The first thing Jelena Dokic eats when she lands in Croatia

The tennis commentator makes a beeline for this flaky, snail-shaped pastry.

Adam Liaw and Jelena Dokic on The Cook Up. Credit: Jiwon Kim

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When she travels back to her native Croatia for her yearly visit, tennis commentator and speaker Jelena Dokic has one thing in mind as she leaves the airport: burek.

“I go to Croatia every year, and these few weeks where I go visit family are the only time that I have off. One of the first things I do when I land is find a cheese burek,” she says.

“It’s a staple for people to have in the morning, from a bakery, and eat on the go. You have it with a nice yoghurt that's kind of like Greek yoghurt, with a thinner consistency so you can drink it. It goes with burek unbelievably well. And I remember, as a kid, you would eat on the way to or back from school, so it will always be something that I love.”

The filo pastry filled with cottage cheese and feta is her order of choice, and she’s not particularly loyal to one bakery. “You can find it on pretty much every corner in Croatia,” she explains.

Credit: Bake With Anna Olson

Make your own Croatian cheese burek with this recipe.

But when in Zagreb, she’s partial to a shop near Dolac market, in the centre of the city. “It’s this cute little store where that’s all they make. They have different fillings with cheese or meat or spinach and cheese. You can sit outside and it's absolutely amazing,” she describes.

Another of her favourites when in Croatia is palačinke, which she compares to French crêpes. She enjoys them rolled and filled with apricot jam or a spread of hazelnuts and white chocolate with crumbled biscuits.

Even after leaving Croatia for Serbia, and then Australia at 11, Croatian cuisine remains her favourite. “It’s the food of my childhood, the food I grew up on,” she says.

For visitors to Croatia, she recommends, of course, having burek and palačinke, but also sarma (sauerkraut leaves filled with spiced meat and rice) and ćevapi (grilled sausages seasoned with garlic and paprika).

Dokic also loves Italian cuisine, especially carbonara and tiramisu. And when she joined Adam Liaw on The Cook Up recently, she shared a recipe for chicken risotto.

Next on her travel hit list is Turkey. “I’ve heard the food is absolutely incredible, with some similarities with Balkan food,” she adds.

Travelling the world for three decades, Dokic feels lucky to have experienced cuisines from so many countries first-hand. While she wasn’t an adventurous eater as a child, her travels have opened her mind when it comes to food, even leading her to try snails as a teenager, during a junior tennis tournament in Canada.

But she admits that she’s not the biggest fan of spicy dishes, and there’s one thing that she just won’t eat, raw fish. “I know everyone loves sushi, and so many athletes and tennis players rave about it, and I love cooked fish and seafood, but I can't do raw fish. I don’t even like to see it! But I'm ok with snails,” she says, laughing.