4 Year Aged Gouda Pittig

I know, I know - we just did a post on gouda. I didn't even want to eat this cheese after tasting the last one, Old Amsterdam Aged Gouda. A friend bought it for us, and really I was just being polite tasting it in my kitchen one evening. Let me tell you, friends, this was a whole different gouda animal.

For starters, it looks different:

Gouda Pittig, aged 4 years

Look at that color! Look at the delicious fissures, inclusions, and little crystals of flavor! It reminds me of caramel - it smells like caramel, and has hints of caramel hidden deep within its complex flavor. The cheese is rock-hard, and cleaves like stone into neat little crumbles. 

More about the flavor - it is intense. This is not the same cheese we tried a few weeks ago. The flavor is sharp, reminiscent of whiskey, with subdued sweetness and salt. 

Those little crunchy bits in the cheese? Those are crystalized shards of lactic acid, formed naturally during the aging process. They're like little pop rocks, bursting with flavor. 

The cheese making process starts with regular gouda, which is is a cooked, pressed cheese made of cow's milk. The gouda is then left to age for years, turned every so often by the loving hands of master dutch cheese makers. The result is a marvel of the cheese world, a wheel of dark amber colored, toffee-smelling aged gouda. 

The bottom line: if you want gouda, stick to the AGED gouda - it's amazing, a true cheese experience. Look for gouda that has been aged for 2 or more years. I really disliked regular young gouda, but this stuff is magic.

- Alan

Old Amsterdam Aged Gouda

In an effort to keep this blog user friendly and searchable, we will split up our blog entries per cheese. Huzzah!! And so...

...the evening continued with the unveiling of the second cheese of the night: Old Amsterdam brand aged Gouda. I was apprehensive of this well-known cheese, with vivid memories of the stink of smoked gouda at my childhood breakfast table. I never cared for the smoked variety - it reminds me of old fish and socks. I figured I would try the non-smoked variety, so we grabbed some Old Amsterdam Aged Gouda at Trader Joe's (which has a good variety of cheeses, by the way).

The cheese:

Aged Gouda is a firm, light orange cheese native to the Netherlands made chiefly from cow's milk. It is typically aged for at least 2 years in a humidity controlled environment.  The Cheese Primer describes its taste as having a "scotch whiskey aroma, both sharp and sweet at the same time, like molten honey or butterscotch." Hmm...those are some pretty specific flavors. Note the cloud of skepticism forming around me.

The Cheese Primer explains that plain old gouda is "one of the most unexciting cheeses imaginable." Aged Gouda, however, "is a truly delicious thing, almost totally divorced from the blandness of its youth." Wow! Sounds like a party in my mouth! Can't wait to sink my jowls into this sucker!

The verdict:

Wow! The party in my mouth turned out to be more like a gag-fest. The cheese is very creamy, and has a certain gritty texture to it - weird characteristics to occur together. Aged gouda reminded me of old, unwashed hats, with a sickly-sweet taste that permeates your nostrils. It made me cringe immediately.

Ashleigh loved it, the ridiculous girl. Why?! How???! She ate half the block of cheese herself! Good. The less of this putrid hunk of "cheese" there is in the house at any one time, the better.

She described the flavor as "warm and spicy," but had trouble being more specific. She mentioned nutmeg as something she was reminded of when eating Aged Gouda.

All in all, Aged Gouda went over fairly well with our guests Andrew and Kelli. Andrew insisted it tasted like cheddar. Everything tastes like freaking cheddar to this guy. Watermelon tastes like cheddar to him.

Ashleigh insists on mentioning that Aged Gouda also made the cover of the Cheese Primer, for some strange reason. This might mean that the author/publishers seem to be extra fond of it, perhaps as a result of eating some tainted cheese just before publishing. I don't like it. Ashleigh loves it. You be the judge.

Here's a link to the makers of the Aged Gouda we bought.
Old Amsterdam Gouda