Our Matured Cheeses
Mahoe Cheese is best known for its Edam and Gouda style cheese range. We are maturing our Edam and Gouda wheels on site for 3 to well over 12 months for a wide spectrum of flavour intensities and textures. We also make a Komijnekaas, which is Gouda with Cumin seeds, and a Gouda with chives and garlic added into the curd.
Over the years Jake and Jesse have worked on further varieties of matured cheeses, the results are Mahoe Blue, a mouthwatering blue cheese and Montbéliarde a flavourful hard cheese with a natural, washed rind.
Goudas and Edams
The recipes and techniques we use for our cheeses are based on the original Dutch way of making Gouda and Edam. Over the years we have refined and adapted our cheese making and derived our own style of Gouda and Edam.
The composition of the milk undergoes seasonal changes and it is down to the experience of our cheese makers to respond to these changes in their cheese making techniques and affinage (maturing process) to create a consistent, high quality cheese throughout the year.
Cheese makers Jesse and Jake are also working together their brother Tim, who looks after our herd, to refine the composition of our herd, in order to utilise the varying properties of milk that the different cow breeds produce. The goal is to further improve texture and flavour of our cheeses.




Very Old Edam & Very Old Gouda
A reward for the dedicated and conscientious work of our cheese makers are cheeses like our Very Old Edam. Its recipe has been perfected over many years and after being matured for at least 10 months it is simply a pleasure to eat.
It has won CUISINE CHAMPION ARTISAN CHEESE numerous times over the last couple of decades. Master Judge Russell Smith once described our Very Old Edam as
“(…) a pure delight. It displays a firm and crunchy texture with sweet and floral notes and a nutty aftertaste. (…) It is so good that you don‘t want to put anything else in your mouth for some time“.
More important than awards are our customer reviews. Our Very Old Edam has a loyal and passionate following. It is also our favourite cheese. Our house is in a state of panic if we don’t have any Very Old Edam in the fridge.
Mahoe Blue
Our Mahoe Blue has been a bit of a long-kept secret until the NZ Specialist Cheesemakers Association Awards in 2020, when it won the ECOLAB Champion Blue Cheese trophy (aka ‘best blue cheese of the year’). It was our head cheesemaker Jake’s mission to supplement our traditional, dutch-style cheese repertoire with a well-balance, satisfying Blue. Our blue is semi-firm but creamy. Its flavor is a mouthwatering combination of smooth and sweet creamyness and the fruity aromatics of the blue mold.
“Mahoe Blue [has] a balanced fruity acidity without the bite and a creamy yet crumbly texture. Not that it is indecisive in any way. I don’t know why it amuses me that Mahoe Blue is pierced with knitting needles, but it seems consistent with their approach to making cheese – simply and elegantly without fuss.”
NZ’s cheesemonger extraordinaire Calum Hodgson (2019, October).
Cheese Watch. Cuisine Magazine.


Montbéliarde
On his travels through Europe Jesse got to love the mountainous hard cheeses of the Alpine regions, the likes of Comté, Greyer and Bergkaese. The Alpine cheese makers will tell you that it is impossible to re-create their cheeses outside of the Alps, because the flavour of the mountain herbs that the cows eat during summer months are integral to the flavour profile of the cheese. This is well true but didn’t stop Jesse from developing his own natural-rinded hard cheese, with the techniques he learned from the small Alpage cheese makers he visited in Europe and the influences of our terroir here in Northland. Due to the long maturation of the cheeses, it took many years to create a cheese Jesse was happy to sell. He called it Montbéliarde, which is the name of a popular breed of cows in the European Alps, and which we have introduced to our herd too.