Goat’s Milk Gouda (Marks and Spencer)
Goat’s Milk Gouda is a non-standard twist on the Dutch classic Gouda, made with goat’s milk instead of the usual cow’s milk. It is a hard, whitish-yellow cheese with a waxy rind.
Phil and Pez ate this cheese at an impromptu Grate My Cheese rating session outside King’s College, Cambridge. This cheese was easier to open than the Lincolnshire Poacher and its firm, non-crumbly texture made it amenable to cutting with a blunt wooden knife intended for M&S lunchtime pasta salads. It has high-end packaging and a premium price.
Phil: Legacy Gouda is a Dutch cow’s milk cheese, and most standard supermarket Gouda is crushingly bland and uninspiring. In many cases eating it is a dismaying waste of valuable seconds of life; avoid Gouda sold pre-sliced in transparent plastic packets at all costs. Good-quality Gouda is actually quite flavoursome and tasty, but not always easy to find. Never settle for a cheap and flavourless Gouda; going the extra mile will pay dividends.
This cheese has a striking twist – the nutty sweetness of Gouda in a delicious goaty package. The Gouda flavours are quite muted; I would describe this as a hard goat’s cheese with a distinctly sweet flavour, and I would probably not realise the Gouda link without the label. Once explained, it is an inspired combination: the almost-cloying sweetness of a Gouda leavened with the acidic sharpness of a goat. Unlike some hard goat’s cheeses the goatness is enjoyable rather than overwhelming.
This cheese also performed well with a strong, oniony cracker. The cheese’s sweeter flavour harmonised with the earthy oniony cracker rather than battling with it.
Upon reaching home, I immediately ate all of the remaining cheese in one sitting. I gouged as much as possible from the waxy rind and consumed every tiny fragment I could liberate. An excellent cheese both alone and accompanied, especially with non-sweet crackers. It would require an impressive cow indeed to persuade me back to traditional Cowda after the excellent innovation of Goatda.
Pez: Every once in a while in the cheese-making world, someone decides to break the mould. Many of these efforts fail spectacularly and are never heard of again; see Joe’s review of Cheddar (Scotcheese Gin and Tonic).
While this effort does not attempt to redefine cheese, it did prompt an hour’s frantic googling by your reviewer to establish the meaning of Gouda. Purists be damned, Gouda is not a term with protected status by the European Union and I was able to find at least 6 independent Goat’s Gouda creators from around the world, prompting a life goal to collect and rate them side by side. Judging by this M&S offering, the competition will be fierce – this is a delightfully moreish cheese, soft and sweet, which melts slightly on the tongue. Hopefully the start of many goat/cow crossovers!
Phil rated this cheese 8.5, and Pez 8.0, for an average score of 8.3.
