India’s Regional Cheese Trail: 4 Local Varieties Communities Have Preserved Through Centuries |
In most Indian kitchens, cheese still arrives in familiar cubes of paneer or in the household-favourite form of Amul cheese.
But beyond supermarket shelves and café menus, another cheese map exists across the country. In the high Himalayas, milk was boiled, pressed, and dried into hard nuggets that could survive long winters.
In Jammu’s pastoral belts, handmade discs of fermented cheese hissed on iron tawas before being tucked into kulchas.
Along Bengal’s old river ports, cheesemakers smoked salted curds over wood fires, carrying traces of colonial trade routes into local kitchens.
Long before imported cheddar or processed slices entered Indian cities, communities across the subcontinent had already developed their own ways of preserving milk.
India has always been rich in dairy traditions. But heat and humidity made European-style ageing difficult across much of the country. Instead of long-matured wheels of cheese, food cultures evolved around ghee, curd, buttermilk, khoa, and fresh chhena. Here are some of India’s own cheeses:
Chhurpi: The cheese built for the Himalayas
In the mountain regions of Sikkim, Darjeeling, Arunachal Pradesh, Nepal, and Bhutan, chhurpi has long been less a delicacy and more a survival food.
Made traditionally from yak milk or cow’s milk, chhurpi appears in two forms. The softer version resembles cottage cheese and is often added to soups, momos, or eaten with rice. The harder variety is something entirely different, dried........