Why is pule – a Serbian donkey-goat cheese – the most expensive cheese in the world?

The world is obsessed with dairy. From cheesecake and chocolate to what most of us cannot live without – cheese. We are all familiar with the good stuff like Gruyere and Parmigiano-Reggiano (thanks to Massimo Bottura), but pule?

Probably not the first thing that comes to mind, and at €1,000 (US$1,136) for every pound, it is the most expensive cheese in the world. Fancy that.  

It is white, crumbly like feta and similar to Manchego, only richer. You pay for what it’s worth, and for its rarity.

The donkeys milked for the cheese live on a farm in the Zasavica Special Nature Reserve in Serbia, and its owner, Slobodan Simić, is the world’s only producer of such cheese.  

Donkey cheese, you say? The usual types of cheese use cow, goat, sheep and buffalo milk. The rarer ones, yak. But perhaps the rarest is donkey milk, which is exceptionally difficult to produce.

A female donkey produces only about 1.5 to two litres of milk a day, and it takes about 25 litres of milk to make one kilogram of pule.

The milking is done by hand three times a day; it’s a laborious process that requires extreme care and attention.