Stop Serving Cheeses on Wooden Boards
I love collecting vintage kitchen utensils, including beautiful teak cheese domes and serving boards. They look nice, especially the domes, but they don’t smell very good. Not at all. The best cheese is the one with the persistent flavor, but while I enjoy the smell at the moment, I generally don’t want to smell it again and again, especially after I’ve eaten the cheese. The culprit here is the tree – to stop the stench, stop serving your cheese on it.
The problem with wooden cheese boards is that they are porous and tend to absorb the odors of anything you put on them. These odors linger and the effect can be unpleasant. (That’s why I have a special cutting board for onions – I don’t want my apples to taste like onions.) Though I’m sure you could eventually get rid of most of the smell with a baking soda paste or lemon scrubs. and salt, you may not get all that, and it’s much easier to serve the cheese on a non-wooden surface to begin with.
By the way, this is why many fashionable cheese shops serve their products on a slate board. (This isn’t just pretending.) Slate isn’t porous, so it’s much easier to clean and much less fragrant. All you have to do to clean a piece of slate is wipe it down with a damp cloth. Alternatively, you can also use a glass cutting board. Note that this is the only time I have ever recommended a glass cutting board for anything, as you definitely shouldn’t use them for cutting because they will dull your knives. (Yes, you might have to use a cheese cutter to get the brie on the glass tray, but it’s pretty boring anyway.)