Cheese Is Finally Coming Of Age

Cheese is finally coming of age in India with various artisanal brands providing soft and hard cheeses that hold their own against their western counterparts

- Smita Tripathi

Thirty-five-year-old advertising professional Nandini Dhingra is a self-confessed ‘cheese-aholic’. “I can have cheese any time of day and night,” says the Bengaluru resident. Her current favourite cheese is called Ode to Chennai—a young Cheddar rubbed with milagai podi (gunpowder). The unusual cheese is the brainchild of artisanal cheese maker Namrata Sundaresan who along with her partner Anuradha Krishnamoorthy founded Käse in Chennai in 2016. Käse does a variety of cheeses with a desi twist such as a Pecorino (an Italian sheep-milk cheese) infused with fennel, or a goat cheese that is wrapped in fresh turmeric leaves and then aged for a couple of weeks. “In India we have a very good understanding of spices. So why shouldn’t we use it,” says Sundaresan who gave up a 13-year-long corporate career to turn full-time cheese maker.

Uttarakhand-based Darima Farms offers a cheese called Chilli Bomb that is basically a hard cheese infused with red chillies from Jaisalmer. At Mumbai-based Eleftheria Cheese, artisanal cheese maker Mausam Jotwani Narang has crafted a condiment cheese infused with Himalayan pink salt and rubbed with Kerala black pepper. While that is a popular cheese, it is her take on the Norwegian-style brown cheese Brunost that won her a silver rating at the World Cheese Awards held in Spain in November last year. It’s the first time an Indian cheese won the award, popularly known as the cheese Olympics. The awards had over 4,000 entries from 49 countries.