Instructions: If youve had your fill of goats, sheeps and cows milk cheeses, get your appetite ready for yaks milk cheese.

In Tibet, where no cheese-making tradition existed previously, this all-natural cheese is being made to help improve an ancient way of life.

The sweet, delicate, herbal-tasting cheese is made from the rich milk of those shaggy-haired, big-horned, buffalo-size animals that roam the plateau at 14,000 feet above sea level.

New Yorks Trace Foundation, which works with Tibetans in China, has joined with Jonathan White, a former cheese-maker at New Yorks Egg Farm Dairy and founder of Grasslands Cheese Consortium, a non-profit organization that helps American grass-based dairy farmers become cheese-makers. On this remote treeless plateau, where per capita income averages $90 a year and the only source of fuel is yak dung, the Trace Foundation is teaching nomads how to turn milk into cheese and cheese into added income.

Theyre cash-poor, but they have these enormous herds that they treat as capital and dont want to sell off, says Ethan Goldings, senior program officer of the Trace Foundation. Cheese will provide them with a disposable income so they can send their kids to college and take care of their family when theyre ill.

The average family owns about 80 yak, Goldings says. The animals provide milk, butter and meat, as well as hair for tents, and fleece and skin for clothing. Although a yak is as large as a dairy cow, it gives only as much milk as a goat, just a few liters per day. The milk has the grassy, floral flavor of edelweiss and other wildflowers that the yaks graze on. It also has double the protein and minerals of cows milk, but spoils easily.

In the summer, when the yaks can graze and grow strong, milk is abundant. But in the winter, Goldings says, the yaks are not milked. The Tibetans struggle just to keep the animals alive. As a result, the cheese is made only during the summer.

The Trace Foundation built three low-tech cheese factories that are lit only by daylight and where all the work is done by hand. They are operated by a monastery, an orphanage-old age home and a medical clinic, with all profits going back to support each of the groups work.

The firm cheese, named Ragya Metok (flower of Ragya in Tibetan) is made from yaks milk that is heated and ripened in big copper vats, curdled, then drained and molded into 15-pound wheels. The cheese is dry cured in a coating of Tibetan red salt, from an ocean that has been dry for 15 million years. Known as Tears of Droma, it is similar in texture to fleur du sel, the pricey artisan salt from Brittany, but is tinged pink by the presence of iron. The cheese is then aged in the thin, mountain air, wrapped in ceremonial scarves (khata), and packed in bamboo dumpling-steamer baskets.

Two chefs in Beijing have spotlighted the cheese, featuring it in multiple courses, including a tempura-like dish. And in San Francisco, the cheese was featured in January at the 27 th Fancy Food Show, where producers showed off their wares to chefs and prospective retailers.

The first shipment of yaks milk cheese was imported into the United States just last month. Limited supplies are selling for $25 per pound at www.cowsoutside.com, the Grasslands Cheese Consortiums Web site.

We know people will try it once just for the novelty and story behind it, Goldings says. But we hope to make a cheese good enough that theyll come back to it again and again.

If you would like to email yourself the recipe for later use, or share the recipe with your friends or family, enter the email addresses below and this recipe will be emailed to you and others as well.