Šarska Pleskavica: Macedonian Pleskavica Stuffed with Cheese
At Nadžak I ordered it on a "tip" from the next table, so I knew what to expect. A plate, an oval of meat with dark grill marks, fries on the side - and in the middle of the patty another white lump of cheese, doubling down on the flavor.
Šarska pleskavica (Macedonian: шарска плескавица) is a large grilled patty of ground beef and pork into which Macedonian cuisine seals a slice of kaškaval, so it melts inside.
Where the Name Comes From and Whose Dish It Really Is
The Šar Mountains stretch across the country's northwest, shared between North Macedonia, Kosovo and a sliver of Albania, and the name gets borrowed freely: it's carried by the Šar Mountain sheepdog (šarplaninec), by a national park declared in 2021, and by a cheese called šarsko sirenje from the village of Kamenjan below the peaks. Yet no šarsko cheese actually goes into the pleskavica - inside is kaškaval, the yellow melting cheese known across the Balkans, and according to one Skopje restaurateur, the "šarska" in the name is less a recipe ingredient than a memory of where the meat and cheese supposedly used to come from. The word itself is easier to explain: the Macedonian pleska means "to slap," which is exactly how the patty gets shaped between your palms. Serbs write pljeskavica with a soft l that the Macedonian alphabet doesn't have - one letter of difference, same dish.
Pleskavica itself is shared across the whole of the former Yugoslavia; the loudest claim comes from Serbia's Leskovac, which even secured an officially protected name for its fiery leskovačka. The šarska version is served under the same name in both Serbia and Macedonia; Macedonian sources treat it as their answer to the leskovačka, while the English Wikipedia calls it a Serbian variant - whose it is depends on which language you read about it in. Neighbors know how to hide cheese in meat too: Turkish cuisine fries kaşarlı köfte, Albanian cuisine has qofte me djathë, and in Bulgaria's Varna I once ate a gourmet pljeskavica with bacon and cheese. Just how explosive it can be to claim a meat patty as your own in the Balkans became clear in the summer of 2026: Dua Lipa was filmed with a pleskavica in bread described as a Kosovan sandwich, and the Serbian side of the internet objected at once.
Since When Cheese Gets Sealed Inside the Meat
Šarska pleskavica has no birth certificate; the oldest trail leads to the Istanbul restaurant in Skopje's Old Čaršija, opened in 1992, which still lists it as a flagship dish - so it's been on menus since at least the early nineties, and nobody can say how much earlier than that. Cheese sealed inside a patty is like most good ideas: it looks so obvious that everyone claimed it, and nobody wrote down when.
A Pocket of Meat and What Holds It Together
The technique is called the pocket. A portion of the mix - beef chuck and pork neck - is split into two patties; the bottom one gets a slice or a handful of grated kaškaval, the top one closes over it, and the edges are pressed together so it doesn't burst on the grill. The trick is in those edges: wherever the two layers don't seal properly, the cheese escapes onto the coals before the meat is done, and what was supposed to be a stuffed pleskavica turns into a plain one with a hole in it.
At grill houses, the šarska is ordered either with fries and salad, or na lepče, tucked into lepinja; for the stuffed version, the plate is the smarter choice, since melted cheese inside bread does whatever it wants. Alongside it comes what always shows up at a Macedonian grill - a bowl of pindžur and a draft beer. A tip for your first order: say the whole word šarska - plain pleskavica comes with no filling.
A White Lump on Top
I ate it in Skopje, at Gostilnica Nadžak (see Where to Eat in Skopje), the place we kept coming back to most often. I won't dissect the flavor: it was simply perfect. The plate with fries cost 260 MKD (4.40 EUR). That leaves the lump. The kaškaval was inside, as it should be, except on top sat a spoonful of something white and lumpy that was melting into the meat - and to this day I don't know if it was kajmak, a soft cheese, or something like grated butter. The recipe insists nothing should be on top. The plate insisted otherwise, and I sided with the plate.
