Kunafa (Knafeh): The Registered Recipe, the Right Cheese and a Pistachio Version

Kunafa is a hot dessert of shredded pastry baked in butter around a soft white cheese and soaked in sugar syrup as it comes out of the heat. You will see it spelled knafeh, kanafeh, kunafeh or, in Turkish, künefe. All of these name one family of sweets, eaten from the Levant through Turkey to the Gulf. The pastry is kataifi, strands of flour-and-water batter cooked on a hot plate. The cheese stretches when you lift a piece, and that pull is the point of the dish.

Most kunafa recipes are loose about quantities. One version is not: Antakya künefesi, from Hatay province on Turkey's border with Syria, has a recipe fixed in a legal registration. We read that registration, and the European Union's, and set the numbers beside our own recipe. Then we compiled the salt content of the cheeses people use, because the cheese is where a home kunafa most often goes wrong.

What is the registered kunafa recipe?

Turkey's patent and trademark office, TÜRKPATENT, registered Antakya künefesi as a geographical indication (no. 101) on 5 September 2008, with protection running from the application date of 14 April 2006. The holder is the Antakya Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The EU added the name to its register of protected geographical indications under Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/562, dated 6 March 2023.

The Turkish registration document lists four ingredients and one ratio:

The same document sets the rest of the method. The butter must be unsalted and hold 80% to 90% milk fat. The syrup is white sugar and drinking water, boiled with a few drops of lemon juice to stop it crystallizing. The künefe is round and about 1 to 2 cm thick, and the EU text puts its diameter at anywhere from 10 to 50 cm. It is cooked in a shallow tray of tinned copper or aluminum over low heat until the base browns, then flipped so the other face cooks. Hot syrup goes on last, and it is eaten hot, while the cheese still pulls into threads.

Three rules make it a legal product rather than a style. The cheese has to come from named Hatay districts, and the EU text adds that the milk has to come from Hatay province. The pastry, the cheese and the künefe must all be made there. And an inspection body checks producers once a year, with laboratory tests for vegetable fat, for cheese melted with chemical salts, and for beet sugar.

The EU filing also records the history behind the claim. It cites Islamic records from 18th-century Antakya listing künefe making as a trade, and a künefe tray counted among household goods in records from 1898 to 1901. It also notes a festival habit: each year Hatay makes its longest künefe one meter longer, and in 2019 it reached 81 meters.

What the table shows. Our cheese-to-pastry ratio is the registered one exactly. Our syrup is a touch sweeter. The real gap is butter: we use 200 g where the Antakya ratio gives 120 g. Our version bakes in the oven and we butter the strands heavily. If you cook it the Antakya way, in a pan on the stove, try the lower amount.

And the registered recipe has no pistachio in it. For a site about pistachios that is worth saying plainly. Pistachio is a topping that many shops and home cooks add, and it suits the dish, but the protected Antakya recipe does without it.

Turkey has registered a second künefe too. Cennet Çamuru, or Kilis kaymaklı kırma künefe, from Kilis province, holds geographical indication no. 393, registered on 14 November 2018.

Which cheese should you use for kunafa, and do you need to soak it?

Use a soft white cheese that melts and stretches. What matters is how salty it is. The traditional cheeses are stored in brine, and they carry several times the salt of the mozzarella most home cooks reach for.

We compiled the published figures per 100 g:

* USDA gives sodium, not salt. We converted it with the EU's legal formula, salt = sodium × 2.5, so every row is on the same basis. The full dataset keeps the original sodium figures.

Three findings come out of this.

Nabulsi, before soaking, carries five to six times the salt of low-moisture mozzarella. The study measured 9.69 to 10.16 g of salt per 100 g across five mixes of sheep and cow milk, against USDA's 1.78 g for whole-milk low-moisture mozzarella. The paper notes that nabulsi is kept in brine stronger than 18% and soaked in water before anyone eats it. That is the reason every Levantine recipe tells you to soak it.

Hatay solved the problem by making a cheese without salt. The unsalted Antakya künefe cheese measures 0.02 to 0.40 g of salt per 100 g, under a quarter of the mozzarella figure at its highest. It is made for the dish and nothing else. The trade-off is shelf life: the registration says it keeps only a few days. Hatay also makes a salted type, which keeps for up to six months at room temperature and a year in the fridge. The künefe registration says that one is soaked in drinking water for about a day, with the water changed every few hours, until the salt is gone.

The cheese registration also says something most recipes never mention. Both types are made from raw milk, and neither is eaten raw. They are only used cooked inside künefe, because baking takes the cheese above 75 °C, past the temperature used to pasteurize milk. The heat is part of the food safety.

Mozzarella is a reasonable stand-in. Outside the Middle East, low-moisture mozzarella is the usual swap. It melts, it stretches, and at 1.67 to 1.78 g of salt it needs no soaking. Fresh, high-moisture mozzarella is less salty still, but its extra water can make the base soggy. Some cooks cut the mozzarella with ricotta for a softer center. Ricotta has little salt, but at 73.7 g of water per 100 g it will not stretch on its own.

