A well-curated cheeseboard is the perfect way to show off your personal style at the table and impress your guests – and it takes a lot less effort than you think. Read our guide to learn how to create the perfect cheeseboards.

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Choosing a Cheeseboard

The first step in the cheeseboard crafting process is choosing a vessel for your ingredients. If your finished cheeseboard is the masterpiece, the platter or board which you display it on is the canvas. The board you choose is ultimately up to you and your preferences, but here’s a quick rundown of cheeseboard materials and shapes to help you decide.

Popular Cheeseboard Materials

Cheeseboards come in a wide variety of materials, including solid wood, iron, bone china and even crystal. However if this is your first time creating one, you might want to stick with the basics.

Wood: Wooden cheeseboards are considered classic thanks to their simple and muted look. If a more basic, polished wooden board isn’t for you, there are wood options available that resemble raw sections of tree trunks.

Bamboo: These cheese boards offer a similar look to their wooden counterparts but are more durable and require less maintenance.

Earthenware / Stoneware: After a more sophisticated looking cheeseboard? Marble and granite platters can enhance your cheeseboard’s aesthetic and are sure to wow your guests even more. Lighter colours will shine on dark slate boards that can even be labeled with chalk.

Popular Cheeseboard Shapes

Rectangle: Simple and sleek, rectangle cheeseboards make for easy cheeseboard assembling. Elongated rectangles are excellent for bars and long tables with many guests.

Round: Round cheeseboards make for stunning centrepieces on circular tables. They’re also excellent for highlighting particular ingredients.

Novelty: Cheeseboards may be seen as sophisticated but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for fun. Opt for a novelty cheeseboard for occasions such as Christmas, game night or a birthday.

Tip: Some cheese boards come with their own set of cheese knives while others have built-in compartments for easy storage of utensils or toothpicks.

What to Add to a Cheeseboard

Choose Your Cheeses

Even though the cheeses you choose will be the shining stars of your platter – it’s called a cheeseboard for a reason – don’t stress too much about which ones to use. We have a couple of tips to help you make the most eye-catching, mouth-watering cheese platter possible.

Types of Cheese

To make a cheese platter both delicious and visually appealing, choose cheeses with different textures and colours. This will not only make your cheeseboard look more dynamic but it'll also make it much more versatile flavour-wise.

Fresh: Fresh cheese is very pure unaged cheese that can be soft, firm, spreadable, bouncy and even crumbly. It’s usually almost white in colour and tastes mild. Salt, herbs and spices are often added to fresh cheese to compensate for its mildness. Goat's cheese, feta, mozzarella and burrata are all fresh cheeses that look and taste great as part of a cheeseboard.

Tip: Sometimes fresh cheese comes packaged in whey or brine. If you’re putting brined cheese on your cheese board, make sure to dab excess liquid away to avoid any unappetising puddles from forming.

Soft and Semi-Soft: These cheeses are still subtle in flavour and much less structured than fresh cheese. The rich and creamy Brie and Camembert are spreadable soft cheeses perfect for pairing with crunchy textures. Muenster and Havarti are delicious semi-soft cheeses that can also be sliced.

Semi-Hard and Hard: Pungent in smell and powerful in flavour, these cheeses are great for slicing thinly. Gouda, cheddar, Colby, Monterey Jack and Emmental cheese (Swiss) are all fairly dense and creamy semi-hard cheeses that slice well. Monterey Jack is special for its colour marbling and Emmental is known for its large, comical air pockets. Gruyère, Asiago and Parmigiano-Reggiano (Parmesan) are all hard cheese varieties that are exceptionally flavourful and flakey. They're served best in smaller amounts.

Mold: Mold-ripened cheeses with crusts like Brie and Camembert and mold-ripened cheeses with pops of colour, like the pink-orange Munster and the blue-green Roquefort and Gorgonzola, can add to your cheeseboard’s aesthetic.

Tip: Avoid using less-structured cheeses like cottage cheese, cream cheese and any shredded or powdered cheeses. You might also want to avoid individually-packaged cheese slices and cheese sticks. They’re good as ingredients and on their own, but they won’t make for an exceptionally good-looking platter.

