Donkey cheese, anyone? At £1,000 a kilo it's the most expensive in the world. But as I found getting the milk out of the donkey can make an ass out of anyone
Were those three wise men to turn up at the stable this Christmas, they might well come bearing gifts of frankincense, myrrh and a bucket. Then they could pull up a stool and start milking the donkey. Because the bucket would be worth its weight in gold.
For, this week, we learned the astonishing news that the world's newest and most expensive cheese actually comes from the hind legs of a donkey.
And if the prospect of paying hundreds of pounds for a dollop of curdled ass's milk is not bizarre enough, so too is the possibility that the entire world's supply might end up in the hands of one of the world's greatest tennis players.
So, here I am, crouching on the straw of a snow-capped stable in the middle of nowhere in Serbia, testing the patience of an extremely long-suffering donkey called Meleca while I try to establish what on earth is going on.
As a proud cheeseaholic, I have to say that discovering the most expensive cheese on the planet comes from a donkey is rather like being told the world's most expensive wine is made of rhubarb. And can any cheese be worth almost £1,000 a kilo?
That's why I've trekked out to the world's only donkey cheese factory on a pretty nature reserve 50 miles west of Belgrade. And having spent half an hour grappling with poor Meleca's teats, I soon realise that donkey cheese production is more time-consuming than churning out, say, a respectable Cheddar.
After all, in just six weeks, the average dairy cow can produce more milk than this entire farm of 130 donkeys can generate in a year. No wonder Cleopatra needed a pack of 700 just to run a bath of her fabled ass's milk.
In fact, it requires 25 litres of donkey milk to make one kilo of cheese. Which helps explain why no one has ever bothered producing it — until a few months ago. It also helps explain why it instantly shot to the top of the cheese-price league table, easily overtaking £630-a-kilo Swedish moose cheese.
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And the verdict? Unwrapped from its elaborate presentation box — bearing the no-nonsense title Donkey Cheese — each 50g piece is roughly the size of a decent pork pie (and sells for £45). Sliced up, it is slightly firmer and less crumbly than its goat counterpart.
In terms of smell, it is reassuringly pongy, reminiscent of a strong sheep's cheese, perhaps, but nowhere near the sewagey munificence of a sweaty Epoisse or a Stinking Bishop from Gloucestershire (leave one of those in a confined space and someone will be calling the gas emergency hotline).
According to its creator, MP-turned-conservationist Slobodan Simic, donkey cheese is best-served in thin slices on its own. I pick up about ten quid's-worth of the stuff on a cocktail stick and pop it in. It's a convivial blend of flavours — part-goat, part-Feta, part-Wensleydale, plus a hint of Spanish manchego.
Making an ass out me: Robert Hardman struggles to milk Melica the four-year-old donkey'Delicious,' I tell Slobodan and his happy cohorts, whereupon another delicacy is slapped on the table with much cheering. Oh good. The Donkey Milk Liqueur has arrived (think: Italian Limoncello with a slice of Roquefort, though it's nicer than it sounds).
'The ladies like it — and the men like to serve it to them before bedtime,' says Slobodan with a knowing wink, adding that Mrs Simic (his third wife) is a fan.
But he doesn't stop with the cream-coloured hard stuff (price: £90 a litre). Slobodan produces a £25 pot of donkey face cream — 'it turns the granny into the young lady' — and £4 bars of donkey milk soap. He then pours me a cup of donkey milk. It turns out that Slobodan, 57, starts every day with a mug of cold cranberry tea mixed with warm donkey milk. Attaboy.
It has absolutely no smell, is sweeter than cow's milk (and, thus, child-friendly) and has various medicinal properties which explain why people have prized donkey milk since the age of the Pharaohs.
Two years ago, a wealthy Serbian paid Slobodan's farm £4,500 for enough donkey milk to provide a bath for his lady friend. It took months to accumulate the milk for the task in the freezer.
'Then the couple came here and we left them to it,' says Slobodan's colleague, Jovan Vukadinovic. 'But I don't think she was his wife, as she was about 20 years younger and he didn't want any photographs.'
Hippocrates, often described as the father of medicine, was using donkey milk to heal wounds and snakebites in the fifth century BC. Nero's wife, Poppaea Sabina, would wash her face in it seven times a day. And until the 20th century, hospitals across Europe would keep a donkey or two on standby to provide milk for babies whose mothers could not provide it themselves.
I would not pay hundreds of pounds for a chunk of it. But it has character, depth, less fat than its rivals and alleged medicinal powers.
For it is said to be the closest thing to human breast milk, has precious little fat compared with cow's milk and is particularly rich in the omega 3 and omega 6 acids found in oily fish.
Many parents and doctors have found it's perfect for children with allergies, while others swear by its restorative powers for people with asthma and eczema. And then there are those, Slobodan included, who vouch for its qualities as an aphrodisiac . . .
