Chhurpi is a cheese of the eastern Himalaya – Nepal, Sikkim, Darjeeling, Bhutan and Tibet – made from cow’s milk or from the milk of yaks and yak-cow hybrids (chauri). It comes in two very different forms. Soft chhurpi is fresh, white, crumbly and mildly sour, like a tangy cottage cheese; it’s eaten with rice, cooked into curries and soups, made into pickles, or used in Bhutan’s chili-and-cheese stew ema datshi. Hard chhurpi is pressed, cut into small blocks and dried – often smoked – for weeks until it’s rock hard; it’s held in the mouth and softened slowly, for hours, rather than bitten. Traditionally, chhurpi is made from the buttermilk left after churning butter from soured milk, which is heated until the curds separate.
What Ferments It
Chhurpi belongs to the region’s family of naturally fermented milk products, alongside dahi, mohi (buttermilk), somar and others. In 58 samples from India, Nepal and Bhutan, lactic acid bacteria reached 10 to 100 million per gram; they included Lactococcus lactis, several lactobacilli such as L. plantarum and L. paracasei, and Enterococcus faecium, and none of the strains tested made biogenic amines (Dewan & Tamang, 2007). Sequencing of 54 products from Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, including chhurpi, found Lactococcus lactis and Lactobacillus helveticus predominant, with acetic acid bacteria such as Acetobacter and Gluconobacter (Shangpliang et al., 2018). In the lab, digested hard chhurpi from yak and cow milk released peptides with antioxidant and blood-pressure-enzyme-blocking activity (Abedin et al., 2022) – interesting, but not evidence of health effects in people.
Safety
- Raw milk. Raw yak milk and yak milk products in northeast India have been found carrying Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2012), and raw milk in general can carry harmful germs that souring doesn’t reliably remove (CDC). Make chhurpi at home from pasteurized milk products.
- Teeth. Fully dried hard chhurpi can be harder than many teeth can take – let it soften in your mouth, and don’t give it to young children, who could choke on a piece.
- Storage. Soft chhurpi is perishable; keep it in the fridge and eat it within about a week.
Making It at Home
The recipe card makes soft chhurpi from cultured buttermilk – already fermented, like the traditional starting point – heated until it splits into curds and whey. Plain milk curdled with lemon or vinegar gives paneer, not chhurpi. For a semi-hard version, cut the pressed cheese into small blocks and dry them in a very low oven; home drying won’t reach the hardness of traditional smoked chhurpi, so keep it in the fridge. For other Himalayan ferments, see gundruk and tongba; for other fresh fermented cheeses, labneh and bryndza.