Ka'ak b'Jibneh (كعك بالجبنة) is the sesame street bread filled with soft white cheese, the broad cheese version that takes whatever jibneh a cart favors. The angle is melt and salt against a shell that already brings its own sweetness and toasted sesame. Where the egg or za'atar fillings are about seasoning a neutral protein or coating the bread, this one is about a cheese going soft and binding to a warm crumb that is not flavor-neutral itself. Most Levantine white cheeses run salty, so the build is as much about keeping the salt in scale with the bread's gentle sweetness as it is about getting a good melt.
The construction is simple and the choices are in the cheese and the warming. The ka'ak is heated so the sesame crust crisps again and the inside softens, then split along its wider end. A soft white cheese, often akkawi or a stretchy melting cheese for pull, sometimes blended with a milder or firmer cheese for flavor, is sliced or grated thin and tucked inside, then the loaf is given a brief reheat so the cheese loosens and the crust holds. Tomato, mint, a little onion, or a dusting of za'atar go in to add acid and moisture against the cheese's salt and richness. The thin even layer is what matters: too much cheese and the center turns stodgy and oversalted while the crust goes soft; too little and the bread dominates and there is nothing to bind it. A good ka'ak b'jibneh pulls a clean soft string when split, has a crisp sesame shell, and carries enough tomato or herb to keep the salt honest; a poor one is greasy, salty, and limp around a stale loaf.
It varies first by the cheese. Akkawi is the common base, often rinsed or soaked to temper the brine, sometimes cut with a mozzarella-style cheese for pull or a sharper cheese for flavor, and many carts work in nigella seed, mint, or za'atar. The additions, tomato, cucumber, olive, onion, push it toward a fuller breakfast. Within the ka'ak family it is the umbrella for the soft-cheese fillings, overlapping with the akkawi-specific version and standing opposite the firm halloumi form, which browns rather than melting, and the egg and labneh fillings. It is essentially the cheese manoushe logic put inside the sesame loaf: a thin band of warm, salty cheese kept in balance by the bread's own sweetness and a little acid.