Sebadas — Fried Cheese Pastry with Honey

Sardinia — originating in the Barbagia and pastoral highlands as a festive cheese pastry. The fresh sour sheep's milk cheese of the Sardinian shepherd's table and the wild honey of the macchia (scrubland) are the traditional ingredients.

Sebadas (or seadas) are the defining Sardinian dessert: a pastry made from semolina dough and lard, filled with a large disc of fresh, slightly sour sheep's milk cheese (slightly fermented — acidulated by the natural lactic cultures), fried in lard until the dough is golden and the cheese has melted and is running, then drizzled with bitter honey (corbezzolo — strawberry tree honey — or aged dark honey). The combination of savoury, sour cheese inside a crisp fried pastry with bitter honey is quintessentially Sardinian.

• Fried pastry with cheese filling — the Greek fried cheese pastry tradition parallels the sebadas concept; the Greek version uses filo or bread dough where sebadas uses a specific semolina-lard dough → Tiropitakia Fried Greek
• Fried cheese enclosed in pastry — the structural concept of cheese enclosed in pastry and deep-fried is shared across Mediterranean traditions; the Sardinian honey finish and sourness of the cheese are specific → Pastel de Queso Frito Spanish

The fried semolina crust is crisp and golden; the interior is molten, slightly sour, savoury sheep's milk cheese that flows when cut. The bitter corbezzolo honey drizzled over creates a flavour of extraordinary complexity: savoury, sour, sweet, bitter, hot, cold (from the contrast of fried pastry and running cheese). An unusual and compelling dessert.