Hiking the world in search of rare cheeses
bbc.comI recently learned of - but have never tried - a cheese from the Himalayan region of South Asia that is reputed to be the "hardest cheese in the world". Apparently it is exported to the West as a dog treat.
Yes, my dog loves this. I think there’s essentially no scenario I could imagine a human could eat this save treating it like hard candy or rehydrating extensively before consuming. It really is extremely hard.
The Mongolian version, aaruul, comes in a whole range of textures from reasonably chewable to a hardness that dissolves in your mouth over the course of an hour or so. It makes for great travel food.
I don't know why nepali version is dried so much, but it becomes impossible to rehydrate and hence, unusable.
Maybe it's a dog treat over there as well?
I've seen it called Yak Cheese in the US, and it's quite popular with my dogs.
Marketed as Himalayan Dog Chews: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1GX8THY/
Despite the initial stick shock on the price, we've found them very effective dog chews, threading the needle on lasting a long time but also retaining interest over time relatively well. Also threading the needle on being designed to come apart safely, yet not instantly disintegrating. In late-stage capitalism part of what you're paying for in that price is that you won't need to buy them very often, if you get the correct hardness level for your dog.
Trader Joe’s sells it for a few dollars
Living in Switzerland I've come to realize that it's pointless to obsess about cheese. Every tiny village has its own varieties. There are probably thousands. It's better to try something new whenever you can - but there are some like Sbrinz that you have over and over.
(Similar feeling about wine - as long as it's a chasselas I'll try anything and there's enough producers to last a lifetimes)
Hah, then there’s the Netherlands where I was excited for the cheese until I realised it’s basically just Gouda. It’s good! But almost all the cheese is Gouda. Kinda strange there isn’t much variety (except for putting different stuff in Gouda)
Reminded me of "How a Cheese Goes Extinct" by Ruby Tandoh, my favorite essay about cheesemaking: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-a...
> When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history.
Further in, amid the stories of the lost delicacies and delights of yesteryear:
> Others fall out of favor because they’re simply not good: one extinct Suffolk cheese, “stony-hard” because it was made only with skimmed milk, was so notoriously bad that, in 1825, the Hampshire Chronicle reported that one ship’s cargo of grindstones was eaten by rats while the neighboring haul of Suffolk cheese escaped untouched.
Years back I lived near a cheese shop La Fromagerie marylebone/London.
The owner would travel around Europe finding amazing cheeses.
If you enjoy cheese and ever get the chance I'd highly recommend visiting. I've never found another store of similar calibre.
I don't know La Fromagerie. I do know Little Mouse in Crystal Palace, they are encouraging the re-creation of "lost" British cheeses.
I guess he didn't get to Corsica. Casu martzu. Don't look it up unless you have a strong stomach!
Sorry, I consider cheese to be bacteria poop only, with no additional "processing". Casu martzu is just fly shit.
"You must be joking.."
I can fully understand the love of cheese, however, there is a hidden cost to it, that I have experienced but only recently acknowledged.
The places they show on TV and in articles such as this is analogous to showing posh West End made-to-measure tailors and pretending that those SHEIN garments from Bangladesh are made the same way, with no 'slavery' involved.
I worked in a cheese factory as a student, taking up the job with an attitude that it must be 'women's work'. How wrong I was. Twelve hour shifts, with 'every object' weighing (or wheying) upwards of 25Kg and every one of your senses brutally assaulted, always with the potential to lose life, limb or another finger in a moment of lapsed focus. Just surviving became the intellectual challenge, with many not making it past two hours before throwing in the towel. Mastery was my goal and I put in the sleepless 'nights' with relentless 'tennis elbow' to get there, achievement unlocked.
Because I was a student, this was not a forever job, and there was a higher tax threshold for students, making it financially tough but worth while.
On a trip down memory lane I looked the old place up, to discover it had shut down due to numerous health and safety violations, which made me chuckle. That was the culture, and the rule, for example, those chemicals that have huge warning labels, to read such a label after getting nervous ticks after using it, would be moral cowardice. Or, if you needed someone's attention, because the machines were so loud, you would casually throw a 25 Kg object at them (a cheese or a bag of salt) as a 'gentle tap on the shoulder'.
On reflection, there is this small matter of the human cost to cheese. PETA might shock people with cheesy animal welfare issues and cardiologists might not be entirely positive about the consumption of 'saturated fat laced with salt', however, few have experienced the harsh reality of working in the industry, to have the strength to write about how extreme and ultra-violent the production of this harmless product can be.
I am not saying 'boycott the product', just 'value it more'.
Do you think cheese is unique in this regard, or part of a special class of product? Or is that just the hidden cost of all our niceties?
I was a janitor at a Cabot facility in college. It's an industrial product like anything else. Tanker trailers drain go into one side of the factory. Reefers of finished product exit the other.
I took my Swiss wife to the Tillamook factory in Oregon and she was laughing at how industrial it is. Later she took me to a Swiss mountain cheese maker, accessible only by hiking, making cheese over a wood-fired kettle.
You write well. I get the sense you have some interesting stories from your time in the cheese factory!
Me? I'd love to travel to the home of Camembert, even though I've never been to France. A pretty mundane life goal. But it brings joy to my heart knowing people like this exist.
Hurry up because it's on the brink of extinction (ok, probably exaggerated) https://edition.cnn.com/travel/camembert-extinction-crisis-s...
Highly recommend G.K. Chesterton on cheese: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9656/9656-h/9656-h.htm#link2...
I recommend Chesterton on everything.
Venezuelan beaver cheese?
Not today, sir, no.
man eats cheese is not a story
What do you think about bryndza? I want external opinion.
It is quite good.