Great for entertaining, perfect for a late night supper, a way to start a meal or end it; cheeseboards can fill the void of a meal, or become one in itself. For as long as we can remember cheeseboards have been a good excuse for a late afternoon wine on a lazy weekend and, in our family, a source of healthy competition for who can design the most elaborate and creative.
At .beige we love cheese and curating and designing a well constructed cheeseboard is as much fun as eating it! Here are our tips to crafting the perfect Spring time board for an afternoon of grazing before an evening of barbeque festivity.
Board building principles
What you want to achieve is filling every surface area of your board. We like to use round boards for larger events and entertaining but anything from your chopping board, bread board to a plate will suffice. Starting with the cheeses allows you to canvas the surface area really well. We recommend four cheeses for a medium-sized board as the variety allows for an offering of different textures and flavour profiles. Choosing two-to-three bread and/or cracker options helps decide the most appropriate board-to-plate delivery mechanism too and should be matched with your cheese varieties. As we are using both soft and hard cheeses for our board, we have made a sourdough baguette and sourdough discard crackers.
The cheese
We’re using cheeses from our friends at Alte Milch here in Berlin to build our board. Each have a unique taste and texture which allows us to match fruits, nuts and charcuterie in each section of the board with the profile of each cheese.
Cantal vieux is our hard cheese and produced in the central French region of Auvergne. Typically a firm cows cheese and aged for around six months it comes from the Comté family meaning it has a firm, rustic and picante flavour that is very grassy and earthy. This profile is delicious and downplayed when paired with stronger, chilli flavours which we’ve done with a mango, habanero chutney and cremé fraché filled mini peppers. And as an alternative, lemon-cured white fish served sardine style with pitted dates.
Cabriolait is a Flemish raw goats milk cheese with a washed rind, and matured for a short two -three months. This cheese is deceivingly creamy for a semi-hard cheese and works perfectly with smoked almonds and green olives cured in brine. We’ve also added in some smokey salami slices to really enhance the creaminess of the goat’s milk. This is served next to our homemade sourdough discard salted crackers.
Selles sur cher is also a goats cheese but much softer than the Cabriolait and coated in a light dusting of charcoal. From the French Loire region, this style is a favourite for the masses as a super creamy, mild and gooey cheese it is served beautifully with honeycomb. We’ve matched it with crisp and sweet green grapes and peppery bresaola.
Crémeer a semi-soft cows cheese from Hof Backensholz from the upmost north region of NordFriesland near the Danish boarder in Germany. For our Spring inspired board we used halved strawberries that on a piece of homemade sourdough baguette is almost like strawberries and cream.
You’ll see the balance of shapes and textures here means your guests can work their way around the board in a way that the flavour profile enhances and develops though the meal.
TOP TIP! Be sure to let your cheeses warm outside the fridge for at least 45 minutes before serving.
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