Move over Donkey Cheese, take your smelly self to a different shelve because there's a new fromage in town and it's just claimed the title of being the most expensive cheese in the world.
That's right, until recently it was the much prized Zasavica cheese produced in Serbia made from the milk of donkeys that held the title as priciest slab of coagulated milk but a farmer in The Netherlands has gone one step further, pushed donkeys aside and decided to milk his farm of pigs.
Cheese with Chorizo, milk and meat in harmony:
The farmer behind the project, Erik Stegink, said that it took him around 40 hours of milking his freerange pigs to produce just a few pounds of the cheese that, apparently, might not even taste good. The Kitchn have already asked the question of ‘why don’t pigs make cheese?’ finding that most cheese experts believe a pig’s diet of slops and meat if given the chance, mean that milk wouldn’t hold good enough flavour for cheese.
This, however, hasn’t stopped Stegink who now plans to charge, wait for it, over $1,600 for a pound of his Piggy Palace cheese. The cheese will be auctioned on the company’s Facebook page and money raised donated to charity. Apparently Stegnik says his creation has a chalky texture and tastes a little salty, he also told The Daily Mail that due to the huge number of man hours involved in production he probably won't be making anymore.
Stegink boasts happy pigs on his farm in The Netherlands that attracts people to watch the pigs as they play in their purpose built play area, complete with a slide and a trampoline.
Perhaps this pig cheese will get it’s own celebrity bidder just like Serbia’s prized Donkey Cheese, in 2012 the tennis star and Wimbledon winner Novak Djokovic purchased the entire productions of the country’s rare cheese to sell in his own chain of restaurants.
Pig's milk cheese is rare but it certainly doesn't claim the title as the weirdest cheese, here's Gordon Ramsay as he tries maggt filled cheese from Sardinia: