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Gouda is Good-ah!  Just couldn’t resist.

The first mystery is, what kind of cow are sheep?  Wikipedia says Gouda is made from cow’s milk.   Trader Joe is selling us sheep’s milk Gouda.  The second mystery is, what’s a Gouda?

Starting with the second mystery,  Gouda is a city in the Netherlands (Holland to some of us).  While the city is the place where Gouda cheese originated, the name Gouda on a cheese does not mean the cheese was made in Gouda.  Gouda is now used only as a designation for a type of cheese that can be made anywhere.  Trader Joe further labels this product, “From Holland”.  So while we can’t trace this cheese down to its roots in Gouda, at least it comes from a close cousin.

Why sheep’s milk?  I don’t know.  What we do know is that using sheep’s milk to make Gouda is fairly rare, even in Holland.  Browsing the internet for prices, we can also find that most of the prices for sheep’s milk Gouda are about twice what TJ is asking.  A few internet reviews for sheep’s milk Gouda say it is a touch more tasty than regular cow’s milk Gouda.  Read that a stronger,  nuttier taste.  Part of that flavor difference may be due to the sheep.  But part of it may be due to a longer aging period.  Since TJ does not specify how long the cheese was aged, we won’t know for sure.  Some Gouda cheese has a red or yellow paraffin wax coating which generally indicates the cheese was aged  six months or less.  The longer aged Gouda cheese may have a black paraffin wax coating.  This cheese had neither color coating.   TJ’s looks like a good place to economically pick up a bit of both cow and sheep Gouda and make your own comparison.  When compared side by side with TJ’s own cow’s milk Dutch Gouda with the red wax coating, these are really two different cheeses.

One additional fact which may be important to some of us,  TJ says this cheese is made  from “Vegetarian Rennet”.  Rennet is the most widely used ingredient that makes milk curdle.  The curds of curdled milk eventually make the cheese.   Most rennet is derived from the stomach of animals, making it not-vegetarian if used in cheese making.  Vegetarian rennet is made from cultures of bacteria.  That leaves animals out of the cheese making equation.  This cheese also contains eggs (or lysozyme from egg whites to be more exact), if that’s important to you.  Because this is made with vegetarian rennet, I’ll add a vegetarian tag to the review.

Well I thought this would be a quick review like, ” … tastes good, go give it a try …”.   And 400 words later, you still don’t know how it tastes. It does taste good.  As might be implied from some comments above, this has a nuttier, or some people would say, more bitter taste, than less aged cow’s milk Gouda.  It’s a bit harder in texture which probably comes with longer aging.  That would make it also “less smooth” than the cow’s milk variety.   It’s a little less tasty and a little less hard than TJ’s own USA produced Asiago cheese, if you know what that tastes like.  In summation,  tastes good, go give it a try.

Calories 130 per ounce        Price $7.99 per pound

Tags: cheese, food, gouda, gouda cheese, holland, netherlands, review, reviews, sheep gouda, sheep's milk gouda, tj, tj's, trader joe's, vegetarian, vegetarian cheese

This entry was posted on 06/11/2011 at 10:00 and is filed under Recipes, food, cooking and related items, Trader Joe's, Vegetarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.