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India is not all paneer. New Indian artisanal cheeses are making their mark around the world, and it’s about time you had some.
Recently, we celebrated the birth centenary of Dr Verghese Kurien, pioneer of the White Revolution in India. Due to the systems he introduced in India, the country is now the largest producer of milk in the world, with an annual yield of over 175 million tons. Milk and dairy products have, of course, been an integral part of the Indian way of life.
According to the Vedas, milk is considered pure and holy. Greatly valued for its soothing and nutritious qualities, milk also sits atop the Ayurvedic food hierarchy. The great Indian food historian K. T. Achaya, in his seminal books on the eating habits of early Indians, notes that the curdling of milk was well established even in the pre-Aryan days during the time of the Indus Valley Civilization (2500–1500 BCE). Milk was fermented with a variety of sour green leaves, barks, and berries. He says loose milk—perhaps an early form of paneer—was combined with yoghurt and spices to make sweets. In fact, by analyzing residues on ancient pots, researchers have recently shown the earliest direct evidence of dairy product processing, thus throwing fresh light on the rural economy of the civilization. The studies were carried out on 59 shards of pottery from KotadaBhadli, a small archeological site in present-day Gujarat. In post-Harappan times, during Aryan/Vedic times, curdling milk became taboo as the Aryans revered cattle.
Over time though, India’s contribution to the world of cheese has stayed almost static at the omnipresent paneer, which itself evolved as a direct result of Persian influence. The dominance of paneer is such that other cheeses from India rarely find a mention outside of the region where they are produced. It’s easier to find premium parmigiano-reggiano from Italy in an Indian city than it is to find, let’s say, kalari from Kashmir, churu from Sikkim, or bandel from Bengal. But that seems to be changing.
Like coffee, chocolate, and gin, cheese is also experiencing its artisanal moment. Although there are operational challenges in the production of high-quality cheese—lack of access to dark, deep cellars; the hotel climate; an unreliable cold chain; the difficulty of finding milk from grass-fed cows that have not been given hormones—there are names that are coming up in India and making a mark on the global stage.
Eleftheria Cheese, a name very familiar in Mumbai, sits prettily atop that list. Their cheese platters helped this particular writer out a lot during the pandemic. Of their many offerings, including their excellent burrata, stracciatella, and ricotta, one cheese always stood out for us. It was a dark-brown cube of semi-hard, fudge-like consistency. It was sweet; it was savoury; to some, it was like pedha; to me, it was like a savoury, nutty Mysore Pak. And we couldn’t wait to order the next cube of it. It was called Brunost. Little did we know that this very Brunost would be among the cheeses to put India on the global cheese map. At the 2021 World Cheese Awards, Brunost, modeled after a Norwegian whey cheese, took home the silver—a first for an Indian cheese. Mausam Jotwani Narang, the woman behind Eleftheria, upon returning to India, missed the cheeses she so happily ate in the UK while doing her master's. To fill that gap was born Eleftheria, and to do something with all the whey that was left over from making burrata and ricotta was born Brunost. According to Mausam, the whey is combined with fresh milk, cream and cooked down till the natural sugars present in the dairy caramelize and produce the signature brown color. After nine hours of slow cooking, what we get are notes of salted caramel. All of these flavors come from the whey alone, with no additional flavoring agents.
Cut to the 2022 World Cheese Awards. There was more good news in store. Eleftheria took home two prizes this time. A silver repeat for the Brunost, and a gold for their newly developed Moony, a cloth-bound cheddar. That was not all. The title of bronze was won by Käse Cheese, a Chennai-based cheese brand that presented a lavender-infused cheddar. This year’s competition saw a mind-boggling 4,434 cheeses from 42 countries. There were 250 cheese experts from across 38 countries, including the only Indian judge, Mansi Jasani of the Cheese Collective.
Indian cheeses may have lost the top prize to a Swiss Gruyére, but these early victories are only a rich harbinger of the big things to come yet.
