Say cheese: How this Norwegian breakfast staple is melting fine foodies’ hearts

A drive through western Norway is a postcard sprung to life, the majestic landscape criss-crossed with fjords, towering mountains and ice-blue glaciers. But the region is home to more than just scenic wonders. Here, herds of goats roam the green pastures of the mountain slopes, delivering the raw material for one of Norway’s most unique culinary specialties: brown cheese.

Brown cheese is a caramel-like, sweet, and tangy delicacy that, in fact, isn’t really a cheese at all. Largely unknown to most of the world, it is uniquely Norwegian; an everyday staple and an important part of the country’s culinary heritage. Traditionally, brown cheese is sliced and served on breakfast rolls or on sweet waffles with jam, but nowadays, top chefs around the country are finding new ways to harness the tasty richness of this unusual product.

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“Brown cheese has some unique qualities,” says Danish chef Esben Holmboe Bang, the mastermind behind three Michelin-starred Maaemo in Oslo, where brown cheese has been on the menu in numerous forms since day one. At Maaemo, where great Norwegian products have always been centre stage, Holmboe Bang uses brown cheese to flavour a sauce served with hay-smoked quail. The quail is glazed with the reduced sauce and served with a purée of cep mushrooms, fermented vegetables, and lots of brown cheese. “It has this salty, acidic, tangy umami, which works great as a flavour enhancer and rounds off sauces, almost like a miso,” Holmboe Bang says. “It’s a shame that it’s not more widely used in cooking.”

Holmboe Bang isn’t the only chef experimenting with the tangy ingredient. Drammen-born head chef Petter Rolund Antonsen serves it up at all-day casual eatery Kafeteria August, also in Oslo. This time of year, he uses it for a ‘Brimi-saus’ – a game sauce named after famous Norwegian chef Arne Brimi. Passed down from the master himself, the recipe features reduced raspberry vinegar, reindeer stock and lots of cream and brown cheese. But if brown cheese isn’t technically cheese, what exactly is it?

Made in Norway’s deep mountain valleys for hundreds of years, it’s made with whey, a by-product from cheese production. While the first official record of brown cheese is from 1646, it was Anne Hov, a young farmer’s daughter from Gudbrandsdalen, who ‘invented’ the popular iteration in 1863. Traditionally, brown cheeses are made with whey from goat’s milk, but whey from cow’s milk can also be used for a less intense version.

When cheese is made, rennet (a set of enzymes) is added to milk and the temperature is raised, causing the milk to separate into solid cheese and liquid whey. The nutrient-rich whey is placed in large vats and reduced for eight to nine hours until caramelising into a thick brown substance full of milk sugar and proteins: brown cheese. Cow’s or goat’s cream (or both) is added to the mixture before the mass is put in moulds and left to rest. Once cold, it’s ready to slice, grate or melt. Unlike ‘real’ cheese, brown cheese doesn’t require any ageing – it’s best eaten fresh.

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In western Norway, far from Oslo’s fine dining scene, Undredal is a picturesque remote village beside the Unesco World Heritage-listed Nærøyfjord. Here, brown cheese is the glue that binds the community together, says 31-year-old farmer Maria Baudonnel Underdal. Her family has been making brown cheese in Undredal for generations. Although she initially left the village to study environmental development and agroecology, five years ago she decided to return to Undredal with her boyfriend to take over the family farm. “It wasn’t enough for me to just talk about what kind of agriculture we want for the future. I wanted to do it,” she says.

She points out that here, she had the chance to do something environmentally friendly and with animal welfare at top of mind. “The goats are the bosses,” she says. Today, her farm is one of three producers that form the small co-operative Undredal Stølsysteri. Here, 330 goats graze on the pastures and hillsides along the fjord. In Undredal, at least a quarter of the village’s 63 inhabitants are directly involved in the making of brown cheese and the white goat’s cheese kvitost, a prerequisite for the brown cheese.

Producing cheese in a traditional fashion hasn’t always been easy. The award-winning unpasteurised white and brown cheeses made here faced extinction in 1991, when food authorities demanded that producers pasteurise the milk. The Undredal farmers resisted, but it took a 12-year fight before, in 2003, Undredal Stølsysteri finally became Norway’s first producer with a licence to sell their raw goat’s milk cheeses in all of Europe.

Baudonnnel Underdal and her boyfriend aren’t the only young people going back to their remote home villages to carry on the traditions of brown cheese. Another is 26-year-old Erlend Kandal from cheesemakers Kandal Ysteri. Last year, he quit his job in healthcare and went home to his parents’ small farm in Kandal to revive the village’s tradition of brown cheese with his mother and the family’s herd of 140 goats.

“Brown cheese was made here up until 1954. I wanted to bring that tradition back,” says Kandal, who uses his grandmother’s old recipe, using only firewood to reduce the whey and adding rich goat’s cream at the end. The vat holds 200 litres, which takes a solid seven to eight hours to reduce. The resulting brown cheese is an award-winning flavour bomb; salty, rich, and slowly melting in the mouth with a kick from the acidity of the goat’s milk.

Making Norwegian brown cheese is not only a small-scale affair. In Byrkjelo, a three-hour drive north of Undredal, one finds dairy giant Tine’s large facility, where 5,658 tonnes of the stuff was produced in 2021. That amounts to 60 percent of Tine’s total brown cheese output, says Pontus Sydberger, the production manager at the facility. With the sweet smell of caramelised milk lingering in the air, the whey here is reduced in huge temperature controlled stainless steel vats, pumped through pipes, and squished directly into the packaging. The whole process takes only one and a half hours.

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Brown cheese is not exclusively for Norwegians, Sydberger says. In the last few years, it has gained a surprising foothold in South Korea, where chefs are now using it as pizza topping and in various desserts. In 2021, Tine exported almost 100 tons of brown cheese to South Korea, making it the third-biggest export market after Sweden and Denmark. Still, it thrives locally. When Swedish chef Frida Ronge opened rooftop Japanese-Nordic restaurant TAK at Oslo’s swanky Sommerro hotel, she wanted to pay homage to the region by integrating brown cheese into the menu.

“When I think about Norway, I think about the world’s best seafood and brown cheese,” she says. “It would be wrong not to have it on the menu. I wanted to take this typical Norwegian ingredient and try to elevate tradition into modern gastronomy.” Her Norwegian staff were somewhat sceptical of the idea. Growing up with it on their waffles and morning rolls, they really didn’t think much of its culinary capabilities, but Ronge persevered regardless.

“The brown cheese’s caramelised taste is perfect for desserts, and when you add umami from the miso paste, the taste really takes off,” says Ronge. She decided on a brown cheese ice cream, served with a choux pastry filled with miso caramel, adding puffed rye and grated frozen brown cheese on top. “People generally don’t cook with it, which is a shame. I wanted to show that you can.”