Bakery Window · Sweet Pumpkin Pastry
Tikvenik
Photo: Villoe / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
It uses the same paper-thin filo as savory banitsa, but swaps the cheese for grated pumpkin, walnuts, and cinnamon — a completely different pastry hiding in a familiar spiral.
Layers of thin filo are rolled around a filling of grated pumpkin, ground walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon, then baked until crisp and dusted with powdered sugar. It shows up in Plovdiv's bakeries every autumn, when the surrounding Thracian valley's pumpkin harvest comes in.
Why it's made this way: The Thracian plain around Plovdiv is some of Bulgaria's richest farmland, and tikvenik is the sweet, cool-weather use for a pumpkin crop the region grows in abundance.
More from Bulgaria
Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries.
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