The most expensive cheese in the world doesn’t come from a cow, goat or sheep
And it’s not French!
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When it comes to expensive cheeses, it’s a bit like couture. Really. Making good cheese means creating something completely unique: incredibly complex, with the best milk available, with intense care and a lot of time. And that inspires a price that might blow your mind… until you get a taste.
I was lucky enough to taste a couture quality cheese one day in northern Spain: El Teyedu, an otherworldly Cabrales cheese aged in a cave in the mountains almost 4,000 feet above sea level. . In 2023, a single 4.8-pound wheel from El Teyedu set a Guinness World Record when it was sold at auction for 30,000 euros. Even though cheese isn’t usually very expensive, it still showed me that you can’t rush – or fake – good cheese, and that it’s worth a lot of money. Just like haute couture.
This is also true for the currently most expensive cheese in the world outside of auctions. This honor goes to pule cheese (or magareći monsieur), a rare cheese produced in the Zasavica donkey reserve in west-central Serbia. The price? About $600 per pound. To put that into perspective, a pound of Parmigiano Reggiano costs anywhere from $15 to $25 per pound and up, depending on the producer and how many months the cheese has been aged.
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What makes Pule so expensive?
Let’s start with where the milk comes from: not from cows, not from goats, not from sheep, but from donkeys. And unlike their milk-producing counterparts, donkey milk is extremely rare. Additionally, the approximately 120 Balkan donkeys are a rare and endangered breed, but now protected in Zasavica, one of the last authentically preserved wetlands in Serbia.
Rare donkeys in a rare environment are just the beginning of what makes pule cheese so special. The cheese is made from 60% donkey milk from Jenny (female), 40% goat’s milk, rennet and a very secret recipe. But it takes 25 liters of donkey milk to make 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of cheese, and a jenny only produces about 1.5 to 2 liters of milk per day. (Compare this to a cow, which can produce up to 60 liters per day.)
Additionally, according to Slobodan Simić, founder of the reserve, milking must be done three times a day by hand (donkeys cannot be milked by machine due to their anatomy). After this careful collection of a sufficient quantity of donkey milk, the cheese is put in 50 gram molds for 24 hours and matured for a month. That’s a lot of time.
Then there’s the flavor: Pule’s flavor has been compared to that of Spanish Manchego, with more richness and intensity and a particularly soft, crumbly texture. Donkey milk contains 1% fat and 60 times more vitamin C than cow’s milk – another influence on flavor, creating a nuanced sour flavor. Is this a flavor worth paying the premium price for? Perhaps, especially considering that the high price helps fund the protection of this rare breed of Balkan donkey and its domestic habitat.
Where can you buy Pule?
Want to taste it? You can’t buy pule at a cheese shop, so you’ll have to fly to Belgrade and go to the Zasavica Donkey Reserve for a direct visit. Or jump online and order yours from the stockpile. Either way, this cheesy couture moment is here to be invested in and enjoyed.
Read the original article on All Recipes.
