World record broken: This is the most expensive cheese in the world

Recently, Spanish blue cheese Cabrales entered the Guinness Book of Records as the most expensive cheese in the world after reaching a price of 32,000 euros for a two-kilogram wheel.

“We knew we had a good product that was hard to beat,” producer Guillermo Pendas, who produced the expensive delicacy at his family’s factory in Los Puertos, told the Times of London with no false modesty. .

Pendas explained that it is a semi-hard cheese with a strong flavor that ripens in the mountain caves of Asturias in northern Spain, and that just before breaking this record, at the 51st annual Las Arenas cheese competition, it was announced as best Cabrales, a blue cheese that is produced exclusively in the aforementioned Spanish province of Asturias.

The expensive wheel was sold to the owner of the restaurant El Llagar de Colloto from Oviedo, Ivan Suarez, who said after the auction that it didn’t matter how much he paid for it because he was fascinated by the passion of the local cheesemakers. for the country and their products, so he took every lot at auction without any offer of remorse. By the way, Suarez also bought a previous cheese that entered the Guinness Book of Records, also a blue Cabrales that was sold in 2019 for 20,500 euros ($22,129).

“The high price of this cheese comes mostly from the painstaking process of its production,” said producer Pendas, explaining that the expensive cheese is made from cow’s milk or a mixture of cow’s, sheep’s and goat’s milk, which it must first be aged for at least four years. months in the mountain caves in the Cabrales region, located in the Picos de Europa National Park.

His winning cheese, he adds, was aged for eight months in a cave 1,400 meters (4,593 feet) high at a temperature of 7 degrees Celsius “for at least eight months”. After the service time, this Cabrales is transported on foot down the mountain to the nearest road, from which it is then returned to the farm and prepared for sale.