Ġbejna

What is Ġbejna Cheese?

Ġbejna (plural ġbejniet) is a small round cheese made in Malta from sheep milk, salt and rennet. Most of the sheep's milk produced on the islands goes into these cheeses. The name is the diminutive of ġobna, the Maltese word for cheese, so it matches the Maltese English word cheeselet, or little cheese. The fully qualified name, Ġbejna tan-nagħaġ, means sheep cheeselet.

Milk in Malta was once sold fresh on the streets, straight after the goats were milked. That unpasteurised milk was one of the causes of the brucellosis outbreak, known in Maltese as Deni Irqiq, that ran from the late 19th into the early 20th century. Themistocles Zammit is credited with stopping the pandemic.

The Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority accepted a request to protect the name ġbejna as a Protected Designation of Origin, but the application was rejected after the national objection period because the word now refers to any cheeselet. The Xirka Produtturi Nagħaġ u Mogħoż then applied for Ġbejna tan-nagħaġ, which the European Commission accepted. It is the first registered Geographical Indication for a Maltese food product.

The cheese is shaped in a hurdle of dried reeds, though plastic ones are common now, and dried in small ventilated rooms with mosquito mesh over the windows. Some people say sea water was used as the curdling agent instead of rennet in the past. Both pasteurised and unpasteurised versions are made.

Fresh ġbejniet, called friski or tal-ilma, are smooth and milky and sit in their own whey much like mozzarella. The sundried kind, moxxa, bajda or t'Għawdex, is fairly hard with a definite nutty, almost musky taste. There is also a salt cured version, maħsula. The peppered one, tal-bżar, is rolled in crushed black pepper and cured, then kept in oil or pickled in vinegar; it grows sharper and more piquant with age and turns crumbly.

Ġbejna carries dishes such as soppa tal-armla, and it gets added to pasta and soup for flavour, used as a pizza topping, or packed into ħobż biż-żejt. It is also served deep fried as an appetizer, cured on a mezze platter, or fresh as a pasta filling.