Cheese-Filled Filo Pastry

One of my happiest memories of being in Salonika was eating my first piece of bougatsa. Although not this Jewish version, it was incredibly rich and delicious. Here is Nicholas Stavroulakis’s Sephardic recipe for bougatsa from the town of Ioannina. In earlier times it was prepared with staka, a very thick cream made from the milk of water buffalo or sheep and sometimes called kaymak in Turkey. While we cannot get such a creamy and rich product, we can make this d