Love entertaining? The Perfect Charcuterie Board is easy to whip together and will be the hit of your next gathering! #MadeInFrance #MadeWithLove
Summer is the perfect time of year to bust out the charcuterie board. We love entertaining, and any excuse to have delicious French wine, cheeses and some finely sliced meats is an excuse enough for me. Today I’m going to be showing you how to build the perfect charcuterie board so that when it comes time to entertain, you’ll be able to whip this together in a flash! P.S. – Did you know Bastille Day is coming up on July 14th? Can you think of a better way to celebrate the French way with a delicious spread of French wine, cheese & salts? Me neither!
The Cheeses
No charcuterie board is complete without a nice selection of cheese. It’s best to choose different styles of cheese so that everyone can find something they’ll like. 3-4 different types of cheese is usually a perfect amount for a medium sized gathering. Try to select a hard cheese, soft cheese and a crumbly cheese. If you’re feeling adventurous, sometimes a fancy flavored cheese can be fun.
On my charcuterie board, I have St. Andre, a soft ripened triple cream cheese. This stuff is lusciously creamy, perfectly salty and easy to spread on a cracker or three 😁
Over yonder is the St. Agur blue cheese. I am usually not the biggest fan of blue cheese, but this stuff is made with cow’s milk instead of goat’s milk, which is what blue cheese is traditionally made from. The cheese was creamier and less crumbly than traditional blue cheese but still maintained its intense flavoring that blue cheese is known for. I served it to my guests and they LOVED it. I’m still in awe that these cheeses are readily available in the U.S. for a very reasonable price.
The Meats
If you know your guests, try to read the crowd before they arrive. We know our friends like a good selection of meat on the charcuterie board, so we put out prosciutto, coppa and salami.
The Crackers, Bread & Breadsticks
As much as I would love to eat the St. Andre triple cream brie all by itself, it’s smart to pair it with an assortment of crackers. Here we had 5-6 different types of crackers, ranging from a seedy variety to a peppered water cracker. All of them make the perfect vehicle for bringing that beautiful cheese to your tastebuds.
Briny Accompaniments
Here I added some green olives and sweet gherkin pickles to balance out some of the other flavors. Although not pictured as part of this charcuterie board, these La Baleine salts would be perfect to balance out a sweeter component of a charcuterie board. I love that they’re an environmentally friendly company that harvests their salts sustainably.
Fruits, Jams & Spreads
Any or all of the above will do for a charcuterie board. Here I chose to sprinkle some fresh strawberries and a few red seedless grapes all about the board. A fresh fruit spread would have been divine on this board as well.
Assorted Nuts
Although this board only features almonds, another nut would be perfect to add to your charcuterie board.
Wine!!
Oh, who are we kidding? A charcuterie board is only as good as its accompanying wine. We loved tasting George Duboeuf’s Beaujolais – Villages and the Pouilly-Fuissé. Both wines were perfect in their own right and Georges Duboeuf most certainly is worthy of the title “King of Beaujolais”.
Saget la Perrière Marie de Beauregard Vouvray was another one of our favorites with the Marie de Beauregard Chinon coming in close behind. We loved that all of these wines are authentic French wines but are offered in the United States at an affordable price. I would go out of my way to seek them out because they were SO much smoother and flavorful than a wine I might usually blindly pick up from the store.
So tell me – when will you be hosting a gathering worthy of a charcuterie board? What are your favorite types of wine/cheese?
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