(Picture: Great Big Story/Youtube)

If you’re into your cheese (and let’s face it, who isn’t?), you might think you’ve tasted all that the dairy world has to offer.

You can now get a gin that tastes like Christmas dinner

You know your goats cheese from your ricotta. Your feta from your halloumi.

Which is why you’ll be interested to hear that the world’s most expensive cheese is the next big thing (for billionaires).

It’s called pule and it’s made from donkey’s milk and costs £880-a-kilo (supermarket cheddar is about £10-a-kilo).


And yes, let’s get this out of the way now, it can also be called ass milk and yes, this would make it ass cheese.



But how and why is it so expensive?

Each kilogram of cheese is made from 25 litres of donkey milk, which can cost up to £40 per litre.

To put that in perspective, one kilogram of cheddar needs 9.5 litres of milk (which cost around 30p each).

Pule is produced by Slobodan Simic on his rural farm in Serbia, using 300 donkeys from the Zasavica Nature Reserve.

Only around 20 donkeys on the farm produce milk at any one time – part of the reason why it’s incredibly rare and expensive to produce.

According to Slobodan, another reason it’s so difficult to get hold of pule (that’s what the cheese is called) is that donkey’s milk doesn’t have enough casein (which is what makes milk thicken into curd) to make cheese the traditional way.

Slobodan Simic (Picture: Great Big Story/Youtube)

He’s got a secret method for getting round the problem but it takes time and he claims that his farm is the only one who knows how to make cheese out of donkey milk.

Is ass cheese really a thing? This is a tricky thing to define. Farmers are split. Of course, Slobodan Simic is very sure of his view and it was even rumoured that tennis player Novak Djokovic bought the entire global stock. But others, like French donkey farmer Jean-Francois Wanbeke, told Modern Farmer that he’s less than convinced: He has tried to make it, think it’s pretty impossible to make it and is not even sure cheese is the right word. ‘We tried only once to make cheese,’ he said. ‘It took a lot of milk and we only got a tiny amount that resembled goat milk cheese, but I’m not sure I would even call it a real cheese.’

Price tag and rarity aside, the key thing about this cheese are the supposed health benefits that are attached to it.

It’s exceptionally high in protein, calcium and omega 3 fatty acids – all crucial for maintaining good cardiovascular health.

Donkey’s milk is also packed with anti-allergen properties, has 60 times more vitamin C than cow’s milk and is low in fat.

Despite all that though, it apparently tastes a bit like Manchego. So if you don’t have a small fortune lying around, then you might as well just go down to Tesco and yourself some of the vastly cheaper Spanish stuff.

MORE: Apparently eating cheese could be the key to a longer life

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