🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Romanians

Romanians are a Romance-speaking people and the main population of Romania, where the Carpathians surround Transylvania and the plains of Wallachia lie at their foot. Sheep farming with seasonal driving of flocks to the mountains is a main tradition, and the best-known dairy product is the sheep's cheese brânză de burduf, matured in fir bark.

As the magazine culture describes, shepherds (ciobani) usually spend winter in the valleys and summer in mountain camps — stâne: huts of old wood under thatched roofs, where they milk their fellow villagers' animals. Slow Food mentions the Turcana sheep and the Romanian spotted cow: one family from the Bucegi Mountains milks twenty sheep and three cows.

On the stâne they make caș — fresh cheese from raw sheep's milk curdled with lamb rennet. From it comes brânză de burduf: pieces of caș are salted, kneaded and packed into a sheep's stomach or a tube of fir bark, where, according to Slow Food, the cheese matures for two weeks or two to three months. Urdă, a soft cheese, is made from the whey. A review in Foods (2025) calls brânză a sheep's cheese popular in Romania and Slovakia. Burduf from the Bucegi Mountains has been a Slow Food Presidium since 2005. Mămăligă, a cornmeal porridge, is served with brânză and sour cream, and balmuș is groats boiled in sheep's milk. In 2023 seasonal transhumance in Romania and nine other countries joined the UNESCO intangible heritage list; communities hold festivals at the start and end of the season.

Why it matters to you. Slow Food writes that store shelves are full of products called "burduf" made in industrial dairies on the plains, while the real mountain cheese is made in summer on the stâne. So look at the origin on the label, not just the name.