How We Build Our Christmas Cheese Boards

The key to a perfect cheese board is a beautiful (and sufficiently roomy) base. While it’s technically meant for cutting, this Il Buco board can easily do double duty as a beautiful base for your cheeses et al.

We can’t be the only ones bothered by a lack of available cutlery when it comes to slicing and dicing our way around a charcuterie board. You can’t go wrong with this 3-piece cheese knife set from Jean Dubost, which will ensure your guests are never left wanting in the utensils departments.

Not all cheeses are created equal, which means every variety you choose should come with specific pairings to suit it. Overwhelmed already? Fear not. We’re giving you our exact breakdown below.

Ideally, you’ll want a mix of soft and hard cheeses–with one, typically a soft variety, serving as the most flavorful centerpiece. Yes, it’s always wise to mix in a Camembert or Brie–but those more common cheeses play second fiddle to our ultimate selection.

The soft cheese:
At Christmas, you won’t want to miss the opportunity to make vacherin mont d’or, a cult-favorite cheese only available in the colder months, the star of your show.

The soft cheese food pairings:
One of our favorite cheesemongers at Murray’s Cheese in New York City once recommended we pair our mont d’or with mini gingerbread cookies, like these. It’s with this advice that we began to live by a board-building maxim: always pair your cheese with one or two classic complements and one unexpected and always make bread available for the less adventurous eaters in the crowd. In this case, our classic pick is salami, and we’d make mini baguette rounds available in addition to a raincoast crisp.

The soft cheese wine pairing:
We know it may feel a bit extra to provide wine pairings for every cheese on your board, but there’s really no better way to enhance the experience! Mont d’or pairs well with champagne (most cheese does, in fact!) or a Bordeaux. We love the way this one brings out the cheese’s distinct alpine flavors.

For the less adventurous cheese consumers, it’s important to have a few hard cheeses on hand. A drunken goat is ideal not only for those disinterested into the funkier options, but they’re also easier on the stomach for anyone who struggles with lactose intolerance. Drunken goat also lacks the strong goat cheese flavor–and is easy to find in most cheesemongers and gourmet grocery stores.

For a versatile sheep’s milk option, you can’t go wrong with Manchego – though it won’t impress the cheese aficionados in your crowd–Murray’s refers to it as a “starter cheese.”

Hard cheeses tend to pair well with juicy fruits, like figs–dried or fresh will do. They also mingle beautifully with quince paste and fig jam, absolute musts for any board. As for an unexpected pairing–scatter your board with nuts–Murray’s recommends Marcona almonds, which bring out the nuttiness in the cheeses beautifully.

When it comes to wine, Manchego goes well with a bold white–and dare we go so far as to recommend an orange, too? The Flood is our absolute favorite, and its funkier flavors will balance nicely with the simplicity of the hard cheese setup.