How To Make A Cheese Plate – these tips will help you make the best, most good cheese plate ever!

At Avdaye, we add lots of tips in all of our recipes – because we are a home cook without any formal training, and we find we are more confident making dishes when we understand why it works, and what each ingredient means to the flavor of a recipe. Our goal is for even the most beginner home cook to feel empowered in the kitchen.

We love cheese plates.

To us, they are the solid easy meal – you can get salty, crunchy, tart, spicy, creamy, and fresh in one platter.

They are great for groups, suited to parties, and easy to make when your time is running low.

And while cheese plates can be decadently indulgent – they can also work well within a budget, too!

visit our two friends sites – both Mary of Barefeet in the Kitchen and Sandy from The Reluctant Entertainer make jaw-droppingly beautiful cheese boards that are great for a party, a meal, or anytime you're looking for something good to snack on!

Nuts To Pick For a Cheese Plate

We like to add nuts and other salty snacks for a cheese plate – they help round out the snacking experience!

We try to get nuts that are salty, some that are sweet and crunchy, and some that are spicy or have a rich herb flavor.

While you can add any nuts to a cheese plate, we are going to go through our favorites:

Marcona Almonds

Roasted Almonds

Roasted and salted or honey roasted peanuts

Pistachios

Walnuts

Spicy candied nuts.

Fruits and Vegetables To Pick For a Cheese Plate

Fruits and vegetables don't make a cheese plate a bit lighter – they help to cut some of the fat from all of the cheese and meats to make the flavors come alive.

We like to focus on a wide variety of fruits and vegetables – and sometimes, we will put them on the side of the cheese plate as a Crudité platter.

Some of our favorite things to serve alongside an epic cheese plate are:

Celery

Carrots

Dried Apricots

Dried Cranberries

Grapes

Banana Peppers

Piquillo Peppers

Pepperoncini Peppers

Meats To Pick For a Cheese Plate

Cheese is obviously the star of any cheese plate – but meats can help to kick up the flavor and add lots of spicy and interesting flavors to a cheese board.

We like to pick meats with different flavors, spiciness, and fat content – some funky, some spicy, and some mellow.

Proscuitto

Speck

Pepperoni

Salami

Iberico ham

Crackers and Bread To Pick For a Cheese Plate

Crackers, bread slices, and cheese crackers are an integral part of any cheese plate – they work to cleanse your palate in between different cheeses, help scoop soft cheeses, preserves, and jams – and are great for serving cheese over.

We tr to balance flavors here too – if you can't tell, we love a lot of variety in a cheese board with soft breads and crackers, crunchy breads and crackers, some salty, some herbed, and some smooth and buttery.

Our favorites include:

Crostini

Mini Toasts

Cheese Crackers (the kind made from parmesan)

Moon Cheese

Salted Crackers

Herb Crackers

Sesame crackers

Confits and Jams To Pick For A Cheese Plate

We love adding honey, confits, jams, and preserves to a cheese plate to help mix up the flavors, cut through some of the fat in the cheese.

We look for sweet, tangy, savory, and rich jams and preserves and honeys, including:

Tupelo honey

Raw honeycomb

Onion confit

Apricot preserves

Tart cherries in syrup

Strawberry jalapeno preserves

Jalapeno jelly.

Cheeses To Pick For a Cheese Plate

It's important to pick great, good cheeses for a cheese plate – but it can be easy when you go for certain types of cheese, and then work with what you can find from each category.

We like to have different textures (creamy cheeses, soft cheeses, hard cheeses, aged cheeses), different colors (yellow, white, off-white), and smell differently.

We try to pick at least one from each group below (and we'll often search the $5 and under cheese bin at our local King Soopers Murray Cheese shop to save more money):

Brie, Camembert, Morbier

Aged cheddar, smoked gouda, pepper jack

Aged gouda, piave, parmesan, Ewephoria

Chevre, soft cheddar with fruit, spreadable cheese blends

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