Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'm going to show you how to do a great cheeseboard. Often you get a load of cheeses
in a pack
and they look like this
and you put them on a board
but I'm going to show you a few little techniques that can really transform it into something
very special for christmas time
or for a supper evening meal
so all we're going to do
is we're going to take
something like cheddar, which everyone has
so for example what I'm going to do is slice it
down and have
a few good slices off the front of it
like so
and then we're going to take something as simple
as baking parchment
and all you're going to do is crumple it up in your hand
and we're just going to put that in the center of the board
and take this delicious farmhouse vintage cheddar
and it's crumbled a little bit but that's the beauty of cheddar
there we go, and then we're going to take the stilton, and I think a great little idea for stilton is to
serve it with a little bit of honey
works well with goats' cheese aswell and just to add a little bit of interest
to the board
I've put this little other board on top of this
when you are choosing your board for your cheeses
make sure it's a nice, dark, deep colour
even if it's a wooden chopping board
it really lifts the colour of the cheese
so what I'm going to do is
just crumble it off at the front there
by doing that you're inviting your guests to help themselves
next we're going to go for something with a bit of height
so this is a lovely manchego cheese from La Mancha in Spain has a really lovely nutty flavour to it
then we're going to put on
a lovely gooey, running brie
this one's from Somerset
and with that I'm just going to place it on there because
it speaks for itself
what i have done with all these cheese is brought them out about an hour before
we want to eat them
so that they develop the flavour
this is a lovely French brie and just to make a point of difference what I'm going to do is
just slice the nose off
at an angle, by slicing it off at the nose end that's a very traditional way of
cutting brie
so we're just going to pop that up at the front there
and finally by no means least is the red leicester
so with this you'll see it's again a lovely crumbly cheese
with a nutty little flavour to it
so I might just move that to the side slightly
also when you're selecting cheeses for a cheeseboard make sure you have
soft cheeses, hard cheeses
and blue cheeses and on this we have all of those
so then the accompaniments you can put with it are anything from
fruits to nuts to chutneys
so I've got some grapes here, obviously that's quite big to go on there and we don't want to
overwhelm the cheese because it is about the cheese itself
so you just snip off beautiful little
bunches of grapes, like so
and just dot them around
again, also add some red grapes in there because it adds a bit more colour
there's no right or wrong with this just have a bit of a play with it
lovely figs, all you need to do is just
cut down through the middle nearly to the bottom
then rotate quarter of a turn and again
down to the bottom
and just using your fingers just
ease it open, it looks like a flower opening up and that
is just a really impressive little idea aswell
pears and apples, anything that's got red or green tones on there
to lift the colour of the cheese, works really well
I'm going to make what I call a jigsaw pear, very simply
take a pear, if it doesn't stand up on its own just trim
the bottom off slightly
and now it stands, now the stalk, it's lovely if you keep the stalk on there
and then to make the jigsaw pear
put it on its side
and you just slice through
sort of about centimetre slices
and what we're going to do is
is reform the pear into its shape
you want to make sure the slices
remain
in the same order
now if you were doing this ahead of time what you'd want to do
is run a little bit of lemon juice over the pear
and that will stop it from going brown
and then what you can do is
place that on our cheeseboard like that
celery
is a great accompaniment and very traditional to be served with stilton
so what we're going to do is you can either just trim the edges and cut it into a V-shape
standing it in a glass of water at the back for a bit of height
but you can do what I'm going to do is cut it into small lengths
and then we're just going to put it
on the board
probably leaning up against a bit of cheese itself
so at every opportunity you're creating little bits of height and colour
differences
between all the different cheeses
chutneys are great, anything that's onion or tomato based, they work
really well
also butter
and then pecans and walnuts
also medjool dates work really well with the flavour of the cheese
to accompany the cheese crackers are great and
digestives work really well with cheddar
also a choice of breads is a good alternative to crackers
you can take French stick for example, just cut it on the diagonal so it creates a
different shape
walnut bread, poppy seed bread, they're all ideal
and of course a really lovely bottle of red wine or Madeira
really compliments the board
so with these little finishing touches of pear or celery or even the fig
you create the most beautiful cheeseboard