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
Beth
Aw, misfit cheese! (I just watched “Rudolph” a couple nights ago.)
I’m at my desk, jotting down a little list of things to pick up at the store, and when I clicked over to this post from Twitter, I grabbed my pencil and added this to my list: “CHEESE”. All caps. Nothing else on the list is in all caps. But oh, the thought of a lovely hunk of cheese. And some wine. On a Friday. Heaven.
Jen
I’ve gotten this brand of aged Gouda before and agree with you – it’s delicious! It reminds me of the “oude kaas” (literally: old cheese) that you can get from the cheese vendor at the outdoor market in Holland. I’ll have to look for some leftovers next time I’m at Whole Foods!
Kristen
Whole Foods (here, at least) usually has a pretty good assortment of Dutch cheeses with leerdammer and leyden, too.
Matthew
I got some of this from a Holland Festival booth at Bowling Green in New York City yesterday. When I tried some today, I thought the crunchy bits meant it had spoiled! Thank goodness for this Web site.
jr
i love the salt in this cheese.
paid 9.99/lb at whole foods 11.2.09
anyone find it for a better price?
.60 of a lb didnt last long but was a tiny slice of heaven in my mouth
Eric Gordon
I am a chef in a hotel in columbus ohio and this cheese hands down is the best cheese in town, and it taste great with grapes and candied pecans
Linda
Love a 5 year gouda due to saltiness, but typically the texture is too hard to snack on (just shave). 3 years are not as salty and as a result lack flavor, but this Gouda is WONDERFUL and tastes like 5yr gouda but is soft. AMAZINGLY good.
jamie
i want to marry this cheese. i have eaten it with apples, nectarines, crackers, all by itself. to me, it tastes sweet and salty, with a little caramel to it.
sarah
This cheese is my new best friend!
Raymond Phillips
I just tried and bought some of this delicious uniekaas reserve cheese from our local Whole Foods store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have long held that I do not believe there is a cheese out there that I do not like and this one, again, confirms this.