Eight international cheeses you need to try once
Paneer is a dense (and delicious) cheese eaten in India and other Southeast Asian countries. (Kanwardeep Kaur/Unsplash/)I came to terms with my lactose intolerance two years ago, after an encounter with a grilled cheese sandwich in my college dining hall gave me a night to remember. But one of my biggest regrets in having to quit dairy for life is that I never tried a cheese that wasn’t from France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, or the US. In my mind, cheese was either fancy and European, or fast food and American—never anything in between. And yet, there’s a whole world of cheeses all across Asian, African, and Latin cultures. Dairy farming first started in the Middle East almost 11,000 years ago, before spreading through the Balkans to Greece and Central Asia. But the cheeses that sit on our grocery shelves today are nearly all Western, and that’s shaped our perception of...