Create the Perfect Cheeseboard

When preparing a cheeseboard, plan on serving from three to five cheeses (any more than that will overwhelm the palate). You want to tempt the taste buds with cheeses of distinctly different styles, tastes, and textures.

For a simple, but interesting cheese board, start with these three selections: one soft cheese (Brie, Camembert), one firm cheese (Farmhouse Cheddar, Cornish Yarg) and one blue vein cheese (Oxford Blue, Brighton Blue). To expand your offerings, add goat or sheep milk cheese (Rosary, Seven Sisters) and a washed rind cheese (Oxford Isis).

For a more creative twist, build your cheese board around a theme. You might offer cheeses from different milks (cow, sheep, goat) or cheeses from a particular region or country.

Differently shaped and coloured cheeses will help to make the cheeseboard visually interesting.

To allow the cheeses to be enjoyed at their best, bring them to room temperature for optimal flavour, so remember to take them out of the refrigerator up to two hours before serving.

Serve your cheeses with rustic bread, chutneys and fresh fruit to complement the range of flavours.

As a rule of thumb  a five cheese board using the five main cheese categories would have 100g of cheese in total per person, with the following percentage breakdown;

Hard Cheese 40%, Blue Cheese 20%, Soft Cheese 15%, Goats Cheese 15%, Washed Rind Cheese 10%.

Here is an excellent selection for a cheeseboard using cheeses that we stock from the South of England;

Quickes Traditional Cheddar 1kg (Devon)

This cheddar has an intense and complex flavour that comes from the cheese being cloth wrapped in truckles and then matured for over twelve months.

Tunworth 250g (Hampshire)

This is a handmade, Camembert-style cheese produced by Hampshire Cheese. The cheese itself is rich, milky and nutty.

Oxford Blue 300g / 2.5kg (Oxfordshire) 

Oxford Blue by the Oxford Cheese Company is a soft, creamy blue cheese that has a mild taste with a bit of sharpness.

It is made from pasteurized cow’s milk using a vegetarian rennet and is matured for 14 – 16 weeks. .

Rosary Ash 275g(Wiltshire)

Made in the same way as the plain Rosary Goats cheese, but  coated with an edible ash to give an interesting appearance and distinctive flavour.

Seven Sisters 800g (West Sussex)

Named after the Seven Sisters chalk cliffs in East Sussex, this is a semi-soft matured sheep’s milk cheese, coated in a layer of Hebridean seaweed. As well as looking interesting, Seven Sisters has a light nuttiness to it and the seaweed coat makes it very difficult to resist.