Cheese

Cheese

Though one of the world's smallest nations in size, Holland is the fifth largest cheese-producing nation and has earned the Dutch the nickname "Kaaskoppen" or "Cheeseheads."

Some famous kinds of cheese are named after Dutch cities.

See if you can find Gouda on a map of the Netherlands. Then, next time you are in the supermarket, go and look at the cheeses and find the Gouda cheese. How many other kinds of cheese can you find?

Perhaps some of them will also be named after Dutch cities!

This is the town square of Gouda, the town famous for its cheese. Doesn't the building look like Cinderella's castle in Disneyworld? Tourists often have their photo taken in this square.

Cheese is milk that has been turned solid by rennet. Rennet is a digestive enzyme found in the stomach of the calf, yuck!

First of all you have to milk the cows.

Stirring the milk in large vats

Separating into curds and whey. The curds are in her hand, and the whey in the glass.

The curds are now put into a mould and warmed.

The moulds are pressed down with weights to dry the cheese out more.

When they are nearly dry, they are soaked in brine to make a rind on the cheese.

To properly ripen or cure a cheese, it is stored, often for months, at a particular temperature and humidity to give the bacteria an ideal environment to turn the curd into cheese.

Some people think the first cheese was produced by mistake. In the olden days, people used to carry their milk round in pouches made from animal stomachs, double yuck! The bacteria in the milk and the digestive juices from the stomach worked together to form a curd and then a crude cheese.

Somebody actually ate this mess and liked it!