Bakery Window · Morning Pastry

Banitsa

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On New Year's Eve, Bulgarian families bake banitsa with small tokens or slips of paper inside predicting the year ahead, such as health, travel or money, and whoever finds one keeps the fortune.

Banitsa is made of thin sheets of filo pastry layered or coiled with a mixture of eggs, yogurt, and salty white sirene cheese, baked until crisp on top and soft inside. It's sold at bakeries and kiosks across Bulgaria from early morning, wrapped in paper as a grab-and-go breakfast.

Why it's made this way: Like many Balkan filled pastries, it descends from Ottoman-era layered doughs, but Bulgarians made it their own with sirene cheese and yogurt — staples of the country's dairy tradition — turning it into a fixture of both daily breakfasts and holiday customs.