Travel bites: The must-try Middle Eastern dessert for cheese lovers
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Kunafa is a Middle Eastern dessert made with cheese and pastry and syrup, and topped with pistachios.
Sure, cheesecake is delicious, but with its biscuit base, sugary filling and decadent toppings, the namesake ingredient is hardly the star of the show.
Enter kunafa – the Middle Eastern dessert that is a must-try for true cheese lovers.
The dish
Kunafa – which goes by many different names, including knafeh, kenefeh and konafa – can be found all over the Middle East. Like the spelling, ingredients vary from place to place, and the question of who came up with the dish first is a hotly debated topic.
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But arguably the most well-known version of the dessert originated in Palestine, specifically, the West Bank city of Nablus. It’s famous for producing a white brined cheese known as Nabulsi cheese, which becomes soft and elastic when heated.
To make kunafa, a semolina-based dough is spread on a pan over a burner, and the cheese is crumbled on top. Once the dough has become golden and crisp and the cheese has melted into a gooey mound, the dessert is flipped over, then soaked in a fragrant syrup, flavoured with rose water or orange blossom. It’s usually garnished with ground pistachios.
Siobhan Downes/Stuff
Cheesy Nabulsi-style kunafa being served at a food festival in Dubai.
In other places, a different cheese might be used to recreate this style – most commonly akkawi, another white brine Middle Eastern cheese, but where it’s not available, mozzarella also works well. Shredded phyllo (or filo) pastry is also often used in place of semolina dough.
The overall effect is the same – a mouth-watering contrast of flavours and textures, from the languorously soft and stretchy, slightly salty cheese, to the crispy dough and nuts, all united…
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