Recipes

    Africa & Oceania

    Two regions with almost nothing in common, sharing a page because the plan gave them one — and it turns out they close two of this wing’s threads between them.

    West Africa supplies the last and best plant coagulant, with a name and a temperature. Australia supplies the last word on the law, and it is a bleak one: a legal victory that took seven years to win and was undone by an administrative tidy-up.

    ⭐⭐ Wagashi, and a coagulant that works at 70 °C

    Wagashi — wagashi gassirè — is a soft cheese from northern Benin, made from fresh whole cow’s milk, and it is produced principally by the Peulh (Fulani) people.

    The coagulant is Calotropis procera — the Sodom apple, a milkweed that grows as a weed across the Sahel — and specifically an enzyme in its extract called calotropain.

    ⭐ And here is what makes it genuinely different from every other coagulant in this section: the coagulation is HOT. Wagashi is set by adding Calotropis extract to milk at 65 to 70 °C.

    Compare that with everything else this wing has met:

    • Chymosin — animal or fermentation-produced — works around 30–35 °C and is denatured well below 70.
    • Cardosins, from the thistle, work at conventional setting temperatures.
    • Papain, from papaya, likewise.

    ⭐ The method is written up as a recipe — Cheese, Wagashi (Fulani) — deliberately as a record rather than an instruction, because the plant is an irritant and knowing which part to use is not something a recipe page should pretend to teach.

    Calotropain is doing its job at a temperature that would destroy calf rennet outright. That is not a variation on the technique; it is a different chemistry, and it means the Fulani method has no equivalent in any European recipe I own.

    It also solves a practical problem elegantly. In a hot climate with no refrigeration, setting the curd at 65–70 °C means the milk has effectively been pasteurised in the same operation. One step, two outcomes. You could not design a better process for the conditions, and it wasn’t designed — it was arrived at.

    And it is dyed on purpose

    The white wagashi is often stained red, using sorghum cobs and panicles and teak leaves.

    Which is worth putting beside annatto, the dye that made cheddar orange in imitation of rich summer milk, and beside the paprika rubs of Spain and the spice crusts of the Levant. Colouring cheese is a global habit and a very old one, and the Anglo-American instinct to treat it as a modern industrial deception doesn’t survive contact with the evidence.

    ⭐ Calotropis now belongs on the rennet page, alongside cardoon and papain. That page currently lists cardoon, fig sap and safflower as the historical alternatives; the world tour has since produced four named plant coagulants — cardosins, papain, calotropain, and the unidentified năiténg vine — and the honest summary is that using a ruminant’s stomach is a regional habit, not a definition.

    The rest of Africa

    Ayib (Ethiopia) — a fresh, crumbly, mild acid-set curd, eaten alongside spiced dishes as a cooling counterweight. The everyday cheese of a country with an enormous cattle population and no aged-cheese tradition — for the same climate-and-use reasons as India.

    Jben (Morocco) and klila (Algeria and Tunisia) — the Maghreb’s fresh cheese and its dried, hard, keeping cousin. Klila is another entry in the dried-curd belt that runs from Central Asia through the Himalaya; the same solution reached wherever the climate is hot and the storage is nothing.

    Mish, karish and Domiati are Egyptian and are covered on the Middle East page, where mish’s years-long jar is the region’s most extreme preservation.

    Amasi (southern Africa) — fermented milk rather than cheese, and the dominant traditional dairy product across a large part of the continent. As with Mongolia, fermented rather than coagulated is the older and more widespread answer.

    South Africa’s modern cheese industry is entirely twentieth-century and colonial in descent, and is now producing genuinely good European-style cheeses. Same story as Oceania below and the Americas.

    Oceania — and the last word on the law

    There was no dairying in Australia, New Zealand or the Pacific before Europeans arrived. No milk animals; the entire tradition is imported, like the Americas.

    New Zealand became one of the world’s great dairy exporters, and both countries now have serious artisan sectors. What is worth the space here is the regulatory history, because it completes an argument this wing has been making since France.

    🔴 The Australian raw-milk sequence

    1998 — Food Standards Australia New Zealand moved to ban the import of all raw-milk cheeses. Exemptions were made for cooked-curd cheeses such as Gruyère and Emmental, and for hard cheese such as Parmigiano Reggiano.

    2002 — authorities ordered the destruction of a shipment of cave-ripened Roquefort, imported by the cheese merchant Will Studd.

    2005 — after an 18-month review (draft assessment published 23 March 2005), FSANZ published a report repealing the ban against Roquefort. Very hard cheeses were exempted from pasteurisation requirements provided the curd received a heat treatment of at least 48 °C (118 °F).

    2009–2012 — changes to the Food Safety Act allowed Australian cheesemakers to make hard cooked-curd cheese domestically.

    2014 — FSANZ removed Standard 2.4.2A and cancelled all special exemptions for imported raw-milk cheese from the Food Standards Code, so the Roquefort exemption no longer applied.

    ⭐ Read that last step carefully, because it is the most quietly instructive thing on this page. A merchant fought for years, had a shipment destroyed, forced an eighteen-month scientific review, and won. And then the exemption was dissolved by a restructuring of the code — not overturned on the merits, not re-argued, just removed along with the mechanism that housed it.

    ⚠ I have not traced what happened after 2014, and I am not going to imply the current position without checking it. What the sequence establishes is the pattern, not today’s rule.

    And a fourth technical proxy

    The other thing 2005 gives us is a new kind of rule.

    This wing has now collected four jurisdictions choosing four different technical proxies for the same hazard:

    WhereThe proxy
    United StatesAging time — 60 days at ≥35 °F
    Britain (Stilton PDO)Heat treatment of the milk — pasteurisation required
    The Netherlands (Boerenkaas TSG)Farm origin and raw milk — pasteurisation forbidden
    Australia (2005)Curd cook temperature — at least 48 °C

    Four regulators, one hazard, four incompatible technical answers, and each one is written as though it were a fact about microbiology. The 60-day rule was calibrated against Brucella and doesn’t do what it says; Australia’s 48 °C is a cook-temperature threshold; the Dutch concluded raw milk was the thing worth protecting.

    They cannot all be describing the same underlying reality. That is the conclusion this wing has been building toward since the very first page, and Australia is where it finishes.

    The rest of Oceania

    New Zealand — Kapiti, Whitestone and Mahoe among the artisan makers; the country’s real weight is in commodity export, and its cheddar and its dairy science are both first-rate.

    Australia — Tasmania in particular has built a strong artisan sector, and the raw-milk fight above has been the defining political issue in it for thirty years.

    And no indigenous dairy tradition anywhere in the Pacific, for the same reason as the Americas: there was nothing to milk.

    What to take to the bench

    ⚠ Not Calotropis. It is a real coagulant with a real enzyme, and it is also a plant whose latex is a recognised irritant and toxin, handled by people with generations of knowledge about dose and preparation. This is the one technique in the entire wing I would say plainly: read about it, don’t try it unless you find genuine documented guidance. The Fulani know what they’re doing; I would not.

    ⭐ But the principle transfers, and it’s the interesting one: coagulate hot. Setting curd at 65–70 °C is outside everything in my books, and the two-birds logic — set and pasteurise in one operation — is elegant enough that I want to understand why no European tradition does it. The likely answer is that chymosin can’t survive it, which means the technique is unavailable to anyone using rennet. That’s a real constraint I had never noticed I was working under.

    Klila and the dried curds remain the free experiment they were on the Central Asia page.

    Next, and last in this wing: the ones nobody here has heard of — the best of them, gathered.

    Sources

    Comments (0)

    1. Loading…

    Comments are held for moderation — nothing appears until approved.