What Makes Pule The Most Expensive Cheese On Earth?

For many of us, the most money we spend on cheese comes when we buy Camembert for our Christmas cheese board. Some people go even further and regularly buy specialty cheese from a cheesemonger or a farmer's market, but it's unlikely that even they have ever tried pule, the world's most expensive cheese. While the Camembert you buy from the grocery store may cost anywhere from $10 to $15, pule cheese goes for a whopping $600 per pound.

What could make any kind of cheese that pricey? To answer that question, it's important to know where pule cheese comes from and how it's made. It is not, as some might have guessed, one of those . In fact, pule cheese, also known as magareći sir, is a cheese that can only be made in the Zasavica Nature Reserve, a protected wetland in West Serbia.



Pule cheese consists of 40% goat's milk, but the other 60% comes from a very unexpected source: donkeys. Pule is made from the milk of rare donkeys You may not have ever tried any, but donkey milk is a real agricultural product. It's not produced in the same quantity as cow's milk; while a cow can produce around 15 gallons of milk in a single day, a female donkey (or a "jenny") is only going to give you under half a gallon.

Because of this, getting enough milk to make the cheese would be an arduous task even if the Balkan donkeys used for the purpose weren't so rare. However, there are only a few hundred Balkan donkeys in all of Zasavica. To further complicate matters, it takes more than 6 gallons of milk to make a block of pule that weighs just over 2 pounds.

With all that taken into account, $600 per pound doesn't sound like such a bad deal. (This is doubly true when you consider that .) Pule would not be able to fetch such a high price if there was no demand for it.

However, people love the cheese for its flavor; it has been described as rich and nutty like manchego, one of . If that wasn't enough, Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis legend, is also a big fan of pule. With endorsements from people of that caliber, it's no wonder pule is so pricey.

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