Seadas

A seada is two discs of thin semolina pastry sealed around a disc of fresh sheep's cheese, deep-fried until the pastry blisters and puffs, then covered with warmed honey and eaten immediately, while the cheese still stretches.

Calling it a dessert requires a footnote. There is no sugar inside: the filling is pecorino two or three days old, deliberately left to acidify, usually scented with lemon or orange zest. Sweetness arrives only at the end, from the honey poured over, and in the traditional version that honey is corbezzolo, made from strawberry-tree blossom, which is genuinely bitter. Salty, sour, fatty and bitter, with sugar as the fourth element rather than the point.

That is also why Sardinians do not always eat them at the end of a meal. Seadas began as shepherds' food, a single dish made when there was fresh cheese to use up, and in plenty of households they still replace a course rather than follow one.

The spelling varies (seadas, sebadas, seada, sebada) because Sardinian alternates between b and v sounds. Menus almost always use the plural, even for one.

The first thing you register is not sweetness but salt and lactic sourness. Fresh pecorino left to acidify tastes tangy and faintly sharp, somewhere between young halloumi and very fresh curd, and it arrives molten and stretchy. The citrus zest cuts through the fat and is much more noticeable than you would expect.

The pastry is thin, blistered and shatteringly crisp where it has puffed, chewier where it wrapped the cheese. Lard in the dough is what makes those bubbles; olive-oil versions are flatter and less crisp.

Then the honey. Corbezzolo is dark amber and openly bitter, with notes people usually describe as coffee and artichoke, and it works against the cheese instead of alongside it. With a mild wildflower or asphodel honey the dish becomes sweeter and much more conventional: pleasant, but it loses the tension that makes it interesting.

Deep-fry at 170°C in plenty of oil, a minute and a half a side, turning once with a slotted spoon. Cooler oil and the pastry soaks; hotter and it colours before the cheese has melted. Drain briefly on paper.

Warm the honey for a few seconds only, just until it flows. Overheating it destroys the aromatics, which in corbezzolo honey are the entire reason to buy it. Pour it over immediately and get the plate to the table in under two minutes: the cheese sets fast, and a lukewarm seada has lost the point.

One per person is a full dessert: they weigh 100 to 140 g each. Some Sardinian households skip the honey and use caster sugar, and some skip the sweetening entirely and eat them savoury at the end of a meal with red wine.

If you are making them, the professional step is melting the cheese first with a splash of water and the zest, spreading it half a centimetre thick to cool, then cutting discs. It makes the filling even and, more importantly, drives off water that would otherwise burst the pastry in the fryer.

Frozen is how seadas travel and how they keep. Leave the pack sealed in the freezer until the day, go by the date on the box, and fry them straight from frozen at a slightly lower oil temperature so the cheese has time to melt before the pastry colours. Do not thaw them first: the pastry takes up water from the filling as they soften, turns slack and tears in the oil. Fresh ones from a Sardinian shop are refrigerated with a short date, a few days at most.

If you make them, freeze them raw on a floured tray until hard, then stack them with baking paper between the discs in a rigid box; they hold two to three months before the pastry starts to dry at the edges and crack. Fried ones do not wait: within ten minutes the cheese sets firm and the pastry softens as steam moves outward. A cold seada can be put back in a hot oven for a few minutes, though the filling never regains the same stretch. Honey goes on at the last second, never before storing.

A seada is a single disc, eight to twelve centimetres across, made of two thin sheets of durum semolina pastry sealed around a flat round of cheese, with a fluted edge cut by a pastry wheel. Held to the light the raw pastry is pale and almost translucent, and you can see the disc of filling inside. It should feel heavy for its size, 100 to 140 grams. The filling is fresh, unaged sheep cheese, faintly sour, scented with lemon or orange zest, and it stretches rather than runs when hot.

Outside Sardinia it is nearly always sold frozen, four to six to a pack, from Sardinian importers, and the spelling swings between seadas, sebadas and sevadas without meaning anything different. Read the filling on the pack: fresh pecorino or formaggio acidulo is the tradition, while ricotta, mozzarella or a curd blend makes something milder and less sour. It is not a sweet ravioli and not a Sicilian cassatella, both of which use a ricotta and sugar filling; the sugar in a seada arrives only as honey, at the table. Frozen packs run $12 to $20.

Frozen seadas from Sardinian producers are now sold across Italy and shipped throughout the EU, and they are a reasonable product when the label names pecorino rather than generic cheese. In the US and UK you will find them in Italian delicatessens and through online Sardinian specialists, at roughly 12 to 20 dollars a pound or 16 to 26 pounds a kilo.

They are also very makeable at home, and the pastry is more forgiving than it looks: semolina, lard, warm water and salt, rolled thin.

The expensive item is the honey. Corbezzolo has a short autumn flowering and low yields, and runs 30 to 60 euro a kilo, more than the pastry it dresses. It is sold online by Slow Food Presidium producers and by Sardinian food exporters. Buy a small jar; it keeps for years in the dark, and if it crystallises a warm water bath below 40°C brings it back.

In the Barbagia, at the agriturismi and village trattorie around the Gennargentu massif (Oliena, Orgosolo, Mamoiada, Fonni, Desulo) where the cheese comes from the same valley and the honey from someone in the village.

Between October and December, Cortes Apertas takes over Barbagia: every weekend a different village, around thirty across the season, opens its courtyards for bread, cheese and pastry workshops. It is the best chance to watch seadas being made by people who have made them all their lives.

In Ogliastra, around Baunei and Urzulei, they tend to be larger and the honey darker. In Gallura orange zest is used more than lemon.

Cagliari and Alghero restaurants serve them everywhere, competently, but the versions inland are on another level, and the drive across the Supramonte to get there is one of the best in Italy.