--- title: "Cheesemaker Who Hikes to Herding Camps Says Turkey’s Cheeses Are Overlooked" description: "Trevor Warmedahl quit a commercial job in Seattle and has since followed shepherds in Mongolia, Georgia and Norway." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-12T12:01:45.347Z modified: 2026-10-12T15:54:53Z url: https://rews.cc/a/cheesemaker-who-hikes-to-herding-camps-says-turkey-s-cheeses-174be8 language: en tags: ["food", "travel", "history", "sustainability", "culture"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Cheesemaker Who Hikes to Herding Camps Says Turkey’s Cheeses Are Overlooked *Trevor Warmedahl quit a commercial job in Seattle and has since followed shepherds in Mongolia, Georgia and Norway.* By rews desk · October 12, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/cheesemaker-who-hikes-to-herding-camps-says-turkey-s-cheeses-174be8 ## In brief - Trevor Warmedahl, a former Seattle cheesemaker, said Turkey’s cheeses get too little attention - He singled out tulum peyniri, a Turkish cheese aged mainly in goatskins - He quit commercial cheesemaking and arrived in Mongolia in 2019, later living with herders on the Zavkhan grassland - In Georgia’s Tusheti region he walked about 81 miles with shepherds and 300 sheep - His book Cheese Trekking, published March 3 by Chelsea Green, argues that milk has a terroir Trevor Warmedahl, a former Seattle cheesemaker who hikes to remote herding camps for rare cheeses, said in an interview published on Monday that Turkey is “a universe of cheese that doesn’t get enough attention.” Speaking with Madison Chapman of [BBC Travel](https://bbc.com/travel/article/20261007-the-man-hiking-the-world-in-search-of-rare-cheeses), Mr. Warmedahl named Turkey as the place he most wants to go next. He picked out tulum peyniri, which is aged mainly in furry goatskins and can come out in animal shapes. He said he hadn’t expected much. “How good can goatskin-aged cheese be, right? It was phenomenal,” he said. “Turkish cheese needs to be talked about alongside Western Europe,” he said. More remote places, in his view, have just as many cheeses worth saving. He came to the work sideways. While making cheese commercially in Seattle, he said, he realized the milk came from animals he never saw, so he quit. In 2019 he landed in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and lived alone in a yurt with a dog. [A profile published by Bioneers](https://bioneers.org/a-global-journey-to-learn-from-traditional-cheese-makers/) says he first went there to manage a cheese plant that used pasteurized milk and store-bought starter cultures, the industrial methods he was trying to move away from. ![A rustic cheese wheel and tied sack sit on rocks overlooking an alpine valley, while a hiker approaches goats and a tent beneath snowy mountains.](https://rews.cc/img/31cefd57d09ed8d36e9d0479be5f1f222e8ced39.webp) In Mongolia he watched women flick milk into the air before making cheese, a gesture of respect known as a milk libation, and saw tables covered in fresh byaslag. Coming back from an overnight trip across the Gobi Desert on a Soviet-era sleeper train, he met a woman who invited him to stay with her herder family on the Zavkhan grassland. He spent the summer milking yaks before dawn and cooking milk down into aaruul, sweet-and-sour dried curds. That summer set the course. The high point so far came in Tusheti, a mountain region of Georgia on the Russian border, where he found shepherds milking sheep by hand into wooden pails and making Tushuri guda, a cheese like feta that is aged in sheepskins turned inside out. He calls Georgia’s ancestral cheeses “fossil cheeses” because they were nearly lost and are now coming back as part of a post-Soviet cultural revival. At the end of the season he walked about 81 miles (130 kilometers) down the valley with the shepherds and 300 sheep. “The cheeses I find are always far out, made by hermit types sticking to the old ways out of sheer stubbornness,” he said. Not everything won him over. Norway’s gammelost, a grayish-brown cheese with mold he likened to fruit rot, tasted to him like a musty cellar with a mouth-numbing spiciness. “It wasn’t for me,” he said. “But deliciousness is cultural. It’s taught. So, I always say: don’t try something once, try it 10 times.” ![A woodcut-style illustration shows a hand holding a forkful of cheese above a plate of cheese, with other forks, bread, tomatoes, and wine nearby.](https://rews.cc/img/d7eedd39850ea19d20c34c4c48f77dc8d2479aed.webp) His case for the old methods is partly practical. Animals can graze almost anywhere, he said, so herding is a way of life that can move as the climate shifts and land turns to desert. Farmstead cheeses, made only from a farmer’s own animals, depend on heritage livestock breeds that he said are disappearing “at an alarming rate” with industrialization. He laid out that argument at length in [*Cheese Trekking*](https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9781645022985/), a 240-page book Chelsea Green published on March 3. It contends that milk has a terroir drawn from a landscape’s plants, concentrated by grazing animals and shaped into food by human hands. He also writes a newsletter, [*Milk Trekker*](https://substack.com/@milktrekker), and has written for [*Culture*](https://culturecheesemag.com/author/trevor-warmedahl/), a cheese magazine. For travelers, his advice was to find the cheesemonger with the most local bent and ask which makers to visit. Paid tours are fine, he said, as long as the money reaches local producers, which he calls responsible “lacto-culinary” tourism. He also asked visitors to accept broken equipment and mud on farms. “When we romanticize tradition, it encourages locals to put themselves in a museum,” he said. “We need to be open to the fact that it’s not all grandmas spinning wool on wheels outside stone cottages.”