Me and Binuka thinking up plans.
I am continually meeting people who astound and impress me. With most of the population relying on farming and the dairy industry for their food and living, every day I’ve come across someone whose efforts are more than inspiring.
Binuka Joshi is one of these people and a personal hero of my mine. An entrepreneur and mother of two, Binuka runs Theki Dairy, a business she created after cannily spotting the gap in the market for hand-made yoghurt. Straight away Binuka arranged to be trained in the craft whilst her husband designed a logo based on a traditional Theki jar. Now, their farm fresh yoghurt is made daily using milk produced by the family’s cows and it’s a massive hit in the local area.
New cheese, new income.
I met Binuka and the Joshi family around six months ago when they asked for some advice on their future plans. As I am sure you have guessed, they were asking about cheese.
They were already producing and selling paneer, an unfermented Indian cheese which you’d come across when you’re out for a curry. But paneer is readily available in Nepal, which meant Binuka struggled to make a good profit.
We were looking for something brand new and quickly became excited at the thought of offering her customers a fermented, European-style soft cheese.
Binuka standing by her new soft cheese!
Fortunately, I was prepped having brought some vital ingredients: rennet, a type of enzyme, and freeze-dried starter cultures from the UK. So in her micro dairy we made our first tentative efforts.
The fine art of cheese-making.
We decided to start by using five litres of milk which makes around 500 grams of cheese. Everything was going well, until we added the rennet. We waited for almost an hour before we let ourselves look; sadly all we’d managed to produce was a weak curd. There was still time and Binuka was still hopeful, but I’d seen this before and could predict a dry cheese.
We waited another hour just in case, and despite myself I started feeling hopeful again. Slowly a stronger curd did begin to develop, thick enough for us to be able to cut and place into the handmade moulds to drain overnight.
The next day we salted the now firm cheese. Binuka was delighted, but I was not happy; the curd was too hard. As I had predicted the extra waiting time had dried it out.
Binuka working hard at the cheese.
We didn’t let it stop us though, it took several more attempts, but we finally managed the soft cheese we’d been aiming for. Binuka named it ‘Theki Maid’ and it was absolutely delicious. Now we’d finally got the method right she could make as much Theki Maid as she like. Keen to start promoting her new cheese, Binuka took it to a local farmers market where it was well received. Theki Maid now features on her shop display board and its sales are really promising!
The challenge of cheddar.
Our work did not stop there. We had one more project where my real cheese making expertise came in to play. Back home in Somerset I was famous for my cheddar which was sold in Waitrose (amongst other places), and won awards including ‘Best Traditional Cheddar’ in the 2010 World Cheese Awards.
Making cheddar in Nepal is a huge challenge. To start with, a product called ‘starter cultures’ is needed, which is hard to find in Nepal. However, they are vital and need to be added to the milk at the very beginning to make it ripen. During maturing stages, the cheese needs to remain at a constant chilled storage temperature, which can be near-on impossible here with electricity outages every day.
However, after a lot of research we managed to source the starter cultures and find a safe place to store the cheese so together we pushed pass every challenge. This time, after the cheese was prepped, we had a six month wait until we could see any results of our labour.
Look how good it looks!
Theki Tabla is unveiled.
I have to admit my heart jumped into my stomach as I took my first bite, after all that time and work, I don’t know how I would have been able to face Binuka if we’d failed. But we were delighted when we realised how tasty it was. Adding hard cheese to her shop would give customers more of a choice meaning she’ll get extra income for her family from the sales.
Binuka decided to call it ‘Theki Tabla’, which means dairy drum – fitting since Nepal’s national instrument is a drum. Now we know it works, Binuka is in the process of repeating the recipe to make more to sell in her shop.
Could progress get much better than this?
Whilst we caught up over a slice of Nepali cheddar, Binuka told me how she is keen to share the knowledge I passed on to her with her fellow dairy colleagues in the region. She wants to lead some training sessions to improve the quality of cheese produced.
Binuka asked if I’d help her with her first session and we made plans to start at a cheese factory in Kathmandu. You can count on your hand the number of women in the dairy food industry in this region, let alone those under the age of 30. So success is even sweeter knowing that Binuka will be stepping up and training the workers and manager in the cheese factory.
Thank you,
With these recent developments you can see just how fruitful my placement has been. All these efforts to share knowledge and reach really remote areas are worth it when dairy farmers like Binuka take the expertise into their own hands and continue to share and benefit more of the community. I hope you are proud of all this progress, as it’s thanks to you that I am here in the first place!
Until next time,
Simon
