Rakakat (رقاقات) are thin pastry cigars rolled around cheese and fried crisp, eaten on their own or tucked into bread as the filling, catalogued here as the sandwich form where the crunch is the whole point. The angle is shatter against soft. A rakakat is a strip of thin dough, usually a phyllo-type or spring-roll wrapper, wrapped tight around a salty cheese filling and fried until the shell is brittle and blistered. As a sandwich component it brings something most Lebanese fillings do not: a hard, audible crunch, which means the build is about preserving that crunch long enough to reach the bite rather than letting bread and steam soften it back into nothing.
The build is the roll first, the sandwich second. A salty white cheese, often akkawi or a Nabulsi-type, sometimes mixed with herbs or a little egg to bind, is laid in a line on the wrapper and rolled into a tight thin cylinder with the ends folded or sealed so the cheese does not escape in the oil. The cigars are fried in hot fat until uniformly gold and crisp, then drained well so they are not greasy. As a sandwich they are laid hot into khubz or a pita, frequently several together, sometimes with a tahini or garlic sauce, pickles, or herbs alongside to cut the richness. Good execution is about the shell and the timing: a wrapper fried thin and brittle with no raw doughy patches, cheese melted and stretchy inside but fully contained, fat drained so the crunch survives, and the rolls eaten before the bread's moisture and the trapped steam go to work on them. Poor execution is a pale under-fried wrapper that stays chewy, a roll that leaked its cheese into the oil and fried hollow, a greasy shell that was not drained, or a sandwich left to sit until the once-crisp cigars have gone limp inside the bread.
It shifts mostly by filling and by how it is served as a sandwich. The cheese-only version is the standard, salty and stretchy against the crisp shell. A herbed version works parsley or mint into the cheese for a green note. Some kitchens fill the rolls with spiced meat or potato instead of cheese, which changes the character but keeps the fried-cigar form. As a sandwich the rolls can go in plain to keep the crunch pure, or with sauce and pickle for contrast at the cost of some crispness. The flat fried cheese pies and the pocket cheese pastries are different forms and stand on their own rather than being folded in here. What rakakat reliably deliver in a sandwich is texture: a brittle fried shell over molten salty cheese, set against soft bread, eaten while it still cracks.