Tsetse is making butter in Sonak village

The production of dairy foods in Tibetan nomadic communities starts with the collection of milk and ends with liquid whey. This process is almost exclusively completed by women in the family.

First, women milk the calf-mother yaks and/or hybrid yak-cows. When enough milk is accumulated, it is usually stored overnight. The next day, the milk is heated to more than lukewarm but less than boiling, then poured into the milk-churning bucket sealed with a lid. The milk-churning stick—a body-length stick with crossed wooden boards at the end, each a foot in length and three inches wide—is pulled through the center hole of the lid. Once sealed, family members churn the milk by pulling and pushing the churning stick in a repetitive motion. After a couple of hours, the milk turns into butter. This separation process has been replaced recently by a machine.

Once the butter is removed, the remaining buttermilk is warmed up to produce cheese; when the buttermilk is heated, the cheese separates from the liquid whey. The cheese is drained and then dried in the sun, broken into pieces spread on a fabric tarp or woven yak-hair canvas. Dried cheese can be stored for later use or traded for cash to people who use it as a key ingredient in products such as soap and lotion. The whey is often fed to livestock. While the dairy food production process is tedious and labor intensive, the products are used efficiently without waste.

ID: TNP_2016_08-06_LHA_0134