When it comes to expensive cheeses, it’s a lot like couture. Really. To make a great cheese is to create something completely singular: incredibly intricate, with the best milk around, plus intense care and lots of time. And that inspires a price tag that might blow your mind… until you get a taste.
I had the chance to taste a couture-level cheese once in northern Spain: El Teyedu, an otherworldly Cabrales cheese aged in a cave in the mountains at an altitude of nearly 4,000 feet. In 2023, a single 4.8-pound wheel of El Teyedu set a Guinness World Record when it sold at auction for 30,000 euros. While the cheese doesn’t usually cost quite that much, it still showed me that you can’t rush–or fake–a good cheese, and that’s worth a lot of money. Just like high fashion.
This is also true for the world’s currently most expensive cheese outside of an auction. That honor goes to pule cheese (or magareći sir), a rare cheese produced in Zasavica Donkey Reserve in west central Serbia. The price? Around $600 a pound. To put this in perspective, a pound of Parmigiano Reggiano costs $15 to $25 per pound and up, depending on the producer and how many months the cheese is aged.
Let’s start with where the milk comes from: not cows, not goats, not sheep, but donkeys. And unlike their fellow milk-producing animals, donkey milk is super rare. Further, the 120 or so Balkan donkeys are a rare and endangered breed, but now protected at Zasavica, one of the last remaining, authentically preserved wetlands in Serbia.
Rare donkeys in a rare environment is just the beginning of what makes pule cheese so special. The cheese is made from 60% donkey milk from the jenny (female), 40% goat milk, rennet, and a very secret recipe. But it takes 25 liters of donkey milk to make 1 kilogram (around 2.2 pounds) of cheese—and a jenny produces only about 1.5 to 2 liters of milk per day. (Compare that to a cow, which can produce up to 60 liters per day.)
Further, milking must be done three times a day by hand, according to Slobodan Simić, founder of the reserve, (the donkeys can’t be machine milked because of their anatomy). After that painstaking gathering of enough donkey milk, the cheese is put into 50-gram molds for 24 hours and aged for a month. That adds up to a lot of time.
Then there’s flavor: Pule’s flavor has been likened to Spain’s hyped manchego, with more richness and intensity and a uniquely soft and 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 tang. Is that a flavor worth paying top dollar for? Perhaps, especially when you consider that the high price is helping to fund the protection of this rare breed of Balkan donkey and its domestic habitat.
Where Can You Buy Pule?
Want to get a taste? You can’t buy pule in a cheese shop, so you’ll need to hop a plane to Belgrade and drive out to Zasavica Donkey Reserve for a firsthand visit. Or hop online and order your own from the reserve. Either way, that couture cheese moment is there to be invested in–and enjoyed.
That honor goes to pule cheese (or magareći sir), a rare cheese produced in Zasavica Donkey Reserve in west central Serbia. The price? Around $600 a pound. To put this in perspective, a pound of Parmigiano Reggiano costs $15 to $25 per pound and up, depending on the producer and how many months the cheese is aged.
Pule cheese or magareći sir, is a Serbian cheese made from 60% Balkan donkey milk and 40% goat's milk. The cheese is produced in Zasavica Nature Reserve. Pule is reportedly the "world's most expensive cheese", fetching US$1300 per kilogram.
Four cups, which begins to explain why Pule, a Serbian donkey and goat milk cheese that's regularly reported as the world's most expensive, commands $600 per pound.
Does Pule cheese taste good? Pule cheese is renowned for its unique taste and texture, often described as rich, creamy and slightly nutty. Due to its extended aging process, Pule cheese develops a smooth and velvety texture, making it melt in the mouth.
The most expensive food in the world is widely considered to be Almas caviar, which is made from the female beluga sturgeon. Almas caviar has multiple qualities that it must meet in order to be deemed authentic. To be deemed Almas caviar, the product must: Come from an albino Iranian beluga sturgeon.
Cow's milk is the most commonly used in cheese making. However, sheep, goat, and buffalo's milk cheeses are also very popular. Each type of milk differs slightly in its fat content, overall composition, and thus each imparts a distinctive flavor.
Energy costs to produce and refrigerate the cheese, worldwide demand, and the cost of feed for the cows are just a few factors considered in the pricing of cheese.
In 2018, archeologists from Cairo University and the University of Catania reported the discovery of the oldest known cheese from Egypt. Discovered in the Saqqara necropolis, it is around 3200 years old. Earlier, remains identified as cheese were found in the funeral meal in an Egyptian tomb dating around 2900 BC.
While it can boast pungent flavors and smells, the stereotype of all goat cheese as smelling and tasting like a barnyard is undeserved — and according to Haley Nessler, who works for Northern Californian cheese manufacturer Cypress Grove, it's not the only thing people get wrong about the cheese.
To understand why goat milk cheese is more expensive than cow milk cheese, consider the availability of the milk, the production process of the cheese, and the supply chain (or 'path to market').
The world's most expensive paneer (cheese) costs around Rs 80,000 per kilogram. Pule donkey cheese is considered the world's most expensive cheese. It's made from the milk of the endangered Pule donkey, which is under special protection. Pule cheese is known for its strong, pungent flavor and unique texture.
Which cheese is healthiest? Cottage cheese is probably the healthiest cheese, Rizzo says. “It's lower in saturated fat and higher in protein than most other cheese,” she explains.
What makes it so expensive is that it comes from the milk of a Balkan donkey from Siberia. It's not just the most expensive cheese, but also one of the rarest of them all. It takes 25 liters of the donkey's milk to make just one kilogram of cheese.
Thanks to its clinical tolerance, palatability and nutritional adequacy associated to the low levels of caseins and other proteins with high immunogenic power, donkey milk is particularly suitable for children suffering from cow's milk protein allergy (CMPA).
True Parmigiano-Reggiano is also significantly more expensive than other cheeses, and for good reason: The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium — the governing body behind the PDO — requires all of its cheeses to be produced by hand and use milk from cows that must follow a specific diet, and then be aged for at least 12 ...
Being a DOP cheese, the production of Manchego is heavily regulated. It can only be made from the milk of the Manchega sheep, a breed native to Castilla La Mancha. The number of farmers and shepherds of Manchega sheep has decreased by half in the past few decades. Fewer farms lead to less milk.
Introduction: My name is The Hon. Margery Christiansen, I am a bright, adorable, precious, inexpensive, gorgeous, comfortable, happy person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-591791872-72144d1702b7419cb4e5eed961a11f7a.jpg "The Most Expensive Cheese in the World Doesn’t Come from a Cow, Goat, or Sheep (1)")