Slobodan sells donkey milk at £6 for a 200ml bottle to those who live nearby and can afford it (in an area where the average wage is £100 a week). But the volumes are so small that it is not commercially viable.
Besides, he is now diverting most of his milk into cheese production. And, for the moment, much of that is earmarked for Serbia's greatest celebrity, tennis ace Novak Djokovic — although Slobodan also plans to set some aside for Harrods.
But I soon realise that this is not about making money: in fact, Slobodan's donkeys have cost a small fortune already and he doubts his cheese operation will ever break even. This is about pride and conservation.
In the aftermath of the bloody implosion of the former Yugoslavia and Nato's blitz on Serbia, Slobodan abandoned life as an MP to set up a nature reserve along the Zasavica river near the Bosnian border. Since then, with international grants, the Zasavica reserve has become an important home of every species of native wildlife, some of them on the brink of extinction, including a mud minnow and the small Mangalica pig.
A jolly eccentric (he has a well-stoked pipe carved with the face of Christopher Columbus welded to his jaw), Slobodan also developed an interest in the Balkan donkey.
Along with his colleague Jovan, he began acquiring a few to entertain younger visitors to the reserve and then discovered that donkey milk cosmetics were popular in other parts of Europe.
Here was a source of badly-needed home-spun income in an area of chronic unemployment.
'People may be poor, but they are very proud about what we do here,' explains Jovan. One by one, more donkeys arrived at Zasavica.
The 4,500-acre reserve is now a popular destination for campers and weekenders from Belgrade, many of them drawn by the animals. And the donkeys are certainly an endearing and rather festive sight, shuffling around their traditional wooden, straw-filled stables.
It's remarkably quiet, too. I hardly hear an 'ee-aw' all day.
It was a year ago that Slobodan had the idea of donkey cheese. 'We all thought he was mad, but then he's like that,' says Jovan. After research with a local cheese manufacturer, a recipe and a process were devised. Then two months ago the first samples were ready and Slobodan and his team were thrilled with the results. The local media christened it pule — 'little donkey'.
But the team always knew it could never be just another 'traditional local delicacy'. The production costs would have to push it up there alongside Oscietra caviar, Alban truffles and Chateau Petrus as a luxury product for the wealthiest connoisseurs and fusspots.
Nor was there any budget for an international marketing offensive although, in the past few days since the story broke, Slobodan has had requests from Switzerland, Austria, Israel and Malaysia.
Besides, Zasavica produces only enough donkey milk to make 100 kilos of cheese each year. So they decided to turn to Serbia's top celebrity, Novak Djokovic, to see if he would be interested in taking some — if not all — of it for his 'Novak' chain of bling-draped restaurants in Belgrade and Zagreb.
Following discussions with Djokovic's management, Slobodan and Jovan are now waiting to clinch the deal. Despite media reports that Djokovic is going to take the lot, it seems not. Who wants to look like some crazed 'Cheesefinger', hoarding an entire commodity for himself? So the Zasavica team are keen to find an international outlet.
'We have a friend in London who is going to talk to Harrods,' says Jovan. 'But that would be it. There is no point having lots of outlets with so little cheese.'
It is time to see where it all comes from. Over at the stables, I discover that only a dozen of the 130 donkeys are producing milk at any given time. Whereas a cow just keeps on going, has four teats and udders for storage, a jenny (a female donkey) has two teats, no reservoir and only lactates when she has a pule alongside her. Even then, no milk is taken until the pule has had enough.
Milkmaid Miropa Kunic, 54, shows me the ropes. I'm much too coy, tweaking and twiddling feebly, worried that my hands must be freezing for poor old Meleca.
Miropa soon steps in and starts heaving away like a bellringer, whereupon everything starts squirting into the bucket. Eventually, I get the hang of it.
Only this week, the farm has taken delivery of a milking machine but, even so, Miropa and the farmhands have to start off every teat by hand before it will respond to mechanisation. It can take hours to get a few litres in the can.
Finally, we repair to the snug of the reserve's restaurant where a whole Mangalica piglet has been roasted in my honour. Out comes the local wine, the plum brandy and, of course, the donkey milk liqueur. There is even a plate of donkey sausage — dry, smoky and like a sweeter form of cold lamb.
'We love our animals, but there are times when we have to control the numbers, like when the male chases a jenny who's his daughter. Then it's sausage time for him,' says Slobodan.
There are toasts and more toasts in liqueur, brandy, wine and milk. Fresh cheese arrives and I mull over another mouthful.
I would not pay hundreds of pounds for a chunk of it. But it has character, depth, less fat than its rivals and alleged medicinal powers. And, after all, London restaurants have diners who'll cheerfully pay more than £20 for a bottle of table water.
I have no doubt that there will be some people who are happy to pay caviar prices to have donkey cheese sprinkled on their rocket salad or served au nature. But they are going to have to wait a long time if they want the full Cleopatra.
