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It is the cheese mass that comes from the first stage of making graviera cheese. It is elastic and homogenous, and is used exclusively for pitas and mainly for Chania’s unique tart.
It is called soft cheese, or sometimes tiromalama, and is the cheese, as the locals say, that smells of Easter.
It is among the most traditional ingredients of the cuisine of western Crete and made exclusively from sheep’s milk. It has become popular all over Crete, and not Crete alone. With the growing interest in ”creative cuisine” in recent years, malaka soft cheese, with its unadulterated Mediterranean characteristics heavily influenced by Cretan cooking, has become available in many regions of Greece.
