Knafeh in Jerusalem: the hot cheese-and-syrup pastry

Overview

Knafeh is not Jerusalem’s invention, and any honest account of it says so first. It is a Levantine sweet, made and loved across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian territories, and its spiritual home is Nablus, a couple of hours north, whose version — knafeh nabulsiyeh — is the one every other city measures itself against. What Jerusalem has is a genuine, living version of it, concentrated in the Arab east of the city, eaten hot off the tray by people who grew up on it. It belongs to the region; the city does it well.

Physically it is a hot cheese pastry drowned in syrup, and it is stranger and better than that makes it sound. A layer of mild, stretchy white cheese sits under a crust of pastry — either fine, semolina-like strands or coarse shredded ones — the whole thing baked until the cheese melts, then soaked in a light sugar syrup often scented with orange-blossom or rose water and scattered with crushed pistachios. The top is usually stained a deep orange. It is served in a wedge, and the point of it is heat: cut fresh from the tray, the cheese underneath pulls into long strings, sweet and salt and soft all at once. Cold, it is a different and lesser object.

What to order

The one real decision is the pastry, and it splits knafeh into two camps that people hold opinions about.

• khishneh — the coarse version, made with shredded strands (the same pastry used for many other sweets), which bake into a crisp, almost hair-like crust on top. More texture, more crunch against the soft cheese.
• na’ameh — the fine, smooth version, a semolina-based paste that bakes into an even, tender layer. Softer all the way through, and the one most associated with the nabulsiyeh style. If you want the classic, ask for na’ameh.

You do not order a portion by name so much as by size. Knafeh is made in large round trays and sold by weight, cut to order — you ask for a quarter or a half kilo, or simply point and say how much you want, and a wedge is sliced, syruped and handed over. A place proud of its knafeh cuts it in front of you from a tray that is visibly being worked through, not from pre-cut pieces waiting under glass.

Two words worth having: ashta is a clotted-cream filling you will see in related sweets but not in classic cheese knafeh — if a counter offers a cream version, it is a variation, not the thing itself. And the crushed green topping is pistachio; a fine dusting is normal, a thick expensive layer is a flourish, and neither tells you whether the cheese underneath is any good.

What to avoid

Everything that goes wrong with knafeh goes wrong when it stops being hot.

The single tell is the tray. Good knafeh is a made-to-the-hour thing: baked, held warm, cut and syruped to order, and sold fast enough that it never sits. A wedge lifted cold from a display case and microwaved back to temperature is the failure to avoid — the cheese seizes into rubber instead of pulling, the pastry goes soggy under reheated syrup, and no amount of pistachio hides it. If nothing on the counter is being actively cut and the tray looks hours into its afternoon, come back when a fresh one lands.

Be wary, too, of sweetness used as cover. A knafeh so drenched it is soup on the plate is often a knafeh hiding a mediocre or over-salted cheese under sugar. The syrup should moisten and gloss, not flood. And the cheese itself matters: the traditional versions use a mild, desalted white cheese that melts and stretches; a version built on rubbery, mozzarella-type cheese that squeaks rather than pulls has taken a shortcut you can taste.

Finally, the orange colour is cosmetic. It is food colouring, traditional and harmless, but a violently bright top is not a mark of quality — plenty of excellent knafeh is a modest amber. Judge it by the pull of the cheese and the freshness off the tray, not by how loud it looks.

Practicalities

Knafeh lives in the Arab east of the city, where the sweet-counters and pastry shops make it, and it is eaten at any hour — as a mid-afternoon sugar hit, as an after-dinner sweet, as street food on the move. It has no single mealtime, but it does have a season: during Ramadan it is everywhere, made in vast quantities and eaten late into the night after the fast breaks, and that is the moment the city’s knafeh is at its most alive. Outside Ramadan the best rule is simply the hot-tray one — go when a place is busy and the trays are turning over.

Expect to pay roughly ₪15 to ₪30 for a generous individual portion, more if you buy a larger weight to share; because it is sold by weight, the price scales with how much you point at rather than with any fixed menu. A suspiciously cheap wedge usually means the cheap-cheese shortcut above. Carry cash: the East Jerusalem counters that make the best knafeh are the likeliest in the city to be cash-only or to prefer it, in a way the central cafés are not.

One practical instruction that matters more here than with almost any other sweet: eat it immediately, standing there if you have to. Knafeh does not travel and does not keep. The stretch of the cheese, which is the entire reason to eat it, lasts minutes, and a box carried back to a hotel is a sad, congealed shadow of what was handed over. Buy it to eat now, not to save for later.