Is there anything more glorious than cheese? Think about it. Cheese makes every food better. It tastes like winning. It makes you feel happy inside. And it comes in a million flavors. Most of us are used to the garden variety grocery store cheeses, but cheese making is a serious, ancient and, creative art form that produces some pretty extreme products. We pulled some of the most jaw-droppingly weird cheeses, for your reading (and tasting?) pleasure.

Pule: The Word’s Most Expensive Cheese

At about $1,000 per pound, Pule cheese tops the list of world’s most expensive cheese. It’s only made in Serbia, where rare Balkan donkeys on a nature preserve slowly produce the milk it’s made from. It takes 15 donkeys upwards of three and a half days to produce enough milk for just one pound of pule. Who would have thought that one of the finest things in life comes from a donkey?


Casu Marzu: Maggot Cheese

Maggot cheese is a sheep’s milk cheese from Italy. To its precise texture, the cheese is fermented by maggots, which break down the milk fats. So what happens to the maggots once the cheese reaches the perfect consistency? You eat them! Well, some people remove them first, but no harm will come to you if you leave the little white worms in their cheesy home. Watch out though, maggots can launch themselves through the air when disturbed.


Milbenkäse: Mite Cheese

This cheese is made with mites. You’re probably thinking the mites snack on the cheese in a similar way that maggots help ferment milk fats, but no. T his cheese is actually made using the feces of the mites. Yes, it’s essentially poop cheese. At one point in time, only one German man named Lisebeth Brauer knew how to make this cheese, which almost went extinct in the 70′ s. Thanks to him, Milbenkäse is alive and well.

Clawson Stilton: Gold Cheese

If you keep your mind on your money and your money on your mind, then you should probably trade in your Velveeta for this cheese with real gold flakes in it. It’s a white S tilton with so much edible gold inside that it costs an estimated $5 to $10 per cracker-sized amount. It only comes out at Christmas time, and as to be expected, there’s a hefty waiting list, depending on the amount they produce . That’s real luxury.

Churpi: Tibetan Yak Cheese

There are hard cheeses, and then there’s Yak cheese, a Tibetan yak milk cheese that’s hug out to dry until it’s literally hard enough to break your teeth.

Parma Violets: Candy Cheese

Parma Violets is a popular UK candy. When it celebrated its 70 th birthday, cheesemakers ground it up and made cheese out of it. It tastes more like candy than cheese, but hey, we’ll take it.

Alrag: Horse Milk Cheese

In Asia, they make a cheese from horse milk called Alrag . They milk foaling mares , and leave it to ferment to create the horse cheese.

Human Cheese: Breast Milk Cheese

Human breast milk cheese isn’t something you can buy, but it’s worth noting that Daniel Angerer cooked up a batch for his NYC restaurant out of his wife’s donated breast milk.

As the saying goes, there is truly a lid for every pot. Or in this case, a cheese for every taste.

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