Arayes Jibneh (عرايس جبنة) is the grilled-pita press filled with cheese rather than meat, the broad cheese version of the family that accepts whatever jibneh a kitchen favors. The angle is melt and salt management. Where the meat forms rely on rendering fat to crisp the bread from within, the cheese forms rely on the cheese going molten and binding to the toasting crumb, which is a different and in some ways more forgiving problem, but it introduces its own: most Levantine white cheeses are salty, so the build is as much about cutting salt as it is about getting a good melt.
The construction is simple and the choices are in the cheese and the additions. A blend is common, often a stretchy melting cheese such as akkawi or a mozzarella-style cheese for pull, sometimes cut with a firmer or saltier cheese for flavor, grated or sliced thin and layered inside split khubz. Tomato, mint, parsley, or a little grated onion go in to add acid and moisture against the cheese's richness and salt. The pocket is pressed flat and grilled, griddled, or cooked on a saj until the bread crisps and the cheese melts through. The thin even layer matters here as much as in any arayes: too much cheese and you get a stodgy, oversalted core with a soggy seam; too little and the bread dominates and there is nothing to bind it. A good arayes jibneh pulls a clean string when split, has a crisp and evenly bronzed shell, and carries enough tomato or herb to keep the salt honest. A poor one is greasy, salty, and limp.
It is cut into wedges and eaten hot, usually with lemon, fresh tomato, and sometimes a tahini or yogurt sauce alongside. As a category within the arayes family it is the umbrella for the meatless forms, overlapping with the halloumi version, which behaves differently because that cheese browns instead of melting, and standing opposite the kafta, spiced-meat, preserved-lamb, and sausage forms. Cheese sealed in toasted khubz is a deeply familiar Lebanese register, the same logic that drives the cheese manoushe and the grilled cheese sandwich, so arayes jibneh is essentially that comfort built in the arayes geometry: a thin band of melted, salty cheese pressed and crisped inside its own bread.