Choose Your Meats

Another signature food group present in many cheeseboards is cured meat or charcuterie. The savoury and salty flavours in the meats will compliment the tang of riper cheeses and add a punch to milder cheeses. Just like with the cheeses, it’s good to pick meats that vary in colour and texture.

Dry-Cured Meats and Sausages: Pepperoni, salami and chorizo are all tough sausages that can be sliced into thin rounds. Their firmness adds excellent texture to softer cheeses and their dappled colouring pops against a duller background.

Thinly Sliced Soft Cured Meats: To add a savoury flavour, choose prosciutto, capicola, dry-cured ham and mortadella.

Choose Your Vehicle

Your cheeseboard would be incomplete without some vessels (usually carb-based) on which to stack all your other ingredients. These vehicles are most often crackers or thinly sliced baguette, either toasted or untoasted, but you can also use crisps, breadsticks, pitas and even tortilla chips.

Choose Your Extras

Once you’ve chosen your cheeses, meats and delivery systems, it’s time to start thinking about colour, flavour and even more texture.

Sweet: It’s always a good idea to bring sweetness to the table. Fresh grapes, figs, berries, sliced peaches, pears and apples are all fairly common cheeseboard additions, but pomegranates, kiwis, and even persimmons can pair beautifully with your more savoury ingredients. Dried fruits, like apricots, raisins, dried cranberries or citrus slices and banana or plantain chips can all find a home alongside cheese and meat. Honey, either out of a small jar or right off of the comb, can also pack a sweet punch and add beauty to your board.

Salty: Cornichons (pickled cucumbers) and olives can flatter your platter and bring in some earth tones to compliment the light yellows and reds of your cheeses and meats. Capers make for a simple, salty garnish.

Rich: Almonds, cashews and walnuts are signature cheeseboard ingredients for their richness and ease of presentation.

Spreadable: Hummus, tapenade, fruit jam and chutney are common but relish, hot pepper spread, pâté and pesto would also look and taste great along with your other ingredients.

Garnishes: When your board looks mostly complete, the right garnish can tie it all together. Sprinkles of fresh herb sprigs or dried herbs, edible flowers or flower petals or seeds are all good considerations at this stage.

Miscellaneous: For a unique touch, add some vegetables. Purple cauliflower, sliced radish, roasted peppers and cucumber rounds are all veggies with vibrant colour to freshen up your board’s look and taste. If vegetables aren’t your style, consider chocolate chunks or chilis.

How to Create The Perfect Cheeseboard

Once you have all your flavours, textures and colours picked out, it’s time to put it all together. Use the same order as above: cheese, meat, vehicle, add-ons. A rule of thumb when placing any ingredient is to make sure similar colours, textures or shapes aren’t directly beside each other unless you’re designing a more organised look.

Step 1: Cheese

• Your cheeses will most likely be the largest items on your board and will act as anchors for all of your other ingredients.
• Space them fairly evenly apart and angle them in different directions.
• Harder cheeses should be presented with several slices already laid out so that guests don’t have to cut their own. You can also cube or crumble cheeses.
• Leave cheese knives with each cheese for easy slicing and spreading.
• Label your cheeses so guests know what is what on your board.

Step 2: Meat

• Sausage-style meats can be sliced into thin rounds or ovals that can be stacked or staggered into beautiful fans. Larger rounds can be folded into flat triangles.
• Thinner, wider slices of cured meat can be rolled into tubes and stacked in pyramids or rolled into messy, rose-like shapes that look great in pairs or trios.

Step 3: Crackers

• Long, thin breadsticks can look lovely splayed outwards from the centre of your board.
• Rectangular crackers look nice in neat rows while rounder crackers look better in staggered fans.
• Baguette slices take up a lot of room, so keep them toward the outer edge of your platter.

Step 4: Extras

• Extras should fill the empty space, unless you want to keep your board simple.
• Place every add-on that has its own dish on the board before the others.
• Build ingredients off of the others in small piles, scattered handfuls, fans and stacks.

Step 5: Garnishes

Place flower petals, seeds, and herb sprigs in areas lacking those colours or textures. They can even be placed on top of other ingredients.