Marieke Penterman has always loved a "nice looking cow," as she puts it. Growing up on a dairy farm in the Netherlands, she and her father bought frozen embryos from premium breeding stock and participated in local cow shows. Today, she and her husband Rolf have about 350 cows a stone's throw from their home in Thorp, Wisconsin, where he oversees the herd of brown Swiss and Holsteins, and she turns their milk into farmstead cheeses inspired by their shared Dutch heritage. If you want to taste good gouda, you've got to talk to the Pentermans.
Gouda is a style of cheese that dates back to the Middle Ages, which makes it one of the oldest cheeses that originated in Europe. Named after the Dutch city where porters would haul hulking wheels of cheese to sell in the town square, gouda was typically made by women married to dairy farmers. Once the milk was set into curds and whey, cheesemakers washed the curd with water, rinsing away some of the whey, and with it, some of the lactose that turns into lactic acid. The result was a sweet, mild, and mellow cheese with a fudgy texture that's easy to love.
As it ages, gouda can turn into a kind of savory butterscotch: drier, flakier, and intensely sweet and umami. "Everybody enjoys some kind of gouda," Penterman says, and we're inclined to agree. Saxelby's big cheese Benoit Breal puts it this way: "gouda is a cheese that's receptive to aging and generating umami flavors the older it gets." We love those complex qualities in Marieke Premium Gouda, aged for 12 to 18 months, and Marieke Overjarige Gouda, aged for a full two years until its paste is full of crunchy protein crystals, similar to Parmigiano Reggiano.
So how did two Dutch farm kids find themselves making cheese in Wisconsin? The story begins in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1998. Penterman was working on a dairy farm there when she met Rolf, who was scouting locations to start a dairy of his own with his brother. "I told him that if they ever find a farm, they should give me a call and I'll help out," Penterman says. Later they started dating, and in 2003, 18 months after the brothers established Penterman Farm, the couple got married, and she moved to the Unites States for good. Or so she thought.
It was in the middle of the night while helping a cow give birth that Penterman decided she wanted to make gouda in Wisconsin. She had missed that singular taste of home, and as airline luggage weight restrictions shrank, visiting Dutch friends had a harder time bringing her the cheese she craved. "Gouda solves everything," Penterman says. "In the Netherlands, every discussion you had with your parents, there was always gouda on the table. After an evening with friends—gouda."
The Wisconsin dairy community didn't know much about gouda, but Penterman credits their support as essential to helping her get her state cheesemaking license and the financing to build out a creamery. She returned to Holland to study gouda production in detail, then made test batches back in her adopted home of Wisconsin. In December 2006, 10 days before her 30th birthday, Penterman opened her cheese shop on the farm.
18 years later, Marieke Gouda boasts more than a dozen gouda varieties: some young, some aged, and some flavored with ingredients like smoked cumin and truffles. The creamery has 67 employees and has racked up more than 250 awards for the 1.2 million pounds of cheese made each year. That's large for a farmstead operation, though still tiny by comparison to Wisconsin producers nearby. Penterman's goal is for the creamery to use all of the farm's milk in the next three to five years. That farmstead identity is important to her, both to honor the original gouda-making tradition and to do right by the cows she loves so much. They weather Thorp's frigid winters and humid summers in an open barn design that Penterman likens to "a cow spa."
In December 2024, Penterman was certified as a Master Cheesemaker, one of the highest honors in the cheesemaking business. She also opened a new retail shop recently that she called House of Gouda. "I figured if Gucci can do it, I can do it," she says. 4,000 miles from the Netherlands, the Pentermans have become ambassadors for and champions of this durable Dutch cheese. You could say the future is looking...gouda.
Taste the Penterman family's fantastic goudas!
Creamery photos courtesy of Marieke Gouda.
