Other milks cheeses
Reindeer, mare, donkey, moose and zebu: the rare milks of herders and small farms.
Beyond cows, goats, sheep, buffaloes, yaks and camels lie milks that few people have tasted as cheese: reindeer, donkey, moose and mare. Each is made in tiny amounts, by herders who milk by hand or by a single farm with a handful of animals. Some of these cheeses are famous mainly for being rare, and some are fading as the ways of life that made them change.
Reindeer and the Sami
Sami herders in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland once milked reindeer in summer and made a small, very rich cheese, since reindeer milk can be around 20 per cent fat. The cheese was dried and kept for winter, and pieces were dropped into hot coffee. Milking reindeer declined in the twentieth century as herding changed. The coffee custom lives on with leipäjuusto, the Finnish bread cheese of cow's milk, traditionally beestings, which is baked until spotted brown; its Swedish name, kaffeost, means coffee cheese.
Donkey and moose
Pule, made at the Zasavica nature reserve in Serbia from the milk of Balkan donkeys mixed with goat's milk, is one of the rarest cheeses in the world, because a donkey gives very little milk and that milk barely sets. In Sweden, a farm at Bjurholm, Älgens Hus, the Moose House, has milked tame moose in summer and made a few hundred kilograms of moose cheese a year. Both cheeses are known far beyond the small numbers ever made.
Mares and the steppe
Mare's milk is too low in casein to make firm cheese, so across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia it is fermented into kumis, called airag in Mongolia, a lightly sour, faintly alcoholic drink of summer. Mongolian herders keep five kinds of livestock, horses, camels, cattle or yaks, sheep and goats, and make cheese and dried curd from all but the horses. Elsewhere, the milk of zebu cattle in the tropics and of the mithun in north-east India is used mostly as milk, not cheese.
Worth knowing
- Reindeer cheese: Rich Sami cheese, once dried for winter
- Leipäjuusto: Finnish bread cheese, dropped into coffee like reindeer cheese
- Pule: Serbian cheese of donkey and goat's milk
- Moose cheese: Swedish farm cheese of moose milk
- Kumis: Fermented mare's milk of the steppe
Good to know
- These cheeses are seasonal and very local; they are found at the farms and reserves that make them.
- Leipäjuusto is served warm, often with cloudberry jam, in Finland.
Sources and further reading
Original text by the EveryCheese desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Customs are described as tradition, not as advice. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Other on EveryCheese
The cheeses written up so far, best known first.
