Cheese Is The New Wine

Cheese is the new wine: UnieKaas Reserve Gouda

Ever since my birthday, I’ve been thinking about doing a series on the various cheeses I buy both from Murray’s and elsewhere. Here’s the first, a piece of UnieKaas Reserve Gouda:



The Whole Foods in Union Square has a basket of shrink-wrapped pieces of cheese too small to sell otherwise. I tend to take pity on these cheese runt-orphans and always come home with at least one.

I really had some misgivings about this one. It looks like a piece of Gouda that you bought and then abandoned to back of the fridge and it went all skanky and dry. It is dry, but it’s not flaky bone-dry, like a Parmesan — it’s more like the texture of a dark chocolate and it shaves off into curls when sliced.

Eaten its own, it’s smooth tasting with little crystallized crunches of salt, and when crumbled into a soup (tomato barley in this case), the cheese mellowed a bit but didn’t vanish altogether into the soup either. There’s a really nice umami-ness to this cheese, too, that’s sort of… well, sausagey. I can think of no other way to describe it, other than sausage-like.

Ingredients: Pasteurized cow’s milk, salt, cheese culture, animal rennet
Country of origin: Holland
Aged: At least 18 months.
Price: $15.99/lb
Final verdict: Buy it.

(Is there something else I should include here? Let me know.)

13 Comments

  • Brian Gomez

    Hah! I went a bit farther than I normally do to go shopping at Whole Foods and was thrilled that they had an extensive cheese selection and cheese monger. I wanted to experiment a bit and try some cheeses I hadn’t tasted before. I decided to get a couple of the smaller hunks and wedges that were wrapped up and discounted. The UnieKaas Reserve Gouda was one of them.

    I tend to like hard and sharp aged cheeses and this Gouda did not disappoint! Sharp, with a smoky nuttiness and tiny pockets of salt crystals that pack a ton of flavor. I tried a bit as soon as I got home and couldn’t stop! I had to go back and buy more! To this day, every time I stop at my local Whole Foods, I make sure to buy a big hunk of this cheese!

    So yeah…this cheese brought me to your site, and likely others too! It’s a great cheese and this review is now one of the top 3 pages that pop up on a Google search for UnieKaas Reserve Gouda!