Rispens Sheep Gouda Cheese selected by L'Amuse

What’s the shelf life on cheese?

• Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

• What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

• Soft cheeses and cheese spreads (like pimento and liptauer) are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

How do we ship artisan cheese year-round across the country?

In warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship cheese with two business day service plus warm weather care. We employ an ice pack and insulation defensive strategy to protect against warm delivery trucks and warm warehouses and ensure your shipment arrives in great shape.

The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the shipping method will either be flat rate service (1-4 business days) for our durable hard, aged cheeses or two business day service for our more perishable soft cheeses and cheese spreads.

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable.

How should the cheese be stored once it arrives?

• Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold.

• We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper.

• After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

• Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty. 

How should the cheese be served?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

I used to joke that The Netherlands only had one cheese: Gouda. Gouda in endless varieties, gouda with endless wardrobe changes. Gouda aged one year. Two years. Four years. Gouda with red wax. Gouda with black wax. To me, Dutch gouda was an enjoyable cheese, but monotonous, dull. It never got me excited. It never had me reaching for more.

Then I met Betty Koster.

Betty and her husband Martin founded the cheese shop Fromagerie L’amuse in Amsterdam in 1989. The name belied its confidence in its home country. This was a shop of fine imported cheeses—many of them French—alongside some good-enough Dutch ones. That soon changed. Betty began traveling across the country, meeting cheesemakers and agers. She took chances on small Dutch cheesemakers. She worked with cheese agers who were willing to experiment with different lengths of aging, different temperatures, different environments.

By the time I met Betty she’d been developing her stable of great Dutch cheeses for almost two decades. She’d become an icon in The Netherlands. She had gone from cold-calling cheesemakers to talk about the cheese she just bought to driving to farmers across the country and seeing them make cheese firsthand. She got to know the person behind the cheese, something no other shop or exporter did at the time. Before that the Dutch farmers and cheesemakers were unknown. They made cheese in anonymity, which, in the food world, is never a recipe for excellence. Any time a food is made without recognition it is usually made for cost savings, for profit—not for flavor.

Today, her shop is the most copied, revered, sought-after and examined vessel of Dutch cheese in the country.

When you visit you’ll see a glowing wall of waxed wheels of gouda behind the case. It’s still a gouda-centric cheese business. But the diversity in the goudas is shocking. From soft, sweet, young goudas to crystalline, caramelized aged ones. From sheep’s milk goudas from flocks grazed on seaside grass island, to goat’s milk goudas that taste like milkshakes.

Many Americans I know admiringly refer to Betty as the Julia Child of Dutch cheese. She’s larger than life, expressive, immediately approachable, funny, and knows her topic inside and out. The cheeses she brings to America have a big personality, just like her. The cheeses she finds, the way she chooses to age them — they are exciting. They will have you reaching for more.

Three exciting goudas from L’amuse

L’amuse Signature is Betty’s house gouda. She’s put her mark on every stage of it, especially the aging, which is done at higher-than-usual temperatures to give the cheese both crystalline crunch and creaminess. These two coveted cheese features are rarely found together.

Brabander is a goat’s milk gouda that reminds me of a milkshake. It’s so easy to eat it’s absurd.

Wilde Weide is one of the crown jewels of Betty’s Dutch cheese roster. It’s a gouda, true, but calling it just a gouda is like saying a Ferrari is just a car. Made organically on a 300 year old farm, its flavors are floral, bourbon rich, stunning.

First things first: it’s not a cave.

Cheesemongers universally refer to their cheese storage rooms as caves but these rooms have about as much in common with a cave as astroturf has in common with the field of dreams. Cheese caves are commercial coolers. Usually walk-ins, which is industry speak for a refrigerator big enough for a full-sized door.

Our cave is ten feet wide, twenty feet long, about the size of a short container truck. It is stark white and sits right in the middle of our warehouse, across the pick line from the bread bagging tent. Between the two they mark the two poles of our operations. Bread and cheese. Both made by hand. Cut by hand. Wrapped by hand. Traditional, practically ancient foods.

We work mostly in whole wheels of cheese.

That’s the way the cheesemakers make them and that’s the way we buy them. We haul them into the cheese cave and cut them open by hand. Sometimes with a big knife. Sometimes with a cheese wire: a thick steel cable with handles that the cheesemonger uses to glide through cheese like butter.

And sometimes you’ve got to tackle Parmigiano Reggiano. Those 80 pound wheels have a hide as tough as a stegosaurus. They need to be coaxed open with a set of wedge shaped knifes that become part of every cheesemonger’s rite of passage. A freshly cracked wheel’s aroma is beguiling. Every one who splits one stops for a moment, puts their face up to the cut surface, and inhales. Fresh shards of parmesan always flake off too – cheesemonger’s treat.

Once a wheel is open we cut pieces of cheese and hand wrap them in waxed cheese bags.

If we cut a piece that weighs exactly the right size on the scale we ring the bell – perfect cut! We send the just-cut cheese out to be packed in boxes, then wait for the container to empty and return to let us know we need to cut a few more. We do this all day long for the 50+ cheeses we carry. On our busiest day in December we’ll do it thousands of times.

That means your cheese is essentially cut to order.

It spends a few hours at most from when it’s cut to when it’s packed to ship. It sounds simple – and it is. But it’s also rare. Most companies that ship cheese these days don’t cut cheese to order. They ship cheese that has been cut long ago – weeks, even months – and sealed in cry-o-vac. It’s not terrible, but remember that once a cheese gets cut it never gets better. It fades. Cry-o-vac slows the fading, but if it spends a long time cut in a wrapper its flavor will become a shadow of itself.

Freshness matters, even when you’re talking about aged cheese.

The primary culprit for flavor loss is air. Air surrounded the wheel of the cheese, of course, but it didn’t penetrate the paste inside thanks to the rind. Now the cheese, with its insides showing, is under siege by air. Air swoops in to dry out the cheese, carrying the environment’s off-aromas and unwanted bacteria along the way.

To protect the cheese’s cut face from air’s ravages we wrap each cheese in a waxed cheese bag. This bag lets the cheese breathe yet keeps it from drying out. The wax lining keeps them in perfect shape. It lasts, too – reuse it for other cheese, it’ll keep almost any hard cheese in great condition.