When it comes to entertaining over the holiday season, it's hard to go past a gorgeous spread of cheeses and charcuterie (deli items). As it happens, this is our 'go-to' for catering at Adrift events. There are so many tasty morsels you can include that is sure to be a hit with even the most discerning guests. As an added bonus, it's fairly quick to put together!
We thought we'd share some of our top tips to help you pull together a great spread, with a couple of images thrown in from a recent table we did at a store event.
1.When putting together a cheese spread ensure you have plenty of timber boards, cutlery and bowls - the more options the better. You can also stack the boards to create more depth with the different heights which makes it look more interesting.
2. You don't always need to use a tablecloth! For this particular spread (pictured) it looked really festive with the gold dot tablecloth as a backdrop, styled with some gold plates and cutlery.
Another great way to set up your cheese spread is to lay out some baking paper on a timber table, using blue tac to hold the baking paper down. Cleaning up is super easy with baking paper (less mess is best). Make sure to pop items like the fruit (i.e. strawberries), meats and cheeses on the boards and then you can scatter the nuts, grapes and crackers around.
3. Buying a full cheese wheels look really effective and you can layer them really nicely. (Make sure you invite lots of cheese lovers!). It's best to choose odd numbers with cheese either 3/5/7 - this is the way the French recommend.
4. Buy a mixture of fresh fruit and wait to put them out until the last 30mins before your guests arrive so they are super fresh.
5. Finally, you just need a nice rose or sparkling white, which work well on the palette with this mixture of flavours.
To re-create our cheese platter, here are some suggestions with the items you'll need:
- Fruit: green grapes, fresh dates, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, dried apricots.
- Olives: herb and garlic, mixture of olives. We bought ours at the Newfarm Deli.
- Nuts: roasted cashews, salted pistachios.
- Crackers: Captain's Table water crackers, Pettini sea salt crackers, Woolworths Rosemary Wheaten crackers and the Grissini bread sticks. We bought the majority of crackers from Woolworths and spent up with the meats and cheeses.
- Meat: Salami and prosciutto from the Newfarm Deli.
- Cheese: We all know there's lots of options when it comes to cheese and it's good to include a mixture of soft, hard, blue and/or goats and sheep cheese. Here are some top suggestions from the Adrift team:
- Budget options: Mercy Valley aged cheddar and Jarlsberg (wheel or section or slices).
- Expensive options: Roque Foet French Blue, Stilton English Blue, Comte French hard cheese, Chevre Goats cheese in French style.
- Cheese locations: The Gympie Farm, Emile + Solange, James St Market, New Farm Deli and Standard Market Co.
These are our top suggestion, but we would love any suggestions on some great cheese platter ideas from you! Please leave a comment and let us know. xx
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