The Caucasus & Central Asia

The strangest and best cheeses in this wing are here, and almost none of them reach an American counter.

Georgia alone gives us a cheese aged inside a sheepskin sack that the cheese is named after, a blue made in a clay pot with no inoculation at all, and a cheese pulled into threads finer than wool, soaked in cream, and packed into pots.

And the “world’s oldest cheese”, as of a 2024 paper, is now from this region.

Two completely different dairy logics

This page covers two things that get lumped together and shouldn’t.

The Caucasus is settled mountain dairying. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan have villages, cellars, clay vessels and the whole apparatus of a fixed place. So they make aged cheeses, and they make peculiar ones, because a mountain valley with its own methods and no export market drifts wherever it likes.

Central Asia is nomadic pastoralism, and that changes the problem completely. You cannot carry a sixty-pound wheel on a horse, and you have no cellar because you have no building. So Central Asian dairy is overwhelmingly fermented milks and dried curd — foods that are light, that keep at ambient temperature indefinitely, and that survive being packed and unpacked.

⭐ This is the clearest case in the wing of the format being dictated by the transport, and it is the mirror image of the Alps: an alpine wheel is enormous because it stays put and must last; a Central Asian curd is a small hard rock because it must move.

⭐ Guda — the sack that named the cheese

Guda is a hard, pungent cheese from mountainous eastern Georgia — Tusheti and Pshavi. The curd is pressed into small rounds, and those rounds are then aged inside sheepskin sacks, which are themselves called gudas. Many months in the skin gives a firm body and a sharp, earthy aroma.

The cheese is named after its container. That is the Balkan burduf idea again, and by now the pattern is beyond dispute: from the Carpathians through Anatolia to the Caucasus, the skin bag is the standard maturation vessel, and the cheeses are named for it — burduf, tulum, touloumotyri, guda.

⚠ A correction to my own planning document, which had guda “aged in clay pots buried in the ground.” That’s wrong: guda is aged in sheepskin, and it is dambalkhacho that uses clay pots. Two remarkable Georgian cheeses, two different vessels, and I had conflated them.

⭐⭐ Dambalkhacho — a blue made by a pot

This is the one I would most like to make.

How it’s made: curds from buttermilk — so a by-product, skimmed and acidic — are salted, dried, and placed in clay pots for several months. During that time a natural blue-green mould develops.

No Penicillium roqueforti packet. No piercing. No needles. The pot, the salt, the dried curd and the local air do it.

Read that against the blue family, which explains the modern method: inoculate the milk with P. roqueforti, form a wheel, then pierce it to admit the air the mould needs to bloom along the channels. Dambalkhacho arrives at a blue by a completely different route — a dry, salted, buttermilk curd in a sealed ceramic vessel colonised by whatever is there.

Together with Kopanisti, which is kneaded rather than pierced, and Castelmagno, which blues spontaneously with age, that makes three ways to get a blue cheese that are not the way the books describe. The books are describing Roquefort’s method, not blue’s mechanism.

🔴 And it nearly disappeared. Dambalkhacho almost vanished during the Soviet period and is now being revived. Add it to the ledger: Britain’s 3,500 farmhouse makers reduced to under a hundred, Milbenkäse down to one woman in 1970, Caerphilly reduced to a supermarket name. The mechanism of loss is always the same — an interruption longer than a working lifetime — and the mechanism of recovery is always the same too, which is somebody going and asking.

⭐ Tenili — cheese pulled into thread

And this is the one that sounds invented.

Tenili is a rare cheese from Meskheti and Kvemo Kartli in southern Georgia. The process, in order:

Cow’s or sheep’s curd is pulled into extremely thin threads — the pasta filata principle taken past braiding, past çeçil, to something closer to fibre than to food.

The threads are drained and stacked in layers.

They are hung to dry, alternating.

Then they are soaked in heavy cream.

And packed into clay pots to age.

Five stages, each of which is a real technique, and the finished thing is unlike anything else on earth. It is traditionally a wedding and festival cheese, which is exactly what you would expect of something that takes that much labour.

⭐ What tenili demonstrates is that “stretch the curd” and “age it” are not alternatives. Everywhere else in this wing, pasta filata cheeses are either eaten fresh (mozzarella) or aged as a solid mass (caciocavallo, kashkaval, provolone). Tenili stretches to the absolute limit and then ages the threads. Nobody else does that, and I would not have thought it possible.

The rest of the Caucasus

Sulguni (Samegrelo, Georgia) — the famous one: a pasta filata cheese, salty, springy, and the thing inside a proper khachapuri. Fresh, and sometimes smoked.

Imeruli (Imereti) — fresh, mild, lightly brined, and the everyday cheese. Most khachapuri is imeruli and sulguni together.

