The World’s Most Expensive Cheese Comes From Donkey Milk
The World’s Most Expensive Cheese Comes From Donkey Milk
by Plainchant
7 Comments
Plainchant
Opening Excerpt:
The world’s most expensive cheese must come from some rarefied French cow, right? A magical creature roaming pastures and lazily munching on the greenest, sweetest, and most nutritious grass and clover? But that’s not the story. The world’s most expensive cheese comes from a donkey — a Balkan donkey, in particular. The cheese is called pule, and it can cost as much as $600 a pound.
The reason pule is so expensive is because donkey milk is hard to produce and very rare. For example, a cow can produce anywhere from about 22 liters to even up to 60 liters of milk a day at peak lactation. A female donkey, called a jenny, only produces about 1.5-2 liters of milk per day. The Balkan donkeys that are milked for pule live on a nature reserve in Serbia called Zasavica, and according to the BBC, there are about 180 of them. These donkeys are smaller in size than an average donkey and they are domesticated. If you want their milk, you must milk them by hand, three times a day, because no machinery currently exists for the large-scale milking of donkeys.
Tackysackjones
Obligatory asscheese
ChayLo357
TIL that female donkeys are called jennies. I love it!
I also feel curious to try this expensive cheese
sgt_ch0ppa
I bet it has a real kick to it.
perplexedparallax
I can understand the mixing with goat milk because the fat content is so low in donkey milk.
Perrystead
Sorry -as a cheesemaker, this seems like PR nonsense. Anyone can sell a cheese for more and say it’s more expensive. You don’t even need an excuse. In this case I don’t even think it’s supply and demand because production is tiny, location is remote, and this style is so perishable that there isn’t a reasonable supply chain to enable its urgent sale.
Add to this the obscurity: this cheese never got awards of note, starred in Michelin star restaurants or graced the fridges of top purveyors. I don’t know distributors that have it and no one would bother with all the compliance paperwork and cold chain logistics to get it across borders.
Donkey milk is actually not as rare as one may think. It is made for freeze drying in supplements and skincare products. In some places sold as an alternative milk and suggested for children on the spectrum (I am not endorsing this, I am not familiar with any evidence of efficacy). It has been used in Central Asia and the levant forever in small production. It is a terrible candidate for cheesemaking as it is incredibly thin and watery. It’s only about 2% fat and 1% fat so in cheesemaking about 90% of it would be lost to whey and flavor would be difficult to come by because of lack of available lipids. To top this off, the production per animal is tiny and the animal isn’t which means it eats a lot and gives you just a bit of watery milk. Not great. If I was to make cheese with this, I would probably have to charge $600 a pound as well and would still not break even. You are paying for stupidly inefficient raw product.
terminalchef
That does not look appetizing. I bet it has a really off flavor. Then again I gag when I taste goat cheese.
7 Comments
Opening Excerpt:
The world’s most expensive cheese must come from some rarefied French cow, right? A magical creature roaming pastures and lazily munching on the greenest, sweetest, and most nutritious grass and clover? But that’s not the story. The world’s most expensive cheese comes from a donkey — a Balkan donkey, in particular. The cheese is called pule, and it can cost as much as $600 a pound.
The reason pule is so expensive is because donkey milk is hard to produce and very rare. For example, a cow can produce anywhere from about 22 liters to even up to 60 liters of milk a day at peak lactation. A female donkey, called a jenny, only produces about 1.5-2 liters of milk per day. The Balkan donkeys that are milked for pule live on a nature reserve in Serbia called Zasavica, and according to the BBC, there are about 180 of them. These donkeys are smaller in size than an average donkey and they are domesticated. If you want their milk, you must milk them by hand, three times a day, because no machinery currently exists for the large-scale milking of donkeys.
Obligatory asscheese
TIL that female donkeys are called jennies. I love it!
I also feel curious to try this expensive cheese
I bet it has a real kick to it.
I can understand the mixing with goat milk because the fat content is so low in donkey milk.
Sorry -as a cheesemaker, this seems like PR nonsense. Anyone can sell a cheese for more and say it’s more expensive. You don’t even need an excuse. In this case I don’t even think it’s supply and demand because production is tiny, location is remote, and this style is so perishable that there isn’t a reasonable supply chain to enable its urgent sale.
Add to this the obscurity: this cheese never got awards of note, starred in Michelin star restaurants or graced the fridges of top purveyors. I don’t know distributors that have it and no one would bother with all the compliance paperwork and cold chain logistics to get it across borders.
Donkey milk is actually not as rare as one may think. It is made for freeze drying in supplements and skincare products. In some places sold as an alternative milk and suggested for children on the spectrum (I am not endorsing this, I am not familiar with any evidence of efficacy). It has been used in Central Asia and the levant forever in small production. It is a terrible candidate for cheesemaking as it is incredibly thin and watery. It’s only about 2% fat and 1% fat so in cheesemaking about 90% of it would be lost to whey and flavor would be difficult to come by because of lack of available lipids. To top this off, the production per animal is tiny and the animal isn’t which means it eats a lot and gives you just a bit of watery milk. Not great. If I was to make cheese with this, I would probably have to charge $600 a pound as well and would still not break even. You are paying for stupidly inefficient raw product.
That does not look appetizing. I bet it has a really off flavor. Then again I gag when I taste goat cheese.