While wine and cheese nights may not be a pricey affair if you are going for the regular parmesan, cheddar and other commonly sold varieties, there is still a kind of cheese which is not only very rare but expensive as well.
Today, Slobodan Simic is the only man who produced donkey cheese in his expansive farm in northern Serbia where 200 to 300 Balkan donkeys are reared for procuring milk. This way, not only Simic is producing a rare kind of cheese, called Pule, for his own benefit, but also helping protect the Balkan breed of donkeys that were only brink of extinction when modern machines replaced them in the field of agriculture.
Extremely rich in vitamin C and good for feeding even a newborn human babe, the donkey milk is as not easy to turn into cheese because it does not have enough casein for coagulation. However, Simic has a secret recipe which thickens the milk into curd to make cheese in the old way. At a time, only 20 donkeys produce milk at the rural farm owned by Simic.
About 25 litres of donkey milk goes into preparing 1 kilogram of cheese, which is what makes donkey cheese many times costlier than cow, goat, or buffalo cheese. And Simic takes pride in the fact that his farm is the only place in the world where donkey cheese is produced.
And there has not been a single human, as claimed by Simic, who has not liked the taste of donkey cheese. Would you pay the price for it?
