This is a story about my experience making the unique Georgian cheese, tenili, in summer 2023.
I rolled up to the village Andriatsminda, in rural Meskheti region of Georgia, with vague directions from Trevor AKA Milk Trekker, in search of one of the last remaining families of tenili cheesemakers. Spotting an old man in a bulldozer by the road, I yelled out the open window, “hey, do you know who makes tenili around here?” Without hesitation, he approached, opened my car door, sat down in the passenger seat, and pointed ahead. I had spent enough time in Georgia by this point to know that this is totally normal behavior and I had stumbled upon exactly the right person.
Two minutes down the bumpy dirt road he pointed at a house, gruffly instructed me “go ask them”, and got out of the car to walk back to his bulldozer. In front of the house, two well-dressed men were speaking in German. That’s unexpected, I thought to myself, but before I could ask them wtf they’re doing in this random little village in the middle of nowhere, a woman smoking a cigarette on the porch approached and asked “are you here for the cheesemaking workshop?” The look of confusion on my face answered her question and before I could utter “what cheesemaking workshop?” she had already opened the door and was ushering me in. As it turned out, this was my lucky day.
I had made the 5 hour drive to this remote region in hopes of volunteering on their farm for a few days and helping them make my favorite Georgian cheese, tenili. It’s not the sort of establishment that you can find on google so I planned to just show up at their doorstep and offer to help, ready to sleep in my tent and shovel shit all day. Instead, I stumbled upon an international group of cheesemakers looking rather…corporate. It was an EU-funded event where German cheesemakers were teaching a handful of local farmers how to make feta and I just got added to the guestlist. Cool!
After a couple hours of presentations about salinity and temperature that I felt like I was the only one intently listening to, the host, Ruslan, started bringing out plates of food and bottles of wine. In true Georgian style, there was enough food to feed the entire village, despite having only ten people sitting around the table. We ate and drank and laughed and ate some more, and slowly people filed out until Ruslan and I were left alone in front of the mountain of food, so we ate and drank some more.
Cows don’t stop making milk no matter how full and drunk you are, so, we rolled down the hill to the barn to join the old farmhand and teenage boys for evening milking. Milking 50 cows by hand into buckets is not an easy task but their seasoned hands moved like clockwork and soon enough we had made the rounds of the whole barn.
That evening, the old farmhand refused to let me pitch my tent, insisting that I stay in his guest bedroom. I often prefer the peace, privacy, and fresh air of my tent but I begrudgingly accepted his offer, fully aware that this was one of those situations where ‘no’ wouldn’t be accepted as an answer. He instructed me to be up at 7 for morning milking.
At 7am sharp the old man came knocking on my door, ready to go. I was still in bed, having taken his “be ready at 7am” instruction to mean “set my alarm for 7:30”. Those of you who have been to Georgia know that nobody is awake at 7am outside of nightclubs and nothing starts on time. Ever. This must have been a glitch in the universe. I jumped up and ran to the barn.
After making the rounds in the barn and having a raw milk chug-off with a month-old calf for breakfast (spoiler alert: I lost), I joined the boys for a day in the life of a shepherd.
The following day, after taking the cows out to the pasture, it was time to start the tenili. Yay! First, the cream is separated from the milk and set aside for later. Skim milk is heated gently, rennet added, and left to sit for a couple of hours. Once the master cheesemaker, Ia, uses her psychic powers to determine that the curd is ready, it’s cut and put in baskets to sour overnight.
The curd is shaped into a massive donut and gently stretched by hardy hands, continually running through the near-boiling whey to keep it warm and elastic. Over and over and over, Ia stretched the donut into a long loop of cheese and kept going for nearly an hour until it was one continuous strand likely 100+ meters long and pencil-thin. I took over a few times—offering her a break that she didn’t need—but never lasted more than a few minutes before running to dip my delicate fingers under the cold tap water. With a smile, Ia noted that with time you get used to the heat and it’s important to use bare hands so you can feel the consistency of the cheese. I’m not sure how she’s able to feel anything at all after hundreds of collective hours of scorching her hands but I’m certainly inspired.
Ia explained to me that it’s imperative to feel the exact moment when the cheese becomes stretchy or else it won’t work. Too hot and it turns to mush, too cold and it breaks. Some days it never stretches. “The milk has to want to become tenili”, she explained, “and you have to feel what it wants. Sometimes, you see the cows and you already know that today there will be no tenili. So we make other cheese.” The spiritual connection between land, animal, and human is palpable. There are no thermometers, no timers, no settings for the flame, just intuition built on lifetimes of coexistence. It’s quite impressive.
This cheese is only made in one small region because, according to local lore, it requires the cows to have a very specific diet of local flora: the combination of aromatic herbs in the almost desert-like environment on one side of the ridge and lush greenery on the other side work their way into each cow’s milk. And you can feel it. The bitter, herbal, sage-y aroma of the pasture subtly carries through into the milk and onward to the cheese, complimented by the vibrant freshness of the lush wooded grassland. When I noticed it, I felt the inexplicable essence of the mountain; I was transported to the very fields that had been distilled through the body of a mammal and into my glass.
After stretching, the endless ribbon is tossed on a table to be peeled apart into threads, kind of like the world’s largest string cheese tangled in a massive pile. It’s hung to dry for at least a day and sometimes weeks, then placed in a bowl and drenched in the cream that was separated out in the beginning, doused in salt, mixed up, and buried in a clay pot for the next 2-4months to age underground.
The result is nothing short of spectacular—a cheese that’s not only deeply flavorful but also a ton of fun. The buttery little balls of cream melt in your mouth, retaining a freshness that perfectly compliments the stronger flavor of the cheese strands which they encompass. To put it simply, it’s awesome.
