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Fermentation Atlas

Dried sour-milk curds

Curd from soured milk, pressed and dried rock-hard, like qurut and chhurpi.

17 entries listed here.

How these cheeses are made

The shared make of dried sour-milk curd family (qurut, aaruul, kashk, chhurpi). Each cheese below says what it does differently.

  1. Sour the milk into yoghurt or sour milk24 h – 2 days · 40–45 °C
  2. Churn out the butter and boil the sour milk10 min · 90–100 °C
  3. Press, salt and hang the curd2–3 days · up to 3 % salt
  4. Shape and sun-dry10–15 days

Compare them

CheeseRegionMilkRipeningRind
Chura kampo / chura loenpaTibetan PlateauButtermilk or skimmed milk of yak, sometimes whole milk1–4 h
Iqt / Oggt (Arabia)Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula
JameedJordan, where FAO finds it all over the country, in rural areas and the desertRaw sheep or goat milk, soured and churned in a goatskin16 days
Khuruud (hurood)Inner Mongolia, China16 h – 2 days
KlilaAlgeria24 h – 3 days
Kurut (Kyrgyz)Kyrgyzstan4–5 h
Qula (Tibetan dried yak curd, China)China, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau2 days
Qurt (Kazakh)Kazakhstan10–12 h
Sürk (Antakya sürkü)Turkey, Hatay province21–28 days
TchoukouNiger79 % of surveyed producers use cow milk and 21 % goat milk24 h
Xinjiang Kazakh cheese (naigeda, 奶疙瘩)China, XinjiangRaw cow or goat milk30–60 days after shaping
Qara qurut (black kashk)Iran, Afghanistan and Central AsiaWhey from yoghurt made of a mixture of kashek (sour yoghurt), doogh and whey, boiled down and concentrated
Gurt (Turkmen)Turkmenistan2–5 days
Kalti (Tusheti)Georgia, Tusheti
Naizha / Nailao (Inner Mongolia)China, Inner Mongoliacow milkdried or fresh
Qurut (Afghanistan, Pashtun Pakistan)Afghanistan and Pakistan
TakammartSouthern Algeria2–3 days

Bold names have a full page with the animated steps. Blank cells: no sourced value yet.

Short entries

What the sources record about each of these so far.

Gurt (Turkmen)Turkmenistan

Also called Gurt.

Small salted balls of strained yoghurt, dried in the sun until rock-hard. Thick süzme (gatyk), made from milk and a starter, is mixed with salt, rolled by hand into balls and dried on trays, about 2 days in the sun in one home recipe.

Base
Salted balls of gatyk (süzme), dried in the sun
  1. Salt the süzme
  2. Roll into balls
  3. Dry in the sun2–5 days

Safety: A dried, salted product.

Kalti (Tusheti)Georgia, Tusheti

A boundary product, a heat-set whey curd rather than a fermented cheese. The whey left from making cow or sheep cheese is heated over a wood fire and stirred, the curd is dried in canvas bags, and the balls are rubbed with salt and finished inside a guda, the sheepskin bag.

Base
Whey left over from cow or sheep cheese making, described as an aged cottage cheese
  1. Heat the whey
  2. Dry the curd in canvas bags
  3. Salt the balls and finish in the guda

Safety: The whey is heated, and the product is salted and dried.

Naizha / Nailao (Inner Mongolia)China, Inner Mongolia

Also called 奶渣 (naizha), 奶酪 (nailao).

Chinese names used in Inner Mongolia for Mongol dried and fresh milk curds of the aaruul and byaslag type. No source found describes a naizha make with numbers, so this entry follows the dried-curd family.

Milk
cow milk
Ripening
dried or fresh

Made like Dried sour-milk curd family (qurut, aaruul, kashk, chhurpi).

Qurut (Afghanistan, Pashtun Pakistan)Afghanistan and Pakistan

Also called quoroot, kurut, qurut.

Yoghurt is strained, salted and dried into hard balls called quoroot, which are reconstituted in water before they go into cooking.

Form
Hard, dried, salted balls of strained yoghurt
  1. Strain the yoghurt
  2. Salt and roll into balls
  3. Dry
  4. Reconstitute for cooking
TakammartSouthern Algeria

A Tuareg dried cheese. Whole goat, sheep or cow milk is curdled with rennet from a kid's stomach, the curd is laid on a mat and pressed to drain, and the cheese is dried for 2–3 days and kept in the shade. In Niger the same kind of cheese is sold as tchoukou, which is also called Tikomart in the Tuareg language.

  1. Curdle with kid rennet
  2. Drain on a mat under pressure
  3. Dry2–3 days

Safety: The thesis account of the Hoggar cheese sets fresh milk with kid rennet and records no heating step, and the cheese is dried for only 2 to 3 days. The Niger tchoukou note, by contrast, pasteurises the milk at 85 °C for 20 minutes. The US FDA says raw milk can carry human pathogens, including E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and Campylobacter jejuni.

Numbers come from cited sources and carry a label that says how each is known. How this atlas is made