How To Make A Great Cheese Board: Advice from The Experts!

Learn how to make the ultimate cheese board — with guidance from the cheese experts at Boston's beloved gourmet cheese shop, Formaggio Kitchen. They shared their top tips with me plus I consulted a few other experts in the field of food and entertaining. This post is your comprehensive guide on how to select the perfect cheeses for your board, how to choose delicious accompaniments, and how to arrange everything beautifully.

Cheese is one of the world's most irresistible foods. Just the sight of a soft brie or camembert, melting out of its rind, inspires passion. With so many exotic flavors, textures and aromas on one  plate, a fabulous cheese platter is one of the easiest, most exquisite things you can serve to guests.  

This post will help you put together a superb cheese cheese platter for your next dinner party or holiday gathering.

How To Pick The Best Cheeses

If you're like me, you've been overwhelmed at the cheese counter, a sea of cheeses, each one with an enticing description. It's enjoyable to read the charming little blurbs about the farms or the animals that the cheeses came from but I still don't know which ones to buy.

Year after year I end up sticking to the ones I'm familiar with, tried and true cheese like Robiola and La Tur.  They are always great, but I've missed out on trying what's new or fresh or super exciting or perfectly ripe!

I decided to asked my favorite cheese experts at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge for some help putting together a great cheese board. Then I took the cheeses they recommended and enlisted the help of two creative foodie friends for styling advice. Here's what I learned!

3 Tips For Making A Great Cheese Board

Boston's Formaggio Kitchen is a foodie's paradise and they know cheese, with over 300 artisanal cheeses in their cases plus an awe-inspiring cheese cave in the basement of their Cambridge store. This is their advice for putting together a great cheese board:

#1 Go With What You Like

If you don't like tangy goat's milk cheeses or spicy blue cheeses, don't worry - you can still put together a remarkable cheese plate without these styles of cheese.

In Europe, the cheese course is traditionally served after the entrée and before dessert, but we encourage you to eat cheese whenever you want: before dinner, after dinner or even as your main course!

If you want to eat the rind, go ahead - if not, don't. Rinds can bring subtle flavors and textures to the cheese, which might add or detract from the flavor and texture of the interior (known as the paste) of the cheese."

#2 Choose Quality Over Quantity

Your palate has a better chance of keeping up with your appetite if you have a smaller selection rather than a larger selection. We recommend constructing a cheese plate of at least three and no more than six cheeses.

#3 Know Your Audience

When building a cheese plate, we suggest that you consider what your guests might appreciate. If it is an adventurous crowd, pick cheeses with more pungency and flavor and perhaps some cheeses that you've never heard of. If your crowd is more conventional, choose familiar styles such as Brie, Cheddar, or Gouda, and throw in one more obscure cheese that push your audience's boundaries a bit.

7 Cheeses That Make A Perfect Cheese Board

There are hundreds of great cheeses to choose from but maybe you don't have the time or inclination to linger at the cheese counter figuring out what to buy? If so, no worries. Here are seven cheeses, recommended by Formaggio Kitchen, that will make the ultimate cheese board.

This selection includes a full range of flavors and textures: soft, hard, mild, pungent, cow, goat, young, and aged.

• Brebis Pardou, Seleccion Montagne
• Colston Basset Stilton

• Oma from Von Trapp Family Farm
• Brillat Savarin

• Castagnino (wrapped in chestnut leaves)
• 3 Year Old Parmigiano Reggiano, aged by Giorgio Cravero
• Compte Forte St Antoine, aged by Marcel Petite

What To Serve on a Cheese Cheese in Addition to Cheese

Perfect Pairings:

• Cheddar and Apples
• Pyrénées Brebis and black cherry preserves
• Twig Farm Goat Tomme and an herbal honey
• Époisses and Gewürtztraminer

Get Creative:

Formaggio advises that after you take note of suggested pairings you should then go on to your own process of discovery to find pairings that you love. Experimenting with pairings is one of the great joys of learning about cheeses and their many accompaniments.

• Add a hunk of honeycomb with the honey oozing out
• include a bunch of beautiful red grapes
• Add a little pot of fig jam with a small spoon

Once you select the cheeses and accompaniments, it's time to arrange everything on on the platter.  I'm lucky to have some extremely creative friends who were excited to spend a day with me, arranging cheese. They came up with some gorgeous and fabulously fun cheese board ideas!

The Rustic Cheese Board

Designed by my friend Pam - chef, artist and caterer. Cheeses are arranged  on a weathered shallow wooden bowl. Pam chose four cheeses, distinct from each other in taste and looks.

Accompaniments are rustic and beautiful, just like the cheeses and the bowl: a hunk of glistening honeycomb, a heaping spoonful of rich fig jam, a ripe split pomegranate and a large spray of red grapes. I especially love the Castignino Cheese for this rustic presentation, wrapped in Chestnut leaves and tied with raffia. Also love Pam's wooden pig tray for the bread!

The Fancy/Elegant Cheese Board

After designing the rustic platter, Pam starting digging through her china to come up with ideas for our fancy cheese board. First she arranged some cheeses on a lovely gold-rimmed platter.

Then she grabbed the Brillat Savarin in one hand and, what looked like a piece of gold origami paper, in the other. With a quick flick of the hand, she touched the sheet of paper to the cheese and gold-leafed it - edible gold leaf!

The gold leafed cheese was so striking we decided it was the only embellishment needed, for our elegant cheese board - with the gold-flecked cheese as the centerpiece and the gold rim of the dish to frame it.

The Mid Century Modern Cheese Platter

Pam and I went to our friend Carol's house to create the final platter. Carol is an artist, jewelry-designer and has an fantastic taste and design sense. She and her husband Clif are collectors of Mid Century furniture and dish ware. What you see here is the real deal.

Pam brought over the green retro cocktail picks. She selected the more geometric shaped cheeses and paired them with colorful olives and (who can resist?) a platter of mini sausages and saltines arranged on top of sliced genoa salami!  (pigs in blankets would work well here too)

We all agreed that potato chips and cheddar dip were a "must" for this theme!

If you're serving cheese for one of your holiday gatherings, I highly recommend a visit to your local specialty store for help. It's a lot of fun to learn about the different cheeses, especially when the selection processes includes tastes!

Be creative! Pick a theme for your cheese board and have fun with it!

For more helpful ideas and recipes for your next dinner party or holiday gathering, be sure to check out our post: The Best Easy Party Food Ideas.