Ruthie Hauge
A cheese board from Longtable Beer Cafe (clockwise from top): BleuMont’s Bandaged Cheddar, Roth’s Buttermilk Blue, Marieke Gouda’s mature gouda, Landmark Creamery’s Anabasque, Night Owl’s Vacca Anziana.
Sometimes, when Chris Murfield is preparing a cheese board at Brasserie V, the chef’s inner crankiness bubbles to the surface.
“I’ll see people order one and I’ll think, ‘All you’re getting is the cheddar? Come on, expand your horizons a little bit. I researched really hard, why don’t you try something different?’” Murfield says with a laugh.
Then Murfield realizes they are expanding their horizons. After all, some of that cheddar, such as Hook’s 10-year or Bleu Mont Cave Aged Bandaged Cheddar, can retail for more than $20 a pound and a smidge of it on a cheese plate is the way many people get a chance to try it.
At Brasserie V, customers ordering a cheese board pick three or five cheeses from a list of about eight. Nuts, a baguette, raw honey and Potter’s Crackers come with the cheese.
It’s not that Murfield is a snob, he just spends a lot of time thinking about creating a great cheese board. What nuts are more interesting than peanuts? What else can he pickle? What cheese might go with those Belgian beers? What mustard might he make with some of that beer? And don’t even try to pull from him the name of the hard-to-find cheese he’s trying to track down right now because he doesn’t want other chefs to know he is looking for it.
“Your brain turns into a hamster wheel for all the things you can try,” he says.
For Josh Chavez of Longtable Beer Cafe in Middleton, the joy of the cheese board is getting the chance to play around with all the local ingredients, particularly some of the Wisconsin cheeses that were practically in the backyard of his hometown of Galena, Illinois. But add some Potter’s Crackers, Door County fruit and Gentle Breeze honey and it gets to be downright fun.
“I know the first time I saw apples on a cheese board I thought, ‘Apples and cheese? Get out of here,’” he says. “But it really is one of those things where the sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves.”
The key, he says, is to get diners to realize that. Often the boards come back to the kitchen with the cheese gone but not the accoutrements — honey undrizzled, spreads unspread. With Longtable’s casual environment and an emphasis on shared plates, Chavez and the staff encourage customers to ask questions about the cheese and the sides when they order.
The various elements of the board are assembled so people can hit the different flavor points, he says. Honey can add a lot to a cheese that is salty or has a crystal crunch. With a creamy blue, it’s nice to follow up with some crunchy nuts.
“Changing textures is one of those things that people can forget about, but it can really add so much,” he says.
Longtable recently started putting cards on the tables that list the available cheeses so that people don’t have to hurriedly order at the counter. (As at Brasserie V, customers can pick three or five cheeses.) Even so, many people just ask the chef to pick because they believe they’ll do something wrong.
Fromagination makes cheese plates, too, with the store’s cheese inventory as the options, as well as crackers, nuts and other accompaniments. Customers can choose any number of cheeses, for $5 each. Some customers come in with an idea of what cheese they want, others defer to staff who pepper customers with questions to identify their preferences.
“Sometimes I can pick five cheeses and they’ll say, ‘I don’t like any of them,’” says Shannon Berry, a cheesemonger at Fromagination with a chef background. “That can be crushing and you think ‘What am I doing here?’ But that’s rare, probably one in every 100.”
At most places, the cheese selections are more finite. About half of Brasserie V’s eight options stay the same.
“The Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Hook’s 10-year cheddar, the Bleu Mont Bandaged Cheddar, that’s Wisconsin,” Murfield says. “Those stay there. Then I try to mix it up a bit with what’s seasonal.”
Ruthie Hauge
Longtable’s Josh Chavez likes to include cheeses from Vermont, Oregon, California and Missouri as well as Wisconsin’s own.
Bleu Mont, Marieke Gouda, Hook’s and Landmark Creamery give Longtable’s cheese boards a consistent Wisconsin presence, Chavez says, but he tries to mix it up, too.
“Wisconsin having the best cheese in the world is a beautiful thing, but we want to go beyond that,” he says, adding that cheeses from Oregon, Vermont, California and Missouri have graced the boards.
The best cheeses in the world won’t make much of an impact, though, if they aren’t prepared right. A good cheese board isn’t just chopping up some cheese and putting it on a board with other nibbly things.
Timing is key, as everything on the board needs to come to nearly room temperature by the time it reaches the table. At Brasserie V, cheese is cut and portioned ahead of time, then put in a cooler that is at about 40 degrees. Kitchen staff places the cheese on the board first in the warm kitchen, where it quickly comes to the right temperature as a baguette is cut and the nuts and honey are placed.
“You get a few of them in a row, it can get a little complicated,” Murfield says. “You have a three-cheese one, a five-cheese one, and you have every cheese you have sitting there.”
Murfield and Chavez create the cheese board template that kitchen staff follows. That’s more about inventory control than trying to protect any artistic vision. Yet if kitchen staff members have a particular flair, Chavez will let them play around a little bit.
“As a line cook, it can be difficult to avoid burnout because they’re not stimulated,” he says. “This is one of the ways they can be creative and have a little freedom.”
For all the beauty of a cheese board, what diners get isn’t so much a work of art, but the supplies to create a project of their own.
“They can do whatever they want with it,” Chavez says. “Just have fun. That’s the point, right?”
[Editor's note: This story was originally written to publish in the Isthmus Dining special section in April. Restaurant status during the COVID-19 restrictions may change. As of this posting all mentioned restaurants are serving cheeseboards.]
