Featured recipe

Ziva

Cheese and olive pastry

Ziva is a Tel Aviv café and bakery invention built on Yemenite malawach dough: flaky layers wrapped around salty white cheese and olives, baked until golden and served with grated tomato, zhug and a hard-boiled egg. You find it at weekend brunch in Jaffa and in the Yemenite Quarter, eaten with knife and fork. The pastry should shatter into buttery flakes against a soft, salty, melting centre. Feta and Bulgarian-style white cheeses are often made with animal rennet, so choose one labelled vegetarian if that matters to you. The usual mistake is overfilling, which makes the cheese leak and the base soggy. Chef's tip: use frozen ready-made malawach rounds straight from the freezer; they are much easier to fold while still firm.

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