Chelsea Kalberloh’s seventh-grade teacher misread her name on the attendance list and called out “Cheesy? Cheesy Kalberloh?” The nickname stuck, and now Kalberloh’s moniker matches her job: cheesemonger at the Wicker Park cheese and wine boutique Taste. At her cheese counter in the back of the shop–opened April 12 by veteran restaurateur and wine sales rep Rodney Alex–Kalberloh educates and encourages shoppers to try unfamiliar things. One recent afternoon she implored a hesitant taster to sample an aged provolone from Wisconsin. “It’s not like the provolone from the deli,” she insisted, and the customer was rewarded with a sharp flaky shard, markedly different from its waxy processed cousin.
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Taste sells only wines and cheeses that are “ready to drink and eat tonight,” says Alex, and he and Kalberloh provide personal counseling on pairing the two. Kalberloh has assembled an impressive inventory based on her lifelong zeal for scouting interesting cheeses. Growing up, “we always had good cheese in the house,” but it was the cheese shops she browsed on a college trip to Europe that aroused her passion. She was a magazine editor before she went into the cheese trade, and while her descriptions may be flowery–“So yummy you’ll cry! So gorgeous you’ll blush!” she gushes about her deep orange aged Mimolette, a nutty, slightly sweet French cheese–they’re also appealing.
Soft cheeses, especially unpasteurized ones, are often best consumed within days of their peak, and Kalberloh keeps a close watch as her wares ripen. “Otherwise they can get too runny or just sort of go off,” she says. Hard cheeses like the best-selling Laack Brothers Wisconsin cheddar (aged nine years) are sturdier, though Kalberloh takes care to keep the cut surfaces from drying out while allowing the rind to breathe so the cheese can oxidize and mature properly. Her cheeses are rewrapped each time they are cut, and she keeps the more delicate fresh and soft-ripened cheeses in a separate cooler from more assertive cheeses like blues.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Cynthia Howe.
