Semi-Soft & Washed-Curd
Gouda, Edam, Havarti, Colby, Monterey Jack, Muenster — the mild, springy, sliceable middle of the cheese world, and the family most people eat most of without ever thinking about how it got that way.
Do not confuse washed curd with washed rind. Different technique, different family, opposite ends of the smell spectrum. Washed rinds have their surface wiped; these have their curd rinsed with water partway through the make.
The lever: take the sugar away
Replace some of the whey in the vat with warm water, and you are not rinsing anything off the curd. You are removing lactose from the system.
The chain that follows is the neatest cause-and-effect in cheesemaking:
Less lactose → the bacteria have less to eat → less acid produced → the finished cheese sits at a higher pH → more calcium stays bound in the protein network → the cheese is springier, more elastic, sweeter and milder.
Compare an unwashed curd of the same milk, which acidifies further, loses more calcium, and ends up sharper and firmer and more prone to crumbling. Same everything else. One extra step.
That mechanism is covered properly in the curd and salt and pH; what matters here is that it produces an entire family.
The members
Gouda. The archetype, and it spans an enormous range — young gouda is mild and rubbery; aged gouda is hard, dark, butterscotch-sweet and full of tyrosine crystals. Those are effectively two different cheeses under one name.
Edam. Lower fat, firmer, famously spherical and waxed.
Havarti. Danish, buttery, with the small irregular openings that come from a slightly gas-producing culture.
Colby. Invented in Colby, Wisconsin in 1885 by Joseph Steinwand, who was handling a batch of cheddar and washed the curd with cold water — arriving independently at the same lever the Dutch had been using for centuries.
Monterey Jack. Californian, and the mildest of the group. Dry Jack, aged hard, is a completely different proposition and belongs with the grating cheeses.
Muenster (American) — mild, orange-rinded with annatto, and not to be confused with French Munster, which is a washed rind and an entirely different experience.
Leyden. Gouda-adjacent, spiked with cumin seed.
Brick. Wisconsin, 1877, John Jossi — technically a washed-rind descendant of Limburger but domesticated firm and mild enough to sit here comfortably. And the reason for the caramelised edge on a Detroit pizza.
🔴 A note on the name, which applies to this whole wing
Worth stating once, here, because gouda is the clearest case.
“Gouda” and “cheddar” are not protected names. Neither is “brie” or “camembert”. Anyone anywhere may make and sell a cheese called gouda.
What is protected is the specific, longer-named version:
| Generic, unprotected | Protected |
|---|---|
| gouda | Noord-Hollandse Gouda |
| cheddar | West Country Farmhouse Cheddar |
| brie | Brie de Meaux |
| camembert | Camembert de Normandie |
Which is the practical resolution of the whole naming thread running through the English story and today: the family name is generic; the place-specific name carries the protection. So a label saying “gouda” tells you a technique, and a label saying “Noord-Hollandse Gouda” tells you an origin. Neither is lying; they’re saying different things.
Also worth knowing: Boerenkaas is the Dutch farmhouse designation — raw milk, traditional method, a genuinely different cheese from industrial gouda regardless of what either is called.
Making one
This is the family I’d point a home cheesemaker at for their first aged cheese, ahead of cheddar, and I’d give three reasons:
It’s forgiving. The higher final pH means you’re not chasing a narrow acidity target, and the elastic paste tolerates imprecision in cutting and pressing that a cheddar wouldn’t.
It’s quick to be edible. A young gouda is pleasant at four to six weeks. A cheddar wants months before it’s interesting, which is a long time to wait to find out you made a mistake.
And the washing step teaches the mechanism. You can make two wheels from one batch, wash one curd and not the other, and taste what the lever does. That’s a genuinely instructive afternoon, and it’s the sort of experiment the whole point of doing this myself is to be able to run.
Wax it and it needs almost nothing from your cave except a stable temperature.
How to make one: Making semi-soft washed-curd cheese — the ten-minute step that separates this family from cheddar.
Next: pressed uncooked cheeses — cheddar, and the step that made it a verb.
Sources
- Brie, camembert, gouda and cheddar are not protected names in themselves; only specific cheeses within those categories hold PDO status — Brie de Meaux, Camembert de Normandie, Noord-Hollandse Gouda, West Country Farmhouse Cheddar: Institute of Culinary Education on PDO designation
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