THE INDIAN CHEESE SPREAD

Apart from Flanders,Haryana is home to Umesh Batras Poshtik Milk Products at Daulatpur village in Hissar and Exito Gourmet in Chandigarh,set up by a 27-year-old Italian,Giuseppe Mozzillo,and his Indian partner Puneet Gupta. Down south,a creamery in Auroville near Pondicherry and a monastery in Ramamurthi Nagar,Bangalore,are rolling out wheels of parmesan,mozzarella,gouda and edam and even flavouring them with cumin,coriander and onion.

Bhu supplies cheese to hotel chains and restaurants in Delhi. He claims his cheese compares with the worlds best. The market is tough. But our mascarpone and mozzarella compete with original Italian brands, he says.
Batra,a vet and a nutritionist,began making the straw-coloured parmesan and the soft and crumbly feta 13 years ago when pizza chains first marched into India. Last year,he set up a stall called Passion Cheese at the popular Delhi mall,Select Citywalk. Here,you can sample and then buy your favourite cheese. At Rs 255 for 200 g,parmesan is the costliestand for good reason it would seem. We store it below 10 degrees Celsius for over 18 months before the cheese acquires the texture and the taste, says Batra. Onion and coriander feta and feta with whole olives cost Rs 250 for 200 g and smoked cheddar is priced at Rs 165 for 200 g. The market for cheese in north India is a big one and Delhi has many buyers of local cheese, he says.

History provides at least one weighty reason for Indians to thrive as makers of cheesethe water buffalo. We may not have inherited the ancient cheese-making tradition of Holland or Italy but the good news is that we have 70 per cent of the worlds water buffalo population. Thats the same buffalo that Italians so snobbishly credit their gourmet cheese to. In the seventh century,legend has it,the buffalos were sent to Italy from India, says Man Mohan Malik of Himalayan International,a Himachal Pradesh-based export house that supplies locally-made cheese to the United States. Malik started producing mozzarella in 2006,under the brand name of Uno Italiano. He has roped in a fifth-generation cheese-maker Raffaele Cioffi from the coast of Sorrento,Italy,to supervise his unit in Paonta Sahib.

No city can beat Bangalore when it comes to a mozzarella with character. Where else can you find Benedictine monks churning out world-class cheese for restaurants? A charming monastery at Thambu Chetty Palya on Sacred Heart Road is the perfect backdrop for Father K.L. Michaels cheese-making unit,Vallombrosa. Along with a small group of monks,he has been hand-moulding boccinni,mozzarella and ricotta since five years now. I spent eight years in Naples,Italy,doing my theological course. Thats when I was introduced to cheese-making, he says. What began as an attempt to sustain the monastery in 2005 has got him a big round of applause from the city restaurants which are scooping Vallombrosa cheese into their pastas and pairing it with imported wines.

Making cheese is no longer limited to the West, agrees Dutch cheese-maker Benny,who has been making ricotta and gouda at La Ferme in Auroville near Pondicherry for over a decade now. Now in his late fifties,he moved to Auroville in 1999 and found the local cheese surprisingly good. Making cheese at La Ferme,a unit set up in 1988,is more like community service for him. The foreigners living in Auroville were getting tired of their rice-dal menus and wanted food that they could relate to, he says. Benny also supplies hand-made cheese to Goa,Mumbai,Chennai and Kolkata. Of the 60 kilos of cheese that he and his staff which includes Tamils,Russians and French roll out each day,half is consumed within Auroville. His closest competitor is Kodai cheese,packed on the foothills of Nilgiri Mountains in Kodaikanal.

Despite a growing market,problems with Indian cheese remain. Getting pure,unadulterated milk poses a big challenge. In India,we have still not managed to check adulteration. There are negligible cold chains and food laws have not been implemented well, says Malik. Very few dairies have also taken to affinage,the art of ripening cheese. The after-dinner cheeses produced through this is a notch above the regular milk cheese.

One small step was taken last year in Bangalore when Father Michael unwrapped a wheel of three-year-old parmesan. Cheese is a living organism and is very responsive to its environment. And the possibilities of aging cheese is endless, says Father Michael.
In Pune,Sohrab Chinoy of ABC Farms has attempted some ambitious after-dinner cheese such as Aisy Cendre,which is covered with wood ash,and Buchette DAnjou,which is ripened in charcoal for three months. People,especially expats,are flabbergasted at how close we can get to the imported varieties. We no longer need an aggressive sales pitch for cheeses. People are aware of them and have their personal favourites. In the past 10 years,we have grown over four times, says Chinoy.

But even though we are quickly learning the recipes of burata and grogonzola,our local cheeses are quietly vanishing from the racks. The Kako cheese produced in Jehanabad,Bihar,is no longer available and Kalimpong cheese makers make news only because their craft is dying.
Bengals Bandel cheese is a sturdy survivor though it is not made in the town anymore. The first Europeans to negotiate their way through muddy Ganga banks and reach Bengal were the Portuguese. In the late 16th century,Emperor Akbar granted them the permission to build a church and a town at the banks of the Ganges and Bandel came into being.

Soon the town drew a large number of Portuguese merchants and the area and its culinary culture was modified to suit the taste of the foreigners. Small pellets of salted and smoked Bandel cheese were probably one of the first offspring of this marriage of culinary cultures.

Made of curdled milk chena,this local delicacy employs the same procedure that is required for some of Bengals famous milk sweets. The cheese is now only found in a clutter of shops at Kolkatas not-so-new New Market. The milk is curdled first and then the water is strained out with a piece of cloth. We collect the chena and put it in a mould for two-three hours. Then we salt it cover it with salt for a few days, says Ratan Ghosh,who has been supplying Bandel cheese to New Market for more than a decade now. Its then smoked for a distinctive flavour.

No breakfast is complete in our house without generous dollops of Bandel cheese, says Erica Golmes,a resident of south Kolkata. Consumed mainly by the sizable Anglo-Indian community of the city,around 2,000 pellets of this cheese comes to the city every week.
Alongside the old,innovations continue. In Pune,Chinoy has flavoured cheese with oregano and chives,whisky and walnuts,cognac and almond they are a big hit at Parsi weddings. He even has a variety flavoured with curry leaves. Truly,a taste of India.
With inputs from Premankur Biswas