Chhurpi

churpi · chugo · durkha

What is left when the butter has gone into the tea.

What it is

Chhurpi is the solid left behind after milk has been churned for butter. The buttermilk is heated until it curdles, the curd is strained through cloth and pressed. At that point it is soft chhurpi: white, crumbly, mildly sour, somewhere between ricotta and a young feta. Press it harder, smoke it and dry it for months and it becomes hard chhurpi, an amber block you do not chew so much as keep in your cheek for an hour.

Where it comes from

Yak and dri milk across the high Himalaya, and cow milk lower down. It exists because butter was the valuable part and nothing else could be wasted. Bhutan calls its fresh version datshi and builds half the national menu on it.

What it's called

Chhurpi (Nepali) · datshi (Dzongkha, the fresh cheese) · chugo (the hard dried blocks). Soft and hard are the same cheese at two stages, and they are not interchangeable.

In the kitchen

Soft chhurpi melts into a thin sauce that coats rather than smothers, and that is what ema datshi and kewa datshi are built around. It also goes raw into pickles, cut small and dressed while the tempered oil is still warm. Hard chhurpi is a snack more than an ingredient, though it is grated into thue, the pressed sweet of cheese, butter and brown sugar.

What we know about the claims

It is a high-protein dairy, and the hard version is sold internationally as a dog chew, which tells you something about its density. Nothing to be sceptical about beyond the usual: it is cheese.

Choosing and buying

Soft chhurpi is sold by Nepali and Himalayan grocers online in the UK and by some Sikkimese producers, though stock is not dependable. Rinsed feta plus two slices of processed cheese for the melt is the substitution Bhutanese and Darjeeling cooks recommend themselves, and it is a good one. Dried chhurpi is a specialist order; Parmesan is the documented stand-in for the sweets, but nothing substitutes for chhurpi in a pickle.