One of our favorite appetizers to serve our dinner guests is a cheeseboard out on the patio. A cheeseboard is an easy, simple, and informal dish that you can set out and then forget about while your guests serve themselves from it and you finish preparing your meal. What makes a cheeseboard so easy is that everything is on one board. Here are some of our steps to creating your perfect cheeseboard.
The first step is to pick out your wooden cutting board. Since we are in Hong Kong, our storage is small and we have one main large cutting board in our studio. It's a simple board in a rectangle shape, but you can use any shape you have on hand.
Once we have the board selected, we want to create a symmetry as we placed our food items on the board. A cheeseboard is very similar to setting a table centerpiece. It's all about balance, layers, and texture.
For our cheese selection on this particular board we chose a runny cheese like a brie and a salty cheese which was a nice bleu cheese. We like to pair the bleu cheese with something sweet, so we added some fresh figs and nestled them onto our board. Pointing the triangles of cheese out towards the edges of the board allows your guests to easily serve themselves. Typically, we would want to serve a goat cheese log and/or a sweet cheese that has some dried fruit in it on my board as well. It's all about flavor variations that excite the palate.
Since we had the fresh figs on our board we added some cured salami meat, and the balance of the salty and sweet play off of each other well. For a tangy bite, we added a bowl of olives that my assistant picked up from me from our local Chinese grocery store.
