The Indian Cheese Revolution

Dairy products were never supposed to be part of our dietary evolution; we weren’t meant to digest lactose past infancy. Yet, there are certain occasions when we rebel and find the need to go against this visceral inclination. A slather of butter on freshly toasted bread. A gooey on the inside and crusty on the outside, grilled cheese sandwich. A simple scoop of vanilla ice cream on a hot sunny day. We might not have been meant to consume dairy, but we sure have a strong draw towards it.

When I returned to India from Auckland eighteen months ago, I set about the urgent business of culinary repatriation. Mangalore chicken ghee roast. A proper Kerala meal with all its ceremonies. I ate my way through every dish that had existed only as memory during my years in the big smoke. I filled a void. For months, this felt like enough. Then, slowly, a different kind of void had taken its place. One that kept taking me back to the cheese aisles in New Zealand.

India has the world’s largest cattle population, and a wide variety of dishes in our cuisine involve the use of ghee, cream and butter. Yet, we remain curiously bereft in one area. Cheese. Not Paneer. Not the processed rectangles of Amul that find their way onto everything from chutney sandwiches to dosa (the latter combination makes me wince), but proper cheese. The kind with personality. With funk.

Cheese Platter at Pizza 4P's in Bangalore. Image: Pratyaksha Prakash

We do have a lineage of ancient cheeses, but they seldom make it out of the places they're made in. Bandel cheese in Kolkata, with its smoky, sharp bite. Churpi from the Himalayas is made from yak milk. Kalimpong cheese, creamy and mild from the hill stations. Kalari in Kashmir, stringy and squeaky when fresh. Each of them carries a history as rich as their taste. However, I can’t help but reminisce about the cheese back in New Zealand.

I have many memories associated with cheese during my time in Auckland. Quite often, Friday evenings meant cheese boards. Baked brie oozing with honey and chilli. Tiny goat cheese logs paired with figs. An aged cheddar. There was a satisfaction of finding the perfect bite: a little cheese, a small cracker, a fruit on top, maybe some quince paste if you were feeling fancy. I remember eating a stinky Kau Piro Cheese during my time at Saxon + Parole, a restaurant in the Commercial Bay building downtown. That’s where I learned that the stinkier the cheese, the richer the taste.

My favourite memories are associated with the drives north from Auckland. The ones where we stopped at the Puhoi Valley café. Their Double Cream Brie and Blue Cheese became my standard haul. But it was their beef and cheese pie that ruined me completely.

But good cheese isn’t a far grab in India. Something remarkable has been stirring in India's artisanal food landscape. The cheese revolution, if we may call it that, has been gathering momentum with the quiet persistence of fermentation itself. In 2023, an Indian cheese, Eleftheria Brunost, grabbed fourth place at the World Cheese Awards. Not exactly the kind of news that makes headlines, but for those of us who care about these things, it felt significant.

The numbers tell the story better than awards do. Where once India produced a modest quantity of artisanal and processed cheese, production has multiplied sevenfold in just over a decade. Not just because people have more spending money, though that helps. Not just because you can order anything online now, though that helps too.

It's because people are getting curious about food and their palates are getting more adventurous. And this has led to the rise of artisanal cheese in India.

The Farm, Chennai, is one of my favourite accounts to follow, showcasing its bountiful garden and happy bovines that remind me of the ones back in the meadows of New Zealand. The milk from these herds is turned into 17 different types of cheese, including Manchego style cheese called Queso Coromandel, a white, soft and fluffy cheese called 1/277 Bloomy Rind, aged cheese called Tomme de Semanchari, Madras Feta and more.

Nari & Kage Fromagerie in Bangalore

Käse, another fromagerie in Chennai, focuses on grass-fed, fresh, ethically sourced local milk to bring out the deep, rich flavour of the cheese. Their ‘Ode to Chennai’ cheese is crusted with an in-house Milagai Podi (a condiment made with lentils, seeds and spices). Mor Milagai is a semi-hard, milled curd cheese infused with traditional-style buttermilk-fermented chillies.

Then there are people like Sanjukta Roy in Kolkata, who make cheese at home for her and her family. Her fermentation experiments during the COVID period eventually led her to produce cheese like camembert, creamy kefir cheese and goat cheese.

But here's the thing nobody talks about: India is a terrible place to make cheese on a large scale. Cheese likes cool, consistent temperatures. India offers neither. Making cheese here is hard enough. Moving it around the country is even harder.

Everything has to travel in insulated boxes with dry ice, and the cold supply chains in India haven’t fully developed yet. The packaging companies will tell you their boxes can keep things cold for forty-eight hours, but that's assuming nothing goes wrong. Delayed flights, traffic jams, a truck breaking down in the middle of nowhere—any of these can turn a wheel of perfectly good cheese into expensive biodegradable rubbish.

Climate change isn't helping. Summers are getting hotter, which means more cooling, better packaging, faster transport. Every shipment becomes a race against time and temperature. And all of this, the fuel for the trucks, the energy for the cooling, the flights for the urgent deliveries, just makes the problem worse.

Then there's the shipping cost. Shipping cheese across the country can cost as much as the cheese itself. Most of these small producers require minimum orders that turn a simple craving into a significant purchase.

I can feel things changing, though. Not just in the cheese world, but in how people in India think about food. There's more curiosity now, more willingness to try things that might not work. The infrastructure is slowly catching up to the ambition.

The recent trade deal with New Zealand might help. Maybe some of that Puhoi Valley blue will make it to Indian shelves. Maybe competition will push local producers to innovate. Maybe the combination of imported expertise and local ingredients will create something entirely new.

When it all comes together—when good cheese becomes as easy to find as good coffee—I'll be ready. Bread, butter and eighteen months of accumulated longing. It's going to be a very good grilled cheese sandwich.

Asia Media Centre