What’s cooking today: Black sesame & cheese pastry twists

These cheese straws are easy and quick to make and versatile. I used chopped garlic chives and a very fine, nutty cheese from Klein River in Stanford in them, and a dusting of black sesame seeds.

Sesame and cheese, with pastry, are very Greek; you find sprinklings of them on many a phyllo dish, for that extra pop of flavour as you bite into them.

Ingredients

1 pack of frozen puff pastry, thawed

120 g Klein River Stanford medium fat hard cheese, grated with a fine grater

Flour for dusting

1 Tbsp black sesame seeds

6 garlic chives, chopped finely

Method

Preheat the oven to 220℃. Roll out the puff pastry on a floured board, sprinkle with half the cheese, fold in half and then fold in half again, and roll it out again to the original dimensions.

Sprinkle the rest of the cheese over along with the chopped chives, fold twice again, and roll out until the pastry is about 3 mm thick in a big rectangle.

Cut it into 1 cm strips, and twist each strip into a spiral, four or five times. It’s easier to twist from the middle outwards.

Spray a baking sheet with cooking oil spray. Sprinkle more cheese over the pastry twists and a sprinkling of black sesame seeds which you can press very lightly to attach them to the pastry. Lay them out on the baking tray.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 14 to 16 minutes or until golden. Turn once, two thirds of the way through.

Cool to room temperature and seal in an airtight container if not using immediately. DM/TGIFood

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Champion 2021. His book, foodSTUFF, is available in the DM Shop or, if sold out, directly from him. Buy it here. 

Mervyn Gers Ceramics supplies dinnerware for the styling of some TGIFood shoots. 

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks. Share your versions of his recipes with him on Instagram and he’ll see them and respond.

SUBSCRIBE to TGIFood here. Also visit the TGIFood platform, a repository of all of our food writing.