🧀 Wagasi

Wagasi (wagashi, gassirè) is a soft, unripened West African cheese made from cow's milk, curdled not with rennet but with an extract of the Sodom apple plant, Calotropis procera. In Benin it is the most eaten dairy product; it is made mainly in the north of the country, almost entirely by Fulani (Peulh) and Gando women. ¹²

The names you will meet. Researchers searching for this cheese use wagashi, wagashie, wangashi, warankashi, warankasi, wara, waghazi and woagachi, and in Benin the full name is often wagashi gassirè; in English it is described as West African soft cheese or Fulani cheese. It has nothing to do with Japanese wagashi sweets. ¹²

How it is made in Benin. A survey of 165 cheesemakers in Dassa and Nikki found four steps. Most filter the milk and warm it to about 59 °C for 20 minutes. Leaves and stems of the plant, or its sap, are washed, crushed and ground with a little milk or water, then strained and added to the warm milk, which sets. The curd is cooked at about 91 °C for 34 minutes and ladled into oval woven or plastic colanders to drain into white, soft rounds. ¹

Red wagasi. About one maker in eight dyes white rounds red by soaking them in a liquid made from sorghum cobs or panicles, or teak leaves, boiled with potash, bicarbonate or salt. The colour of dye sorghum leaf sheaths comes from the pigments apigeninidin and luteolinidin; a 2024 study recommends extracting it with sodabi, a local palm-wine spirit, at 200 ml per litre, which matched the best red cheese from the Parakou market. ¹³

Safety. Market wagasi often exceeds the usual limits for bacteria, and E. coli and Salmonella keep turning up, while cheese made under laboratory conditions comes out clean. The suggested limits are at most 3 log CFU/g of total bacteria and 2 log for E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus, with no Salmonella or Listeria. Every maker surveyed in Benin used aluminium pots, two thirds worked in the open air, and 59 % of dairy farmers misused antibiotics. ¹²

Its yeasts. DNA sequencing of 20 wagasi samples from Benin found the yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus making up 61.1 % of the yeast community; the potentially harmful Candida parapsilosis also turned up. The authors suggest the safe yeasts could become starter cultures for a controlled process. ⁴

Who makes it. In the Benin survey all cheesemakers were women, 62 % Peulh and 35 % Gando, and 98 % of traders were women, while 94 % of dairy farmers were men. Milk and cheese bring Peulh households more than half of their yearly income. ¹

New versions are being tested. Soy milk has replaced 5–20 % of cow's milk, and coconut, tiger nut and Bambara groundnut drinks have been tried; sheep's and goat's milk are used only as a full replacement. ²