Here a new one.
This, my fellow gastronauts, is camel milk cheese from China's troubled but beautiful far-western Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region*. Historically, mostly Muslim, it is a desert area and so, home to the aforementioned even-toed two-humped ungulate, Camelus bactrianus.
According to Wikipedia, so it must be true
QuoteUntil recently, camel milk could not be made into camel cheese because rennet was unable to coagulate the milk proteins to allow the collection of curds. Developing less wasteful uses of the milk, the FAO commissioned Professor J.P. Ramet of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Agronomie et des Industries Alimentaires, who was able to produce curdling by the addition of calcium phosphate and vegetable rennet in the 1990s. The cheese produced from this process has low levels of cholesterol and is easy to digest, even for the lactose intolerant.
The cheese is weird. It is naturally sweet, dense and chewy. The taste and texture remind me strongly of a kind of candy called White Rabbit Milk Chews sold in every store in China. It isn't at all cheesy, but oddly pleasant.
* China has five so-called autonomous regions. I live in one - Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. In fact, they have no real autonomy.The only real advantage they have over any other province is that the governor must be of the local ethic minority, here Zhuang; in Xinjiang, Uygur. This is largely meaningless as the goverorship is purely honorary and the real power is in the hands of the local Communist Party Secretary who is never from a minority and is appointed directly by Beijing. They are rarely even from the areas they govern.
