Shanklish (also shankleesh, chankliche) is a cheese of Lebanon and Syria made from fermented yogurt curd: salted, rolled into balls, coated in dried thyme or za’atar and chili, and either eaten fresh or dried and aged until it’s hard, crumbly and pungent. The classic way to serve it is crumbled with chopped tomato, onion and plenty of olive oil, with bread.
Aged and Fresh Shanklish
A 2025 review of Lebanon’s traditional dairy products by researchers at the American University of Beirut describes it like this (Dimassi et al., 2025):
- Aged shanklish is a mold-ripened cheese: the yogurt-curd balls are sun-dried, then aged at ambient temperature for several months, becoming brittle and strongly flavored. Northern Lebanon favors drier, more intensely ripened shanklish; the village of Rahbeh in the north is known for cave-aged shanklish, made in summer and eaten in winter.
- Fresh or “green” shanklish (akhdar) is eaten within days of shaping – softer and milder. In southern Lebanon shanklish is often eaten earlier in the aging cycle.
Its base is close to well-drained labneh, and it belongs to the same family of Levantine yogurt foods as kishk.
Why We Don’t Give a Home Method for Aged Shanklish
The same review notes that shanklish, like sun-dried kishk, is aged in open environments without microbial control, which favors contamination by spoilage organisms or pathogens (Dimassi et al., 2025). A Lebanese study isolated staphylococci, including Staphylococcus aureus, from kishk, shanklish and baladi cheese – products sometimes eaten raw – with resistance rates of 67–94% to the antibiotics tested (Zouhairi et al., 2010). And yogurt-based cheeses aren’t automatically protected by their acidity: in labneh, Listeria survived for up to 15 days in the fridge (Issa & Ryser, 2000).
Weeks of mold ripening on a shelf in an ordinary kitchen can’t be controlled the way a producer’s cave or aging room can, so for aged shanklish, buy it from a dairy you trust. People who are pregnant, over 65 or have weakened immunity are advised to choose lower-risk foods to avoid Listeria (CDC); artisanal aged cheese is one to think twice about.
Fresh Shanklish at Home
Fresh shanklish is simple and stays in the refrigerator throughout: drain pasteurized full-fat yogurt for about 48 hours into firm labneh, salt it, roll it into balls, let the surface dry in the fridge for a day or two, and roll the balls in dried thyme or za’atar with Aleppo pepper (recipe card below). Plain labneh keeps about 8.5–10.5 days at 5°C (Al-Kadamany et al., 2002), so eat fresh shanklish within about a week of shaping.
If you want to keep the balls under olive oil, do it in the fridge, and season with dried herbs only: raw garlic or fresh herbs in oil are a botulism risk (UC ANR).
How to Serve Shanklish
- Shanklish salad: crumble it with diced tomato, finely sliced onion, a little parsley and generous olive oil; eat with flatbread.
- With eggs: crumble into scrambled eggs at the end of cooking.
- On flatbread: scatter over dough with olive oil before baking.
Other fermented dairy from the region: Iranian and Turkish yogurt drinks doogh and ayran.