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Guyanese Cheese Rolls

Published: Sep 24, 2011 · Modified: Jun 1, 2021 by Alica · 74 Comments

Every weekend my family made our routine trip to Liberty Avenue in Queens, NY to purchase our Guyanese baked goods for the week. Our first stop was to the ever so popular and historic bakery, Sybil's. Sybil's has come to be a landmark in our community, one that is easily recognizable by the look and taste of their baked goods. Two of my absolute favorite pastries from Sybil's are their pine tarts and cheese rolls. Usually, when my dad purchased a bag of cheese rolls, I would have already eaten one in the car before we got home. It was flaky, cheesy, slightly spicy, absolutely delicate, so delicate that you could see the crumbs in the bag. I made sure to always wash those scrumptious cheese rolls down with a bottle of cream soda. Oh, the childhood memories...

Check out my pine tart recipe here.

Baking cheese rolls take patience and focus, the crust and assembly are what will take up most of your time. You can buy yourself some time by purchasing already shredded cheese and using store-bought pie crust (which I have done in the past and works great if you don't feel like spending hours on this), but if you are really in the mood to make it all from scratch then this is an excellent recipe.

Mix 1 tsp salt and ¼ tsp curry powder into 3 cups flour. The curry powder is optional. The cheese rolls will not taste like curry, it's such a small amount compared to the amount of flour!

With a pastry cutter, cut butter and shortening into the flour mixture until you have little lumps of butter/shortening throughout the flour. You can also use a fork for this step.

Add enough ice cold water to bring the dough together about a ¾ cup or more.

Place dough ball on a piece of plastic wrap and flatten dough into a square shape. This is important because it will help you later when cutting the dough. Refrigerate the dough for a couple hours or overnight.

In the meantime, mix the cheese. You can season the cheese and freeze it and use it at a later time. Add ½ tsp mustard, ½ tsp pepper sauce, a shake of dry parsley, black pepper, and garlic powder.

Toss together

Remove dough from the refrigerator and cut into 16 squares for thinner cheese rolls or 9 squares for thicker ones. Your squares should be 1inch x 1inch in size, it's okay if it is not exact.

Sprinkle your surface with flour and flatten the square piece of dough. Roll to a rectangular shape.

Reserve 1 egg white for brushing the edges of the rolled dough.

Brush edges

Place about 1 tablespoon of cheese mixture at the bottom of the dough, then fold over. Add another tablespoon of cheese and brush a little egg white on the folded edge, seal and flip cheese roll so the seam is on the bottom. With a fork, pierce sides and cut with a knife for a nice and clean look.

Place all cheese rolls on a baking sheet

Can you see the specs of curry powder in the dough?

Beat one egg to be used for the egg wash

Brush egg wash on each cheese roll. This will give the cheese roll a really nice color after baking. You can use butter mixed with yellow or orange food coloring if you want to make this vegetarian.

Ready to go into the oven! Bake at 350 for 15-18 minutes. You can pierce the cheese rolls on the top with a fork if you are nervous about the cheese oozing out while baking.

Remove from oven, cool and serve 🙂