Cheese, Mish

⚠ UNTESTED, and the longest-aged thing in this collection by some distance. A briefing.

🔴 Mish is not really a cheese you make. It is a jar you keep. Pieces of a plain fresh cheese go into an earthenware pot with buttermilk and a great deal of salt, the pot is sealed with mud and kept somewhere warm — often in the sun — and left for a year or more.

⭐⭐ And the starter is the last batch. A spoonful of old mish — khamira — goes into the new jar to get it going. That makes it the third perpetual vessel in this collection, alongside a master stock and a sourdough starter: three unrelated cuisines that each arrived at the same idea, which is that the container is the recipe and you never empty it.

⚠ It is pungent, extremely salty, and an acquired taste that a great many Egyptians acquired in childhood. Serve it in very small quantities with bread, tomato and onion.

Ingredients

• 2 lb plain fresh skim-milk cheese, drained firm — karish traditionally; a dry cottage or
• farmer’s cheese stands in. See Cheese, Farmer’s
• About 3 1/2 oz coarse non-iodised salt — roughly 10% of the total weight
• 1 quart buttermilk, or soured raw milk
• 2 Tbsp old mish, if you can get any — the traditional starter
• Optional: 1 tsp each of ground fenugreek, coriander and chilli
• A wide-mouthed earthenware or glass jar with a lid that is NOT airtight

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Break the fresh cheese into rough pieces about the size of a walnut and let them dry on a rack for a day, so the surfaces are no longer wet.
2. Layer the pieces into the jar with the salt, a scatter of salt to each layer. ⚠ Ten per cent of the total weight is the traditional figure and it is not negotiable downwards — the salt is the only thing standing between this jar and a year of trouble.
3. Pour in the buttermilk to cover, and stir in the old mish if you have it, and the spices if you want them.
4. 🔴 Cover, but do NOT seal it airtight. Traditionally the pot is closed with a mud paste that breathes. ⚠ A screw-top jar clamped shut is the wrong idea — this is a long warm ferment and it needs to vent.
5. Keep it warm. Traditionally in the sun or in the warmest corner of the house. Room temperature is the floor, not the target.
6. Leave it a year. Check it monthly: top up with buttermilk if the pieces are ever standing proud of the liquid, and skim anything growing on the surface. The cheese will soften, darken and eventually break down into a thick pungent paste.
7. ⭐ Keep a spoonful back when you use it up, and start the next jar with it.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED, and this is the recipe on the page I would be most careful with. It is assembled from published descriptions of the traditional method: pieces of karish cheese covered with milk or buttermilk and 10% salt, matured in earthenware for a year, with old mish added as a natural starter to get the new batch going. Some versions also add morta — the residue left from boiling butter to make clarified samna — along with spices and herbs.

⭐⭐ A jar you never empty, for the third time in this collection A master stock is reused and topped up indefinitely; a sourdough starter is fed rather than remade; and a mish jar is seeded with the last one. ⚠ And the argument this collection already made about master stocks applies here without modification: you cannot claim indefinite flavour concentration and simultaneously deny indefinite accumulation of everything else — it is the same mass balance. In a mish jar what accumulates is salt, time and whatever the last jar had in it. That is precisely why it tastes the way it does, and it is also why it is not a casual project.

🔴 The date everybody repeats, and why this page does not Mish is routinely introduced with a claim that it is 5,000 years old and was found in the tomb of the First Dynasty pharaoh Hor-Aha, “from 3200 BC.” ⚠ That looks very much like a number that has migrated from an age into a date. The famous, published, chemically analysed find is a 3,200-YEAR-OLD solid cheese from the tomb of Ptahmes at Saqqara — a 13th-century-BC official, so roughly 1200 BC, not 3200 BC — identified by proteomic analysis in Analytical Chemistry in 2018 as a dairy product made from sheep or goat milk mixed with cow’s milk.

🔴 Two thousand years, lost in a transcription. Egyptian dairying really is ancient and there really are First Dynasty jars from Saqqara; what there is not, as far as I can find, is a published identification of any of it as mish specifically. So the page says the cheese is old, names the find that actually exists, and leaves it there.

⚠ And a genuine safety note attached to that same find The Ptahmes analysis also recovered biomolecular evidence of Brucella melitensis. Brucellosis is a real and current hazard of raw sheep and goat milk, and soft white brined cheeses are among its classic vehicles — which is worth knowing on this page in particular, because a long warm ferment of raw milk is exactly the scenario involved. ⭐ Salt and a year do not make raw milk safe. If you are working from raw milk here, understand that trade rather than assume the age of the tradition settles it.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/brined-and-pickled/ on the site.