Yak Herder's Trade Good · Hardened Cheese
Chugo
Photo: Arijit Dasgupta / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
It's so dense that a single knuckle-sized piece can take up to five hours to fully soften in the mouth — locals treat it less like a snack and more like a slow-release stick of gum.
Yak milk is boiled, strained, and pressed into small hard blocks, then air-dried until they turn nearly rock-solid. Haa's highland herders string them up by the dozen and sell them in the district's shops and markets, where they're known locally as Haabey ruto — 'the hard thing from Haa.'
Why it's made this way: Haa sits closest to Bhutan's high yak pastures near the Tibetan border, and herders who spend summers grazing yak at altitude turned surplus milk into a cheese that would survive weeks of travel and barter without refrigeration.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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