Making Gouda Cheese at Home (Homemade Baby Gouda Cheese)
In the Netherlands, we are all cheeseheads. That’s why I’m going to make Gouda style cheese in this video together with my cousin Martin. We are making two baby Gouda cheeses from pasteurized milk. The recipe is a traditional Dutch recipe for Gouda cheese. Did you know Gouda is the place in the Netherlands where this cheese originally comes from? Anyway, to make this video extry fun, I have hidden 7 cheese puns to let you enjoy this Gouda cheesy video even more. Try to find them all and let me know in the comments which ones you found!
The full recipe for this delicious homemade Gouda cheese can be found by clicking here.
Video transcript:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. My name is Tony, and I am Martin. You may have heard of Gouda, a cheese from the Netherlands. We’re both Dutch guys so in this video we are going to show you how to make some awesome cheese. The milk is already heating up on the stove so let’s get on with it. Have fun watching!
It has been a while since the last video, so I tried to make this one extra fun by hiding a few cheese puns in the voice over for some Gouda laughs. Let me know in the comments which puns you found and win a thumbs up!
The milk we are going to use today is pasteurized fresh milk. It is not sterilized and also not raw milk. I have access to raw milk straight from the cow. Using that would result in the best tasting cheese. However, to make cheese from it, you need to pasteurize it first and take some other precautions to prevent E.coli contamination. Since it is our first time making cheese, we decided to take the safe route and use professionally pasteurized milk.
We are using 10 liters of milk and let all of it slowly heat up until it reaches 30 de-cheese Celsius. Then we add the cheese starter culture: a mix of lactic acid bacteria dissolved in milk overnight. This starter culture aids in the coagulation of milk proteins and the specific culture we use also gives the cheese it’s Gouda-resembling taste. By the way, the name Gouda, or Gouda, is the name of the village in the Netherlands where this cheese is made. I am not based in Gouda, so we cannot officially call it Gouda cheese.
So we have just added the cheese starter. Now it has to sit for about 45 minutes at 30 degrees before we can continue with the next step.
In those 45 minutes we will also sterilize cheesecloth in boiling water. We need this later on in the process to press the two little wheels of cheese in their molds.
For the next step we first are going to add 1.5 milliliters of calcium chloride solution to strengthen the proteins in the milk. Then we are going to add 2.5 milliliters of rennet to separate the solids from the liquids. Then we’re going to give it a little stir.
After ten minutes we test to see if the rennet has done its job clotting the milk. When cutting it with a knife and moving the knife to one side, the milk should split up letting a clear liquid, whey, seeping into the cavity. It doesn’t get any cheddar than this, so we can start cutting the curds.
We cut in all directions, first from top to bottom, with a distance of approximately 1 centimeter in between the cuts. Then we cut it from left to right to from long cubes. After that we cut again from left to right, but now at a 45 degree angle, before cutting another time from bottom to top, again at a 45 degree angle. The goal is to allow the whey to seep out of the Jell-O-like substance so we can separate the cheese curds from the way. It’s a whole lot of cutting and our muscles are getting sore from it. But hey, that’s nacho problem, you just have to enjoy watching other people work.
Who cut the cheese? We cut the cheese – the curds that is. They have been standing for 10 minutes now, so it is time to wash them with the warm water. Let’s take a look inside the pot.
Before washing we scoop off most of the whey: the clear yellowy liquid on top of the curds that sunk to the bottom of the pot. It’s easy to use a sieve for this to not risk transferring curds out of it. We take away roughly one third of the total volume before we continue with washing the curds.
For washing we use water that has been heated to 65 degrees Celsius. The goal is twofold: heating up the curds to 33 degrees and taking away some of the acidity of the cheese resulting in a more balanced taste in the end. Washing takes 10 minutes after which we transfer the whey, roughly half of the total volume, to a sanitized bucket. This can be used for making real ricotta cheese.
Then we repeat the washing process once more to get the temperature of the curds up to 36 degrees Celsius. I later found out that washing two times is not necessary for small cheeses apparently, but we didn’t know since we do this for the first time. Again, stir for about 10 minutes, or until you’re feta up with it. Then, let the curds ripen at the final temperature for 30 minutes.
With a sieve I scoop out the curds and using my hands I press them into a mold lined with the previously sterilized cheese cloth. These are filled until there’s a decent quantity sticking out of the top which will be pressed down into the mold later on by putting some 2 kilogram dumbbell weights on top of the mold. After I’m done, Martin gives it a go too. Then we put the weights on top and we waited an hour before moving on.
After that hour we had to take the young cheeses out of their molds to turn them upside down, back into the mold. The initial pressing is to get most of the whey out. For the second pressing we added more weight, 4 kilogram per cheese in total, to press the cheeses evenly into their definitive shape overnight, in about 8 hours.
For brining, the next step, we dissolved 2 kilograms of table salt in water to a total volume of 10 liters. Be sure to use salt with no added iodine as this may kill the lactic acid bacteria that will give the cheese part of its characteristic taste. These cheeses were brined for 8 hours, flipping both of them over every 2 hours or so.
Many cheese producing countries might use wax or leave the cheeses uncoated to get infections on purpose. In the Netherlands cheese wheels are normally coated with cheese lacquer – an acrylic coating to prevent too much moisture to evaporate from the cheese that also has antifungal properties. This has two reasons: They cheese will keep its weight over time, which is important for economic reasons, and it will survive longer in the cheese caves while developing their taste.
For the coating to stick, the outside of the cheese has to be dry, so we put it in a cool and dark closet for about a day or until the outside is dry to the touch. Then it’s time for the final touch: applying a few layers of the coating. Initially I tried this with a sponge because the professionals do it like that. I didn’t had a lot of success with this method, so I switched to using a brush which worked better. It takes a few hours for each layer to dry, but it looks more and more like a Dutch cheese with every layer. And when the final layer is applied they go back in the cool closet to age for three weeks.
Then the moment is there: time to see if it was all worth it and finally taste the cheese. And… E-dam they’re looking fine! If you don’t think so, let’s agree to disabrie.
I hope this video wasn’t too cheesy. Anyway, we hope you have enjoyed watching it. If you did, then let us know by hitting the like button. Please also consider subscribing to the channel for more content like this in the future. That’s it for now. We would like to thank you for watching. Bye, bye!
