A well-designed cheese board is the perfect way to bring your personal style to the table and thoroughly impress your guests – and it takes much less effort than you might think! Read our guide to learn how to make cheese boards.

How to Choose a Cheese Board

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

Materials

Cheese boards are available from Wayfair in a wide variety of materials, including iron, bone china, and even crystal. If this is your first time assembling one, you might want to stick with the basics.

Wood: Wooden cheese boards are classic for their simple, muted look. If the more basic, polished wooden board isn’t for you, there are wood options available that look like raw sections of tree trunks.

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

Earthenware/Stoneware: After a more sophisticated look? Marble and granite platters can enhance your cheese board’s look and impress guests even more. Lighter colors will shine on dark slate boards that can even be labeled with chalk.

Shape

Rectangle: Simple and sleek, rectangle cheese boards make for easy cheese board designing and assembling. Elongated rectangles are excellent for bars and long tables with many guests.

Circle: Round cheese boards are stunning as centerpieces on round tables. They’re also excellent for highlighting central ingredients.

Novelty: Cheese boards may be sophisticated, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for fun. Wayfair has the perfect board for any occasion, whether it's a holiday, game day, or a regular week day.

Tip!

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

What to Put on a Cheese Board

Choose Your Cheeses

Even though the cheeses you choose will be the shining stars of your platter – it’s called a cheese board 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 colors. This will not only make your cheese board look more dynamic, but it will also make it much more versatile flavor-wise.

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

Tip!

Sometimes, fresh cheese is packaged in whey or brine. If you’re putting brined cheese on your cheese board, make sure to dab excess liquid away – it can form unappetizing puddles.

Soft and Semi-Soft: These cheeses are still subtle in flavor 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 flavor, 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 color 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 flavorful and flakey. They are best in smaller amounts.

Mold: Mold-ripened cheeses with crusts, like Brie and Camembert, and mold-ripened cheeses with pops of color, like the pink-orange Munster and the blue-green Roquefort and Gorgonzola, can add to your cheese board’s visual appeal.

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 cheese boards is cured meat or charcuterie. The savory and salty flavors 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 color 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 coloring pops against a duller background.

Thin, Soft Cured Meats: To add a savory flavor, choose prosciutto, capicola, dry-cured ham, and mortadella.

Choose Your Vehicle

Your cheese board 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 pretzels, bagel chips, pitas, and even tortilla chips.

Choose Your Add-Ons

Once you’ve chosen your cheeses, meats, and delivery systems, it’s time to start thinking about pops of color, flavor, 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 cheese board additions, but pomegranates, kiwis, and even persimmons can pair beautifully with your more savory 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 cheese board 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 watermelon radish, roasted bell peppers, and cucumber rounds are all veggies with vibrant color to freshen up your board’s look and taste. If vegetables aren’t your style, consider chocolate chunks or chilis.

Assemble

Once you have all your flavors, textures, and colors 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 colors, textures, or shapes aren’t directly beside each other unless you’re designing a more organized 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 center 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 colors or textures. They can even be placed on top of other ingredients.

Happy assembling!

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