Bandel is an East Indian Cheese You'll Want to Try (If You Can Find It)

Editor’s note: Every cheese tells a story, some more interesting than others. Our thanks to new contributor Tania Banerjee for suggesting a story on an obscure but fascinating cheese from India. 

Standing from the late 1800s, the labyrinthine New Market (previously known as Sir Stuart Hogg Market) of Kolkata in the West Bengal state of India is packed with surprises. The shops along the perpendicular alleyways of this enclosed market are a smorgasbord of curious products. One of them is the Bandel cheese— a salty, smoky, crumbly, artisanal cow’s milk cheese with a strong inherent terroir currently made by only one family in the world.

The History of Bandel Cheese

Tracking the story of the cheese would take us back to the history of the subcontinent’s first European colonizers—the Portuguese. In early 1500s they established colonies in the Bengal province of undivided India. The cheese is named after Bandel, a town founded by the Portuguese 54 kilometers north of Kolkata on the right bank of the river Hooghly. Over time the local Bengalis picked up some of the Portuguese food habits, including the consumption of cheese. As writer Chitrita Banerji sums up in her book The Hour of the Goddess, “The Portuguese not only contributed the comparatively obscure ‘bandel cheese’ to the gourmet Bengali’s platter, their distinctive way of processing milk also initiated a whole new flowering of the Bengali culinary imagination.”

To make this cheese, the artisans use an acidic agent to curdle fresh cow’s milk. The precipitated milk solids from the curdled milk are strained dry, kneaded and molded into thick cookie-sized discs. To increase the shelf-life, they then coat the cheese with generous amounts of salt, a natural preservative. Cured for at least two days, the salted cheese is smoked thoroughly in traditioned rural ovens fueled by cow-dung cakes. Bandel cheesemakers sell it in both its smoked and unsmoked versions.

According to eminent historian K.T Achaya, before the arrival of the Portuguese, the native Hindus abhorred the practice of deliberate curdling of milk due to religious reasons. However, with time this practice intruded the Indian kitchens and gained favor among Indian taste buds. Paneer, the popular Indian cottage cheese, is a descendant of the Bandel cheese. Bengali sweets like roshogolla and sondesh are derivatives of the Bandel cheese as well.

Bandel Cheese Makers and Sellers

Vidyasagar Setu bridge linking Kolkata and Howrah

The migration of the elusive artisans has pushed the history of the relation of the cheese with the town of Bandel into realms of haze. Today, J.Johnson and S.Panja are the only two shops that procure and sell the Bandel cheese. The owners of these shops are the rare few who are in direct contact with the cheesemakers. The craftspeople who shoulder the weight of this heritage cheese lead a secluded life. The crafters have a couple of trade-secrets that they hold close to their heart—the acid agent that curdles the milk and the exact method of smoking the cheese.

Saurav Gupta, owner of The Whole Hog- Deli & Charcuterie, a Kolkata based online delivery store said, “Palash Ghosh and Debdas Ghosh, the two cousins who make the Bandel cheese, now live in the Kotulpur block of Bankura district in West Bengal.” This is a place around 105 kilometers west of the city of Bandel. According to him, the great-grandfather of Palash was a resident of Tarakeshwar, a town 52 kilometers southwest of Bandel. “It is quite interesting to follow the migration route of the cheese from Bandel to Bankura,” he said.

In the COVID-19 induced nationwide long lockdown of 2020, the Ghosh family had to throw away around 12,000 pieces of cheese, suffering a huge loss. Since then, Gupta has managed in establishing a working relationship with the Ghosh family. Through his online delivery store, he now distributes the Bandel cheese to his clientele. In the lockdown of 2021, when the government shuttered the physical shops, this online outlet brought some relief.

Gupta is also a history aficionado. In the National Library of India at Alipore, while going through a compilation of letters published in 1849, he unearthed the mention of a particular kind of salty and smoky cheese from Bandel—he believes this is the Bandel cheese.

How Chefs Use Bandel

Connoisseurs love grating the cheese over their salads and savor it clubbed between sandwiches. They soak it overnight in water to get rid of the excess salt and relish the cheese disc just by itself. India-based British chef Shaun Kenworthy suggested pairing the smoked Bandel cheese with the red wine Fratelli Sangiovese from the vineyards in Maharashtra. In a 2017 article on Bloomberg, chef Vivek Singh of Cinnamon Club, London, marked the Bandel cheese as one of his favorite under-the-radar cheeses that is “great to crumble onto scrambled eggs.”

“It is not a cheese that you would normally use in cooking so I liked the challenge that it presented to me to figure out interesting ways to use it in our menu,” said Mumbai-based chef Thomas Zacharias. A proponent of using indigenous ingredients in culinary sojourns, Zacharias stumbled upon Bandel cheese on his food trip to Kolkata in 2014. During his tenure as a chef at The Bombay Canteen, he used Bandel cheese as stuffing in chargrilled Bhavnagri chillies. He also used grated Bandel cheese to garnish a potato and coconut milk-based curry, to add contrast in flavor.

Jaipur-based chef Anuroopa Banerjee Gupta was devouring some delectable kathi rolls from Nizam, a heritage restaurant, in New Market when her local friend informed her about Bandel Cheese, sold just a few meters round the corner. “Given the fact that it takes so much effort to make it, I couldn’t believe that it is so cheaply available,” she said. She seasons sweet items like sweet potatoes and butternut squash with the salty Bandel cheese. “If I want a hint of smoke without using charcoal, I just grate the smoked Bandel cheese.” She points that using the smoked Bandel cheese is an innovative way to impart smoky dimensions to raw greens in a salad. According to her, Bandel cheese, with its sharp salty taste, is also a good palate cleanser.

Anuroopa throws light on the biggest challenge of using this cheese— the acquirement procedure. “Restaurants have standardized menus for an entire season or more, so I avoid putting Bandel cheese items on it as there is no guarantee of when I would get the cheese and how much I would get.” For her it is an ingredient for food pop-ups where weekly menus are acceptable. From salad courses to croquettes, Anuroopa has left no leaf unturned to reveal the versatility of this cheese.

To secure a geographical indication tag and make this cheese exportable, Dr. Debabrata Bera and his team, at the department of Food and Technology of Jadavpur University in Kolkata is researching the cheese. They seek to enhance the hygiene of the cheese and make it a easily available mainstream food product—a solution that could solve problems that plague Anuroopa.

Someday the research might bring good tidings for Bandel cheese lovers, but till then navigating the clamor and murmur of musky lanes of New Market remains the only offline cross-over that connects the Bandel cheese with its fans.