Charcuterie Board Accessories

The short version: the accessories that change a board are small bowls, decent knives and something to write the cheese names on. The ones that do not are the twelve-piece kits sold with a board, which bundle four knives you will not use and nothing to put the olives in. Buy for the gaps, and the gaps are nearly always the same three.

How these were ranked

Not by price and not by how they photograph. The order below is how likely you are to be missing the thing, multiplied by how often you would use it once you owned it. That is why a set of small bowls sits above a cheese slicer: almost every household already has something that cuts cheese, and almost none have six lidded bowls the right size for olives.

We have not lab-tested any of this. Picks come from live manufacturer catalogs, material and build, and whether the thing survives being used rather than displayed — the full methodology explains how that works and what it does not claim.

What each accessory is actually for

The problem with accessory kits

Search this category and most of what comes back is a bamboo board with a drawer, four knives, two slate markers and a stick of chalk, sold as a complete set. It looks like excellent value and it mostly is not, for one reason: the knives in those drawers are shaped for photography. They handle a soft brie and skate straight off a hard aged cheddar, which is the cheese that actually needs a tool.

If you are buying from nothing, a kit is a reasonable way to start and we cover the good ones in complete board sets. If you already own a board — and nearly everybody reading a page about accessories does — the kit duplicates the one thing you have and under-delivers on everything else. Buy the pieces.

Start with the bowls, because that is the real gap

Everything wet on a board wants a bowl. Olives sit in brine, jam and honey run, marinated peppers carry oil, and a dip is a dip. Put any of those directly on wood and two things happen: the board stains in a ring that does not come out, and the cracker next to it goes soft.

The number that works is three to four bowls on a board feeding eight, and the number to own is six. The spares are what let you build the board the night before. Fill them, lid them, put the tray in the refrigerator, and on the day the board goes from empty to finished in about four minutes, which is the difference between enjoying your own party and assembling food through the first hour of it.

Four ounces is the size that disappears into a board without taking it over. Eight-ounce bowls are better as a standalone dip beside the board rather than on it. If you want larger vessels for the rest of the table, the serving bowl picks cover that end.

Labeling: ink beats chalk

Slate markers and chalk are the default in this category and they have one flaw nobody mentions in the listing: chalk sheds. Dust lands on whatever is beside the marker, which on a charcuterie board is food. It is not dangerous and it is not pleasant.

Porcelain or ceramic labels with a food-safe ink pen avoid that entirely, stay legible for a whole evening, and go in the dishwasher afterwards, which is why they get reused instead of ending up in a drawer dirty. The one place they fail is on a white platter, where white porcelain simply vanishes — on a white serving dish, use a dark slate board as the writing surface instead.

Write the cheese name, and write the milk underneath it if anyone coming has a reason to care. Goat, sheep and cow is three extra words and it stops the one conversation that otherwise repeats all night.

Keeping a wooden board alive

A wooden board that is never oiled dries from the outside in, and the first sign is a hairline split along the grain at one end. Once that opens it does not close. The fix is dull and takes a minute: food-safe mineral oil, rubbed in with a cloth, left to soak, excess wiped off.

The interval worth knowing is monthly, or every two months on a board in heavy use, which is the guidance the University of Kentucky extension service gives for wooden boards and is cited in full below. The same guidance is blunt about two things people get wrong: never use vegetable or nut-based oils, which turn rancid inside the wood, and never submerge the board, which is what warps and splits it faster than neglect does.

Mineral oil is sold as a specialist board product and also, far more cheaply, as plain food-grade mineral oil. The specialist version in a spray bottle is genuinely easier to use, and ease is the whole variable here, because the problem with board care is not that people do it wrong — it is that they do not do it at all. Our full cleaning and care guide covers the washing side, including the salt-and-lemon method for lifting stains.

Slicing tools, and when a knife is not enough

A knife set is the accessory that matters most, and it has its own page — our cheese knife picks go into blade shapes in detail. The reason a dedicated set is worth the money over the bundled ones is narrow but real: a hard aged cheese resists, and a blade without the right profile slides sideways off the rind instead of entering it.

A slicer is the other half of that problem. On a firm wheel people want even pieces, and a slicer produces them where a knife produces wedges of varying thickness. It is genuinely useless on anything soft, so it never replaces the knives — it is a second tool for one specific cheese, which is why it sits low on this list despite being very good at its job.

The leftovers, which is where most cheese is wasted

Cheese keeps changing after you buy it. Wrapped in plastic it has nowhere to breathe, moisture collects against the surface, and within a few days you get the slick texture and sharp ammonia smell that makes people throw away a wedge that was fine underneath.

Two-ply cheese paper fixes it by doing both jobs at once: the inner layer holds humidity so the wedge does not dry, the outer layer lets gas escape so it does not suffocate. Rewrap after every use, keep it in the warmest part of the refrigerator rather than the coldest, and a good wedge stays good for weeks instead of days.

It is paper, and it costs more than a roll of plastic wrap, which is a fair objection. The counter is simple arithmetic: one wedge of decent cheese rescued pays for the pack.

What this costs, roughly

This is an inexpensive category. Bowls, labels, a bottle of oil and a pack of paper together sit well below what a single good board costs, and the knives are the only item where spending more buys a meaningfully better object. The expensive mistake here is not any single purchase — it is buying a second accessory kit because the first one came with knives that did not cut.

We do not print prices on this site, because they move weekly and a number typed here in October is wrong by December. Every pick links straight to the current listing so you see the real figure before you commit.

Which one to buy

• If you buy one thing: the Sweese lidded ramekins. Six bowls, prep the night before, and the board stops staining.
• Best knives: BOSKA. A cheese specialist’s blades rather than a board maker’s afterthought.
• Best labels: RSVP International porcelain markers. Ink rather than chalk, and dishwasher safe.
• Best board care: BOSKA Board Oil. Mineral oil in a spray bottle, which is why it actually gets used.
• Best for a hard aged wheel: BOSKA Monaco+ slicer. Even slices where a knife gives you wedges.
• Best for leftovers: Formaticum two-ply paper. The pick that pays for itself in cheese you did not throw out.

If you are still choosing the board itself, start with the board picks, which are sized by guest count rather than by looks. For what actually goes on top and in what quantities, how to build a charcuterie board has the per-guest amounts, and the rest of the boards section covers materials, sizes and sets.