Registration is closing on Washed-Curd & Dutch Styles

If you make, or want to make, a washed-curd style — think a young Gouda-adjacent wheel with a faint sweetness and a supple, elastic paste — this is the week to register for Washed-Curd & Dutch Styles before the Stone cohort closes its roster. The five-week course starts May 19 and works through curd washing technique, brine schedules, and the rind development choices that separate a forgettable young wheel from one people ask for by name.

Washed-curd cheeses reward precision in a way a lot of other styles don't punish as sharply. A typical wash removes roughly a third of the whey partway through the make and replaces it with warm water, which pulls lactose out of the curd and softens the acidity the paste will develop later. Wash too little and you get a drier, sharper wheel than you meant to make. Wash too much and the paste can turn rubbery and mute, because the culture never had enough sugar left to build the flavor you were counting on. Getting the water temperature and the timing of that step right, consistently, is most of what separates a maker who's made three of these wheels from one who's made thirty.

What the five weeks cover

The course treats curd washing as a controllable variable rather than a fixed step, with attention to how the temperature and volume of the wash water shift the moisture and residual sugar in the finished paste. From there it moves into pressing — the kind of graduated, low-to-higher pressure sequence that keeps a washed-curd wheel from knitting shut too early and trapping moisture unevenly — and into brine strength and soak time, which for a wheel this style typically runs several hours per pound rather than a quick dip. The last stretch is aimed at troubleshooting: what a slimy rind or a chalky, crumbly paste is usually telling you about an earlier step, and how to adjust the next batch instead of guessing at the next one too.

It's also a course that intersects with a trend several retail members have mentioned this spring — a shift toward smaller-format wedges and wheels at the cheese counter rather than large wholesale blocks. A washed-curd style ages relatively fast and sells well in a smaller format, which makes it a reasonable style to have in rotation if you're weighing how to diversify what you're bringing to market this year.

Instructors who've taught earlier cohorts of this course say the most common early mistake isn't the wash itself — it's skipping the intermediate temperature checks during the wash and assuming the recipe's stated time will get you to the right endpoint regardless of your vat, your milk, or your room temperature that day. A wash that's supposed to land the curd in a specific range can drift several degrees off target if your wash water cooled more than expected on the way from the kettle, and a few degrees is often the difference between a paste that develops properly and one that doesn't. The course spends real time on reading your own equipment rather than trusting a recipe written for someone else's setup.

The second sticking point tends to be patience during pressing. Washed-curd wheels need a graduated pressing sequence — light weight first, building gradually — to knit the curd together without trapping whey unevenly inside the wheel. Members who rush this step by jumping straight to heavier weight often end up with pockets of trapped moisture that show up weeks later as a soft spot or an off flavor during aging, by which point there's no fixing it. If you've had a batch go sideways in exactly that way, this is the part of the course built to explain why.

How to register

Enrollment for the Stone cohort closes this weekend, ahead of the May 19 start date. If you're on the fence, the course counts toward hours for members working through certification tracks that include a cheesemaking-technique component — check with the Education Committee if you're not sure how it applies to your particular credential path. Sign up through your member portal, or contact the office if you're having trouble with the enrollment form.

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The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.