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The best Hungarian cheeses
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When we think about Hungarian gastronomy, cheese might not be the first thing that comes to mind. Wine, sure, paprika, sure, lángos, absolutely, but cheese? Well, as it turns out, there is much potential in the Hungarian cheese-making industry, and there are award-winning Hungarian cheeses out there. Let’s see three of them.
Even though Hungarians consume about half the amount of cheese as the French do, we still love this particular dairy product. If you go into any supermarket in Hungary, you will see a pretty wide selection of all kinds of cheeses. However, most of those cheese are not Hungarian, and even most of the Hungarian ones are usually just the rip-off versions of popular foreign cheese types.
A little bit of history
In Hungary, cheese making as we know it today started in the 18th century. However, Hungarians have been making cheese way before that. An early form of cheese making was already present in Hungary as early as the 13th century, and we mainly used sheep milk for the production. By the end of the 18th century, there were many dairy farms in Hungary that produced and processed milk on a regular basis. At first, the cheese was made from raw milk only, resulting in a puffy cheese with lots of holes. The maturing technology arrived later, which resulted in the introduction of many new cheese types.
In 2018, Hungarian quality cheese making is on the rise. In the summer of 2017, three Hungarian kinds of cheese were chosen to be amongst the best cheeses in the world at the world’s most prestigious cheese competition: Mondial du Fromage held in France. In the hard cheese category, the first and the second were both Hungarian cheeses: Ranolder and Pater. The cheese called Panarella finished third in the semi-hard category. We review these three important Hungarian kinds of cheese in the rest of the article.
1. Ranolder
This particular cheese was named after János Ranolder Bishop of Veszprém, who helped to boost the area’s agriculture, especially the viticulture and winemaking. The ingredients that Ranolder is made of are all locally produced.
Mom used to make a sweet cheese around Easter I believe. I don’t know the name of it, unfortunately. It had raisins and a hint of cinnamon. I believe it was traditional from the upper east provinces of Traditional Hungary (Zemplen, Ung provinces)