⭐ The formulas are written — Cheese, Sulguni, which ripens the curd before stretching it and gives you imeruli if you stop halfway; and Cheese, Tenili, written as a description rather than a how-to.

Chechil — the Georgian/Armenian string cheese, cognate with Turkish çeçil, usually braided and often smoked.

Kalti — dried, hard, keeping curd; the Caucasian relative of the Central Asian dried curds below.

Motal (Azerbaijan and Armenia) — sheep’s-milk curd packed with wild herbs into a skin bag or an earthenware pot and aged. Skin bag, herbs, pot: this page’s three ideas at once.

Lori and chanakh (Armenia) — brined and semi-hard table cheeses.

Central Asia: the dried-curd belt

Kurut / qurut / aaruul — the same food across Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet and Afghanistan under different names: strained sour milk or its curd, salted, shaped, and dried hard. Sun-dried on racks, on cloth, or famously on the roof of a ger.

⭐ The formula is written — Cheese, Aaruul — the one cheese here that preserves milk by taking things away rather than adding them.

It keeps for years without refrigeration. It is eaten as a hard snack, softened in the mouth, or crushed into soups and sauces as a souring, salting, protein-carrying base.

⭐ This is the answer to the question of what a nomadic culture makes instead of cheese, and it is a better answer than “nothing.” Dried curd is the most portable, most shelf-stable dairy product humans have ever made — better than any wheel on both counts. It looks primitive and it is optimal.

Compare chhurpi, the Himalayan dried yak cheese, which is the same solution reached in the same kind of country.

Byaslag (Mongolia) — a pressed fresh cheese, the closest thing to a Western curd cheese in the region.

Shubat and kumis — fermented camel and mare’s milk. Not cheeses, and for a specific reason: equid milk is low in κ-casein and barely coagulates at all, which is why the mare’s-milk product is a drink. That isn’t cultural preference; it is the protein.

⭐ And the oldest cheese in the world is now from here

The origins page records the correction: the Ptahmes tomb cheese from Egypt was long called the world’s oldest, and a 2024 paper in Cell on kefir-type dairy residues from the Xiaohe burials in the Tarim Basin — in what is now Xinjiang — supersedes it.

Which puts the oldest identified cheese in Central Asia, on the territory of the dried-curd and fermented-milk tradition rather than the aged-wheel one. I don’t want to over-read that, but it is at least consistent with what this page argues: the fermented and dried dairy foods are not a degraded form of cheese. They are what dairying did first, and in a great deal of the world they are what it still does.

What to take to the bench

⭐ Dambalkhacho is the most exciting thing in this wing for me, and the most achievable of the strange ones. Buttermilk curd, salted, dried, packed into a crock, left alone for a few months and allowed to go blue on its own. No spore packet, no piercing, no cave discipline, and — critically — no P. roqueforti loose in a shared space, which is the reason I’ve held off on blue with one cave and no separate room.

⚠ With the honest caveat that “allowed to go blue on its own” means “colonised by whatever is in my basement,” and my basement is not a Pshavi village. Rinds and moulds has the list of which fuzz means throw it out, and this is a make where that list gets read before starting, not after.

Dried curd is a genuinely free experiment. Salt some drained curd, shape it, dry it hard, and see what a year does. It costs nothing, risks nothing, and it is the one dairy preservation method I have never tried.

And tenili I will simply admire. Some things are a lifetime’s practice and it is more honest to say so.

Next in this wing: India and South Asia, then east.

Sources

Guda: hard, pungent, from mountainous eastern Georgia (Tusheti, Pshavi); curd pressed into small rounds then aged inside sheepskin sacks called gudas, developing a firm texture and sharp earthy aroma over many months.
Dambalkhacho: curds made from buttermilk, salted, dried and placed in clay pots for several months, during which natural blue-green mould develops; nearly vanished in Soviet times and now reviving.
Tenili: rare string cheese of Meskheti–Kvemo Kartli; cow’s or sheep’s curd pulled into extremely thin threads, drained and stacked in layers, hung to dry, then soaked in heavy cream and packed into clay pots to age.
All three: Georgia Spirit, “Georgian cheese guide: suluguni, guda, dambalkhacho and beyond”, The Cheese Professor, “6 Georgian Cheeses You Need To Know”, and Georgia.travel, “Types of Georgian Cheese”
⚠ Corrected in place: my own planning document had guda “aged in clay pots buried in the ground.” Guda is aged in sheepskin; the clay pots belong to dambalkhacho.
⚠ Stated as general description rather than primary-sourced here: the kurut/qurut/aaruul process and its regional spread; Motal’s herbs and vessels; byaslag. The equid-milk explanation for kumis and shubat is sourced on the milk wing.
The Xiaohe / Ptahmes correction is sourced on origins.