Recipes

    The Others

    Four species carry essentially all the world’s cheese. This page is about the rest — partly because some of them make real cheeses that deserve to be known, and partly because the failures are more instructive than the successes.

    The one fact that organises this page: rennet works by cutting κ-casein. Which means a milk low in κ-casein has almost nothing for the enzyme to cut, and no amount of skill will fix it.

    🔴 Donkey milk barely makes cheese at all — and now we know why

    Donkey milk is the famous hard case, and the mechanism turns out to be exactly the one the coagulation page describes.

    Donkey milk has poor clotting activity and a low content of total solids and caseins — especially κ-casein — so renneting produces a very weak gel rather than a firm curd. Rennet’s target protein is the one it hasn’t got.

    How bad: with a plant protease, getting a consistent curd takes five to six hours against about forty minutes for ordinary milk. In the published work, donkey milk gave a sufficiently firm curd only under “extreme” technological conditions, and pure donkey milk does not curdle with common rennet at all — earlier successes used pure camel chymosin.

    What does help: adding goat milk. Researchers tested donkey/goat at 85/15 and 70/30 and coagulation improved.

    Which explains the world’s most expensive cheese

    Pule, from the Zasavica reserve in Serbia, is reportedly the most expensive cheese on earth at around US$1,300 per kilogram. And it is 60% Balkan donkey milk to 40% goat’s milk.

    That blend is usually reported as a curiosity. It isn’t — it’s the chemistry. The goat milk is there because donkey milk on its own will not build a curd, which the laboratory work confirms independently of the tradition.

    The price has ordinary causes too: the supply comes from roughly 200 Balkan donkeys, a jenny gives well under half a gallon a day, milking is by hand three times daily, and the lactation runs about six months. Roughly 5.5 gallons of milk for a bit over two pounds of cheese — a yield that makes even goat’s 11.9% look generous.

    Mare’s milk is the same story — horses and donkeys are both equids, with the same casein problem. Which is why the great horse-milk product is kumis, a fermented drink, and not a cheese. When a culture with abundant milk of some species makes no cheese from it, that is usually the milk talking.

    ⭐ Camel milk, and the enzyme that came back around

    Camel milk resists coagulation badly enough that cheese was never made from it traditionally. Its fresh-cheese yield, at 13.8%, sits below cow’s milk despite the difficulty of getting it at all.

    The industrial fix was to make the right enzyme: Chy-Max M, a recombinant camel chymosin.

    And here is the part I find genuinely delightful. Camel chymosin turned out to be a better coagulant for cow’s milk than calf chymosin is:

    • 70% higher clotting activity per mole on bovine milk than calf chymosin,
    • but only 20% of its general proteolytic activity,
    • giving a seven-fold higher ratio of clotting to general proteolysis.

    Read that again in cheesemaking terms. You want an enzyme that sets the curd hard and then leaves the protein alone, because leftover general proteolysis is what turns into bitterness over a long ripening. Camel chymosin does exactly that — which is why it has been evaluated as a coagulant for Cheddar, a cheese with no camel anywhere in it.

    An enzyme engineered to solve a milk almost nobody makes cheese from is now improving the most-made cheese in the English-speaking world. That’s a better story than most of the ones people tell about cheese.

    See rennet for what your options actually are at home — camel chymosin is a commercial coagulant, not something in the NECMS catalogue.

    Yak — and a cheese hard enough to be a dog chew

    Chhurpi is the real thing: a Himalayan cheese from yak milk, or from chauri (a yak–cow cross), or from cow’s milk, made across Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet.

    Two features make it worth knowing:

    It’s acid-coagulated from the skimmed residue. Butter is churned first; chhurpi is made from what’s left after the fat is taken. That places it firmly in the fresh, acid-set family by mechanism, even though the hard version is anything but fresh — pressed, shaped and dried, sometimes for years.

    Hard chhurpi is genuinely stone-hard, eaten by slow chewing over an hour or more. The “Himalayan dog chew” sold in American pet shops is the same product; it went to market as a dog treat because that was the easier sell, not because it isn’t food.

    ⭐ The formula is written — Cheese, Chhurpi — soft and hard from the same curd, and it uses three ideas this collection met separately: use the by-product, back-slop the starter, dry it to the limit.

    Composition varies widely between regions, because it’s a family tradition rather than a standardised make — which is a nice reminder of how most cheese worked before PDO schemes.

    Yak milk itself is richer across the board than cow’s — more fat, more protein, more sugar — which is what you’d expect of an animal living at altitude.

    The genuinely marginal ones

    Reindeer, milked in small quantities by Sami herders, gives extraordinarily concentrated milk. The volumes are tiny and the practice is now rare; I’m not going to put numbers on it that I haven’t verified.

    Moose milk is farmed in a few places in Russia. It exists. That’s roughly the extent of what can be said responsibly.

    Sheep, goat, cow, buffalo — and then a very long drop. That’s the honest shape of the picture, and the reason is never romance about tradition. It’s volume per animal, length of lactation, temperament, and whether the milk has enough κ-casein to be worth putting rennet in.

    What this wing has actually been about

    Four pages of numbers, and one conclusion I didn’t expect when I started reading for it: the differences between milks are mostly about casein — which caseins, in what proportion, carrying how much calcium — and barely at all about fat and protein totals. Goat and cow have the same fat and protein and behave differently. Donkey milk fails for one specific missing protein.

    Fat and protein are what’s on the carton. Casein composition is what makes the cheese.

    Next: breed and season — how much the numbers move within a single species.

    Sources

    Comments (0)

    1. Loading…

    Comments are held for moderation — nothing appears until approved.