Akkawi sits in the middle. The one EU label we could read gives 4.9 g of salt, nearly three times the mozzarella figure, so it needs soaking too, but less than nabulsi. We found no study that measured akkawi on its own.

Pistachio kunafa recipe

This is an oven-baked kunafa with a pistachio topping. It keeps the Antakya ratio of cheese to pastry. Make the syrup first so it has time to cool while the pastry bakes.

Butter decides whether the pastry works. Strands that miss the butter bake pale and dry instead of gold and crisp, so rub it through by hand rather than stirring.

The syrup temperature is a matter of house style. Many Levantine recipes pour cool syrup over hot pastry, so it soaks in without softening the strands, and that is what we do here. The Antakya registration adds hot syrup to the hot künefe. Both work. What neither does is pour syrup over pastry that has gone cold.

For the topping, grind the pistachios to a coarse meal rather than a powder. Fine powder loses its bright green and turns pasty against the wet syrup. If you have nuts left over, fold them into pistachio ice cream to serve alongside.

Coarse or fine: the two kinds of Levantine knafeh

Palestinian and Levantine bakers make knafeh two ways. In the coarse kind, khishneh, the base is long vermicelli-like strands, which is kataifi. In the fine kind, na'meh, semolina takes the place of the strands, and the result is a smooth, even crust over nabulsi cheese, often colored red. Al Jazeera's 2018 report from Nablus says fine is the more widely eaten of the two.

This recipe is the coarse kind. The fine kind needs a semolina dough, a different base, and it deserves a recipe of its own.

Some cooks also swap the cheese for a thick milk cream, set with semolina or starch. It gives a softer, milder center with no stretch. You can use it in place of the cheese in the recipe above.

How do you serve and store kunafa?

Serve it warm, within an hour or two of baking, while the cheese is still soft. The Antakya registration is firm on this: the label on a packed künefe has to say it must be baked and eaten hot just after the syrup goes on. Cut it into wedges and serve it as it is, or with clotted cream alongside.

Leftovers keep covered in the fridge for two to three days, though the syrup slowly softens the strands. To bring a piece back, warm it in a low oven or a dry pan for a few minutes. The cheese softens again and the edges re-crisp. A microwave makes the cheese rubbery and the pastry limp.

You can also make it ahead. The EU text for Antakya künefesi gives unbaked künefe a shelf life of one week in the fridge or six months at -18 °C, so an assembled, unbaked tray can go in the freezer, wrapped tightly.

The same pastry, toasted, gives the crunch in Dubai chocolate. Our Dubai chocolate history traces how a bar built on kunafa flavors went global, and our pistachio cream audit covers the green filling. For more pistachio sweets, browse the full recipe collection.

How we compiled this

The recipe table comes from the TÜRKPATENT registration document for Antakya künefesi (no. 101) and the EU Single Document published in the Official Journal on 15 November 2022. We read both in full. The scaled column multiplies the registered figures by 0.4, which is 400 g divided by 1 kg. Our syrup's sugar share is 300 g of sugar in 480 g of sugar and water.

The cheese table uses the composition tables published with the Antakya künefe cheese registration (no. 979), Table 1 of Abu-Alruz (2023), the Yayla akkawi label, and four USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy records. The Turkish and nabulsi figures are ranges: the Turkish ones are the registration's minimum and maximum, and the nabulsi ones span the five milk mixes in the study. Salt in those rows is measured salt. The USDA rows are converted from sodium. We checked every figure on 21 September 2026.

The limits are real. Akkawi is one label, not a survey. We found three more akkawi and two nabulsi panels in the USDA branded-foods database, but pairs of them from the same makers carry identical figures for both cheeses, which points to shared labels rather than separate measurements, so we left them out. One of them also gave a sodium figure far out of line with the rest. Salt in a brined cheese also depends on how long it sat in the brine, so your pack may differ.

The künefe registration (no. 101) contains one slip worth noting. The sentence giving 9.4 ± 2.68% salt calls that cheese tuzsuz, unsalted, where the figure and the context show it means the salted type. We report the separate composition tables instead.

Citing this page

You are welcome to cite or reproduce the tables and the dataset, including for commercial publication, with attribution to pistachiomilk.org and a link to this page (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0). A suggested citation:

Ricci, E. (2026). Kunafa (Knafeh): The Registered Recipe, the Right Cheese and a Pistachio Version. pistachiomilk.org. https://pistachiomilk.org/pistachio-kunafa/

Version history: v1.0, 21 September 2026. Rebuilt the recipe page around the registered Antakya künefesi recipe and a compiled table of salt in eight kunafa cheeses. The recipe's cheese soaking step now follows the sources. Corrections and additions will be listed here.

Allergy note

Pistachios are a tree nut, so this kunafa is not safe for anyone with a nut allergy, and a kitchen that handles pistachios can pass traces to other food. Kunafa also contains milk, from the butter and cheese, and wheat and gluten, from the pastry. Check the labels on the kataifi and on any pre-ground nuts for allergen and shared-line statements. Read our page on whether pistachios are a tree nut for more.