Taiada Silvania is a unique cheese made by a single producer in Sao Paulo’s Caçapava municipality, who thought mixing milk with native leafcutter ants would be a great idea.
Camila Almeida, the owner and founder of Estância Silvânia, came up with Taiada Silvania cheese while brainstorming ideas to attract tourists interested in rural attractions.
She wanted something that really made her region stand out, and she remembered that the people of the area had long been eating Içá leafcutter ants as part of the local cuisine.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1718806029429-0’); });
Since her farm produced cheese, she decided that adding a few toasted Içá ants to one of their best cheeses would be interesting, and she was right.
Today, Taiada Silvania is known all over the world and has won several international awards, including in France.
Brazilian indigenous peoples have consumed içá ants for centuries, maybe even longer, and writer Monteiro Lobato once dubbed the critters “Brazilian caviar,” so Almeida wasn’t completely nuts to add them to her Taiada Silvania cheese.
What surprised even the cheese’s creator was the success that the cheese enjoyed right from its launch in 2021.
“We toast the ants before adding them to the cheese during the forming process, one of the stages of the process,” Camila Almeida told Globo.
“This, in fact, was a huge challenge because working with them isn’t possible at other times; only during the forming process are we able to use them.”
Created especially for the 2021 Mondial du Fromage et des Produits Laitiers, in Tours, France, Taiada Silvania won the bronze medal, and its creator recieved an invitation to exhibit the delicacy at the Salon du Fromage, in Paris, the following year.
This was only the beginning, as the ant-infused cheese has since been honoured at cheese contests around South America and has also developed quite a fan base in Brazil.
Made from raw A2 milk from pasture-raised GIR cows and toasted içá ants, Taiada Silvania is a sweet, firm cheese with notes of almonds and chestnuts, a slight fennel flavour, and the unmistakable crunch of ants. It sells for about 200 Brazilian reais ($38) per kilogram.
• Culled from www.odditycentral.com
The post Brazilian cheese mixed with ants gains massive popularity appeared first on The Sun Nigeria.
