Taiada Silvania – would you eat cheese infused with ants?

2 min read

2 hours ago Danilo

Taiada Silvania is a unique cheese made by a single producer in Sao Paulo’s Caçapava municipality, who thought mixing reguolar milk…with native leafcutter ants would be a great idea.

Camila Almeida, the owner and founder of Estância Silvânia, came up with the delicacy while brainstorming ideas to attract tourists interested in rural attractions, something that really made her region stand out, and she remembered that the people of the area had long been eating Içá leafcutter ants as part of the local cuisine.
Since her farm produced cheese, she decided that adding a few toasted Içá ants to one of their best cheeses would be something to try…and she was right.
And today, Taiada Silvania is known all over the world and has won several international awards, including in France, where cheeses are really delicious.

Actually, Brazilian indigenous peoples have consumed içá ants for centuries, maybe even longer, and writer Monteiro Lobato once dubbed the critters “Brazilian caviar,” so Camila wasn’t completely nuts to add them to her cheese.
But what surprised even the cheese’s creator was the success that the cheese enjoyed right from its launch in 2021.

“We toast the ants before adding them to the cheese during the forming process, one of the stages of the process,” she told in ancinterview.
“This, in fact, was a huge challenge, because working with them isn’t possible at other times; only during the forming process are we able to use them.”

Created especially for the 2021 Mondial du Fromage et des Produits Laitiers, in Tours, France, Taiada Silvania won the bronze medal, and its creator even recieved an invitation to exhibit the delicacy at the Salon du Fromage, in Paris, the following year.
But this was only the beginning, as the ant-infused cheese has since been honored at cheese contests around South America and has also developed quite a fan base in Brazil.
Either way, made from raw A2 milk from pasture-raised GIR cows and toasted içá ants, it is a sweet, firm cheese with notes of almonds and chestnuts, a slight fennel flavor, and the unmistakable crunch of ants, of course!