Cheese, oh cheese, I love you so. By the slice, by the spoonful, stinky or no. You are for me.
As a personal chef and party maker, I have the pleasure of purchasing and presenting (aka buying and setting up all pretty) lots and lots of cheese. I am delighted with it. I love discovering a new cheese, and an hour spent tasting is bliss.
I was asked this week how to create an attractive cheese platter.
Don’t you think everything tastes best when it is pretty? There is nothing wrong with eating a couple of perfect cheeses plonked onto a plate, but it is really fun to make and eat from cheese boards when snacking with friends or entertaining. I am happy to share the few tricks I know.
Start with investing in a nice couple of platters, which you can get for a good price at places such as Marshalls. I am also a sucker for a cheese knife, tiny spoon or wee bitty fork. Can’t hurt to have a few around.
The tip I use the most when designing a cheese display is to start with a “river.” Whether it is diced cheddar or nuts, starting with a meandering vein creates a foundation to build off of with other kinds of food. Into the curves of the river you can nestle small round cheeses, fruit, nuts (if you are not worried about allergies in your group), veggies, little pots of jam (a great opportunity for that tiny spoon), crackers, etc.
I love all kinds of fruits on these displays, but what people really seem to eat the most is grapes. Cut the big bunches into little bunches of four or five using scissors. They will be easier to place in a cute way, and easier for people to pick up to eat. Bonus: You don’t have those empty stems making your lovely board look shabby.
I like to incorporate something truly substantial into my displays. This can be small canapés, such as a puff pastry pinwheel, the cheese puffs known as gougères or something like oat biscuits. You can use a cabbage leaf as a bowl for a dip such as hummus and surround it with cut carrots, snap peas and radishes. (It is nice to offer a variety aside from cheese and meat to accommodate vegan needs.) I frequently make my board entirely gluten free. There are some great GF cracker options out there.
If you are going to use cut apples or pears, toss them in lemon water to keep them from browning. Let them drain well before you add them so they don’t make everything wet.
Finely sliced meats folded into flowers or some such are classic charcuterie, but I find those too fiddly. Instead, I get a few hard sausages and cut them into bite-sized chunks.
Preslicing hard cheeses such as cheddar or “alpines” such as Swiss and Gruyere into similarly bite-sized pieces helps with snackability, though I do love to leave some full slabs with a pretty knife for guests to use themselves.
Choose one gorgeous cheese as a focal point and let pieces tumble off the side of your cheese boards onto the table.
More about the cheese
A classic French cheese plate selection is a blue, an aged/washed rind cow cheese, a hard cheese and a goat cheese. This will give you options in flavor and “mouth feel.”
The squishy bit of cheese is called “paste.” A soft cheese might be called “pudgy.” Isn’t that adorable? Some cheeses are fresh. Some are aged. Some are pressed, some are not. All are made by adding something to separate the curds (the milk solids) from the whey, which is the watery part that is strained away. Here are a few examples from a very, very basic breakdown:
Cheddar is an example of a pressed cheese. Block cheddar, the most popular cheese you see in supermarkets, is layered, pressed and aged briefly, making it a softer but still sliceable cheese.
An example of a “bloomy rind” cheese is brie. This is a drained and only lightly pressed cheese. The outside is exposed to bacteria and aged from the outside in to create a soft, gooey layer around the creamy inside paste. Fried goat cheese “croutons” are also made this way.
Blue cheese is a softer paste inoculated with a very specific bacteria to create those moldy “blue bits.” It is often, but not always, pungent.
The hardest cheeses, such as Parmesan, are hard pressed and aged for a long time.
There are “fresh” cheeses, such as rolls of goat cheese.
We here in New England are graced with a huge amount of delicious local cheese. There is a blue in Vermont called Bayley Hazen Blue that has the French pissed off with all the awards it has had bestowed upon it.
Bayley Hazen is from Jasper Hill Creamery, in Greensboro, Vermont. There is a great story there: Cabot Cheese, which make more than half of U.S. cheddars (the most popular cheese in America), acquires dairy from many farms and mixes it to create what we get at supermarkets. The cheese powers-that-be decided some time ago that they wanted to make a “single herd” cheddar, one that changes by season and by batch. So they partnered with little Jasper Hill and built a facility, a mighty and multifingered cheese cave where Cabot’s Clothbound Single Herd Cheddar is aged in a cave next to Jasper Hill’s own. As Jasper Hill has grown, its products have become more commercially available, which is a big win for us. You can now find many in local markets.
Which reminds me that it is important to tell you about the cheese section at the Somerville Market Basket. It is fantastic and full of Jasper Hill offerings.
My favorite, in addition to Bayley Hazen Blue, is Harbison, a rich, “bloomy rind” cheese wrapped in birch bark. You eat it by carefully slicing off the top and scooping it out. Warm it a bit and it is a kind of fondue substitute. I also love Little Hosmer, another bloomy rind that is smaller and perfect for a dinner for two.
From Vermont Creamery come several excellent goat cheeses. I love Coupole and Cremont, both aged and creamy, with a mild goat bite. (The creamery also makes excellent fresh goat cheeses.)
If you want to give cheese your own twist, pick up a fresh log of goat cheese and roll it in a mix of spices or chopped herbs, nuts, or all of the above.
Send cooking questions to JJ Gonson, a personal chef at Cuisine en Locale, at jjgonson@csindie.com.
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