election ballot to limit counties to 25,000 people or 5,000 square miles, whichever was less.

Peterson and his co-presenter, Joe Kirby, cited the dramatic population shift from rural to urban areas of South Dakota. It’s been happening for decades and it’s very likely to continue, meaning some form of reorganization is probably inevitable. Yet here we are in 2015 with the same patchwork of 66 counties that we’ve known since 1983, when Washabaugh County was absorbed into Jackson County and became South Dakota’s last county to be eliminated.

A few years ago, we embarked on a search to find one interesting spot in every county that we thought people might like to see. After our”66 counties tour” feature appeared in the magazine, several readers wrote to tell us that they had set out on their own South Dakota road trips, magazine in hand, to see the places we’d written about.

There are fun and interesting things to be found in each county, so while we still have all 66, let’s celebrate them. Beginning today, and continuing every two weeks, we’ll pick one South Dakota county and write about the unique facts and places that we’ve discovered in our travels there. As always, we encourage additions to our reports. Please leave a comment if you’re a resident, a South Dakota native reading from afar or anyone with an interest in the featured county.

Our first installment features Bon Homme County, officially organized in 1862. Its recorded history reaches back to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which floated into the area in the late summer of 1804. The explorers noted in their journals passing a large island in the Missouri River called Bon Homme Island. The exact origins of the name are unclear, but some speculate that a Frenchman lived on the island and was considered a good man (“bon homme” in French) to local Indians, who bestowed that title upon the land.

The area’s earliest settlers relied on the fur trade for their livelihoods. The first trading post in the county was opened by Emanuel Disaul in 1815 at the mouth of Emanuel Creek west of Springfield. Zephyr Rencontre built a station on Bon Homme Island in 1828.

The county was effectively opened to non-Indian settlement after an 1858 treaty that required the Yankton Sioux Indians to relocate west of Chouteau Creek, just beyond the present county’s western boundary. John Shober and several families from Minnesota arrived in 1858, just before the treaty was signed. Soldiers from nearby Fort Randall, charged with keeping trespassers off Indian lands, disassembled their log homes and threw them into the river. They returned in 1859 and began a more permanent settlement.

Shober and his party are credited with establishing the first schoolhouse in what would be Dakota Territory. Ten students enrolled in the spring of 1860 under the tutelage of Emma Bradford. The original school building has disappeared, but a replica still stands a few miles east of Springfield.

A replica of the first schoolhouse in Dakota Territory stands near the Missouri River in Bon Homme County.

Bon Homme County’s land appealed to settlers from across the ocean, as well. Hutterites, long oppressed in Europe, sent scouts to Dakota Territory in the early 1870s, looking for a place to establish a colony. They liked what they saw along the banks of the Missouri River and bought 2,500 acres of land in 1874 from notorious Indian agent Walter Burleigh. Bon Homme Colony became the first Hutterite colony in North America, and has been continuously occupied ever since.

Bon Homme County is the resting place of six unknown soldiers belonging to George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. The men were camped along Snatch Creek in May of 1873 when several soldiers contracted typhoid fever. Seven men — six unknown and one identified — were buried along the banks of the creek. Later they were moved to the Bon Homme Cemetery, where a large stone marks their burial place.

Veronica Sanders helps prepare kolaches at the Tyndall Bakery.

Every county most likely has a skeleton in its closet, and Bon Homme is no different. The first tumbleweed ever reported in North America was found near Scotland in 1877. Its origins were probably in a shipment of flax seed from Ukraine.

Today just over 7,000 people live on farms and in Bon Homme County’s five towns — Avon, Scotland, Tyndall, Springfield and Tabor. Immigrants from Czechoslovakia settled around Tabor beginning in 1869, and their culture is still evident at Czech Days, the town’s annual June festival. If you don’t make it to Czech Days, you can still buy kolaches — a traditional fruit-filled Czech dessert — at bakeries in Tabor and Tyndall.

Tyndall, the county seat, boasts a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower on the courthouse lawn. County commissioners voted to erect the tower as a memorial to South Dakotans who fought during the Spanish-American War.

Tyndall’s miniature Eiffel Tower.

On our most recent trip through Scotland, we met Victor Settje, who is carefully dismantling St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, built in 1886. He’s hoping to find new uses for every board, including the old wooden cross.

The town’s VFW Hall boasts a new 5-by-10-foot painting by Menno airbrush artist Mickey Harris that honors a local World War II veteran. Leon Woehl was aboard a B-17 that crashed in Germany in 1944. Harris’ painting depicts the crash and the Nazi soldiers looking for Woehl and the eight other crewmembers who hid in the woods until their capture.

Springfield sits right on the Missouri River, so it makes sense that Greg Stockholm is in the midst of crafting a 68-foot boat. You can see the work in progress outside his shop at 811 College St.

Avon is the hometown of Sen. George McGovern, whose father served the Methodist church in town before moving his family to Mitchell. The museum includes memorabilia from the McGoverns.

The history, the river and the ethnic traditions all make Bon Homme County fun to explore, especially if you enjoy the kolaches and ignore the tumbleweeds.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here to read other installments.

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The Answer is Tyndall Bakery

Lots of folks call or write us with questions about South Dakota. But they don’t ask about the Missouri River so much, or Mount Rushmore or the Badlands.

Usually it’s about food. Where to eat. Who makes the best beef jerky. What town has the best fish fry.

And today the query is about kolaches. A reader from Missouri wants to know if anybody in South Dakota makes the old-style Czech kolaches and would ship them to him.

“My mother’s family was raised in Armour, near Lesterville, and of course were very Bohemian. Great cooks and bakers, and I remember well as a little boy, standing in my Great Aunt’s kitchen waiting for the kolaches that they were baking to cool enough so I could have one or probably more.”

Of course, Tabor is the Czech Capital of the region and in June the ladies there make more kolaches than there are fish in the nearby river. But kolaches are not so easy to come by in the little town during the other 11 months of the year, so we directed the reader just a few miles down Highway 50 to Tyndall Bakery — run for many decades by the Reub family and now operated just as splendidly by Ed and Carol Radack.

Ed says they’d be happy to ship kolaches to Missouri or anywhere. They make them every day. But please, he said, call before 10 a.m. CST (605-589-3372) and ask for Carol. (We didn’t talk to Carol, but I’m assuming she’s ok with that?)

As for me, I’ll just stop on our next journey west.