individual cheese boards

If an event budget is on your side, I think serving guests an individual cheese board along with dessert is a beautiful touch to an intimate, decadent event.  Just take a look at what was cooking over at Sunday Suppers.  They even had someone illustrate a cheese board card to let people know what they were eating.

via sunday suppers

A couple tidbits of info to remember when preparing a cheese board keeping in mind functionality and ease of use at a dinner party/wedding/event.  To prepare a cheese board, serving the cheese on a wooden board is best because metal, glass or ceramic surfaces can blunt your cheese knives.  If you don’t care about how sharp your cheese knives are, then let creativity reign and ignore recommendation #1.   There are a lot of great cheese boards on the market and I have even seen some home-made versions where people have cut their own boards out of logs. 

Here is an example of a slate board:

slate cheese board

 Here is a cool looking wooden board:

fruitwood cheese board via multi chic

Another thing to note is that the cheeses should be placed well apart, each with its own knife, slicer or spoon, to prevent cross flavouring.  That is the worst when cheese flavours mix.  The beautiful thing about serving cheese is dazzling the taste buds of your guests with different flavours/textures of cheese.  Think of the cheese board as a mini adventure!  Let the cheeses breathe with distance between each other.

For hard and semi hard cheeses, cheese knives with pronged ends for picking up the portions are useful (see examples of a pronged knife below). 

via fromaggio kitchen

Semisoft cheese can be cut in slivers with a continental cheese slicer (see examples below). 

via hive modern

via uffda shop

via william sonoma

Regardless of which knives you use and how you plate it, don’t forget to label your cheeses.  Thanks to international trade and a growing interest in gastronomy, there are probably hundreds of different types of cheeses at your disposal.  Be kind to your guests and take the guessing game out of eating cheese.  A simple tag with the name of the cheese will do or you can go for something more elaborate and include the country of origin, a bit about the cheese and likely pairings.

Tags: cheese board, cheese knife