You’re Guaranteed To Love A Trip To This Epic Cheese Barn In Iowa

These cheese makers are serious about offering the best Gouda in the land. Tour their charming location, see the process first-hand, and sample some amazing Iowa cheese.

Come experience the amazing Frisian Farm Gouda!

The address is 2098 Fisher Ave., Leighton, IA 50143

The Frisian Farms Cheese House is just off of Hwy 163 between the towns of Oskaloosa and Pella.

Try samples, see the real cheese-making process and experience the magic of Frisian Farms Gouda. You won't want to miss the fresh curds!

Cheese making is part science and part art.

Frisian Farms cheese is carefully made using original techniques from Holland. It took hundreds of years for Dutch cheese makers to perfect this technique, and it shows.

This Dutch style Gouda cheese is the best.

Over 60% of all of the cheese produced in Holland is Gouda. This semi-hard cheese is named after a Dutch town in South-Holland.

You can visit Frisian Farms Monday through Friday between 10am and 5pm or Saturday between 10am and 4pm.

You'll see the process first hand. Raw milk from a storage tank if pumped into a cheese vat early every morning. The milk is heated to 145 degrees for 30 minutes then cooled to 85 degrees. Gouda cultures mix for 20 minutes then the cheese makers add rennet to make the milk coagulate. After about 30 minutes, the curds can be cut with knives. As they separate from the whey, they are cut down to pea size. After the whey is drained from the vats, the curds are packed into molds that make 20-pound cheese wheels. One pound of cheese requires ten pounds of milk. Each batch of cheese yields 14-15 wheels.

Cheese wheels spend four days in a salt solution to form a rind.

After drying for a day, an edible coating is applied to prevent drying. Like traditional Gouda wheels in Holland, Frisian Farms rinds are burnt orange in color.

Cheese ripens in a climate-controlled room at 54 degrees.

Each wheel must be flipped daily for two months. Frisian Farms Gouda is always a minimum of eight weeks old. This produces a fresh and mild flavored cheese.

The Frisian Farms cheese makers invited a Dutch cheese maker to their location so they could learn to produce an authentic Dutch Gouda.

In 2015, Frisian Farms outgrew their original space, and relocated to their current facilities.

There are many varieties of Frisian Farm cheese.

Curds are the freshest options. Young cheese is smooth and mild, aged two to three months. Aged cheese is 12 to 18 months old and is full-flavored. Sneek, aged 1,000 days, is a bold and popular option.

You can contact Frisian Farms at 641-204-2222 or email them at [email protected] if you have questions about their products or seeing the cheese making process up close and personal.