Kinarut, Sabah

When Australian Shelley Blew came to the Malaysia-Borneo state of Kota Kinabalu over three decades ago, the last thing she expected was to be still on the island in 2023 and running an artisanal cheesemaking business. Arguably the longestrunning (and at this point, perhaps the only) artisan cheesemaker in Borneo, Blew has been crafting cheese since 2007, she created her first products in a highly unusual setting – the boat shed of the Langkah Syabas Beach resort in Kinarut Beach, Sabah.

“You could not get any soft cheese in Sabah at that time,” explains Blew of what the cheese market was like back then. A chance meeting with former Australian cheesemakers staying at the resort, led her and the resort manager to take up the idea of attempting to make cheese by the beach. She eventually settled on recipes she was happy with and even caught the attention of large chain hotels and resorts in the area, who Kinarut Cheese still regularly supplies to this day. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs over the years,” she admits about making cheese in the tropics. Temperature control, humidity, maintaining extremely high standards of hygiene –these were just a few of the challenges Kinarut Cheese faced in their beginnings. “Once that was all sorted, after six months and a lot of wasted milk and cheese, we then applied for our Halal Certification.”

Kinarut Cheese makes a relatively small amount of varieties to help ensure the quality of each product is kept up, especially since all the cheeses are handmade and contain zero additives or preservatives. They are a producer of raw milk cheese, and thankfully are able to source the milk from local dairies in the state of Sabah. “As the cheese is a live product (with no preservatives), it gets stronger in taste so I only put a month’s shelf life on it after it is ripe, because then it becomes too strong for Asian tastebuds,” Blew explained, adding that they also adjusted the salt content in the

Feta to suit local customers. She favours a deep-fried Camembert herself, paired with sweet-tart cranberry sauce for dipping.

Thankfully, cheese consumption and the openness to trying different varieties is much better these days which she attributes to students trying more cheese overseas and then coming back to introduce it to their families.

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20/0 Kinarut Mall, Kinarut 89600 Papar, Sabah, Malaysia IG: @kinarutcheese Tel: 6011-31704834