Yak's milk cheeses
Churpi, datshi and the dried cheeses of the Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau.
Yaks are the cattle of the roof of the world, herded on the Tibetan plateau and across the Himalaya, the Pamirs and Mongolia, at heights where cows struggle. Their milk is rich, often around six or seven per cent fat, and much of it is churned into butter for tea and for monastery lamps before the rest becomes cheese. Churpi, chugo and datshi, and the dried cheeses of Tibetan nomads, are the yak cheeses.
Butter first
In most yak herding families, butter comes first. The milk is soured, churned in a tall wooden churn, and the butter goes into salted butter tea and into the lamps of temples and homes. The buttermilk left behind is heated until its protein curdles, and this curd is pressed in cloth to make soft churpi or datshi, or dried for weeks into hard churpi. It is a cheese of thrift, made from what remains once the butter is taken. The female yak, which gives the milk, is called a dri in Tibetan.
Across the Himalaya
In Bhutan, herders of the high valleys, such as the Brokpa of Merak and Sakteng and the people of Laya, trade cheese and butter with the farming villages below. In Nepal, a cheese factory was set up at Kyanjin Gompa in the Langtang valley in the 1950s with Swiss help, making a hard, Swiss-style yak cheese that trekkers still seek out. In Ladakh, Sikkim and the hills of Darjeeling, herders make churpi from yak, chauri and cow's milk, and the hard cubes are sold on strings in the markets.
Yak cheese in the kitchen
Soft churpi is cooked with chillies, tomatoes or wild greens in Nepali and Sikkimese kitchens, and datshi melts into ema datshi, Bhutan's national dish of chillies and cheese, though today datshi is more often made from cow's milk. Hard churpi is held in the mouth on long walks. In Tibetan homes, dried cheese is eaten with tsampa, roasted barley flour, and butter tea, and in some families it goes into sweets of butter and brown sugar made for Losar, the new year.
Worth knowing
- Chhurpi: Soft or hard cheese of yak and cow's milk
- Chugo: Hard dried cheese of Bhutan
- Datshi: Bhutan's soft cheese, the heart of ema datshi
- Ema datshi: Bhutanese chillies stewed with cheese
- Langtang yak cheese: Hard wheel made in Nepal since the 1950s
- Butter tea: Salted tea churned with yak butter
Good to know
- Hard yak cheese keeps for months in a dry tin.
- Soften it in warm water or tea before cooking with it.
- Outside the Himalaya, cooks making ema datshi often use feta or a mild farmer's cheese instead of datshi.
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.
Yak on EveryCheese
The cheeses written up so far, best known first.
