Orange cheeses have been on my mind. I absolutely love aged gouda!
Three plus year aged gouda completely loses the rubbery, bland, 'this is congealed milk' texture and taste of young goudas. It is crumbly, and delicious with hints of butterscotch, and lined with incredible sugar crystals.
For the best aged gouda experience slice off the thinnest possible pieces with a cheese plane, and let them melt on your tongue.
Aged gouda is amazing with beer and hard salami. A good dubbel would be my choice.
The Reluctant Gourmet has all the details:
Most of us have enjoyed some form of Gouda cheese in our lives. It is a yellow cheese made from cow's milk and is often found with the red or yellow paraffin wax coating in the supermarket. It gets its name from the city of Gouda in the Netherlands where it originated.
Gouda as a young cheese is easy to slice and may be great to serve to the kids in their lunch packs but just doesn't have that much flavor. It's great if you enjoy a mild, mellow flavored cheese but if you want a much more distinct flavor, you'll want to try aged Gouda.
Aged Gouda has a wonderful distinctive flavor that can be both sharp and sweet – think of butterscotch. It is a hard cheese that doesn't come in the red wax covering, but a natural buff colored rind. The cheese itself has an amber color that Jack explained to me comes from a coloring agent called annatto that gives it the pale orange color.
I read in one of my favorite cheese books, Cheese Primer, that some cheeses "once had a natural orange hue caused by the vitamin D that cows ingested from grazing on green plants. But winter milk comes from cows that are fed silage, and the cheeses that result from this milk are white."
So the cheese makers started adding food coloring like annatto to the milk so they would look the same year round. Jack explained to me "all cheese are naturally cream colored and many use coloring for eye appeal."
