1. Green Dirt Farm’s Fresh Spreadable Sheep’s Milk Cheese with Kale Pesto (p. 175)
2. Gruyère with Castelvetrano Olive Lemon Tapenade (p. 173)
3. Frère Fumant with Sweet and Sour Pineapple (p. 176)
4. Dancing Fern with Golden Cauliflower Purée (p. 178)
5. Grevenbroeker with Green Tea White Chocolate Fudge (p. 179)
You’ve thought about what you want on your plate, so now it’s time to consider how you are going to present your cheeses and accompaniments. You can keep it simple and use a plate or platter you already own, or you can go searching for exactly the right piece for your concept.
At Casellula, we serve our cheeses on rectangular white plates. The rim helps to hold some of our looser condiments in place, and the colors of the condiments pop against the white. We present the cheeses and accompaniments from left to right, mildest to strongest. The reasoning for this is simple. If you put a strong blue or a stinky washed rind on your tongue first, you are not going to be able to taste the light, fresh goat’s-milk cheese that you try after it.
For the last several years, serving cheese on slate has become common. Slate offers the fun advantage of your being able to write the names of the cheeses on it with chalk, and the dark slate provides a nice contrast for the white and yellow of the cheeses. On the other hand, everyone is doing it. Only you know if that makes it right for you, or so very wrong.
To a certain extent, the size and shape of your plate, platter, or board will dictate how the cheese is presented. Cheeses have been served in a circle for years, starting at twelve o’clock and going clockwise around the plate, mildest to strongest, probably because plates are traditionally round. Americans typically have included only one accompaniment on a plate of various cheeses, probably because that’s all that would fit in the middle of the round plate filled with cheeses. You can do better than that.
Don’t limit yourself to what we do (white rectangles) or to what so many others do (slate). Instead, be creative and find other surfaces. Woods and bamboos, which you can find in the form of good-quality cutting boards, work beautifully for larger cheese platters or small individual servings. Antique cutting boards, plates, serving platters, pieces of marble, granite, or simple planks of wood can be beautiful.
There is a lot of fun to be had with presenting the condiments, too. Many can be simply placed on the plate. Some can be shaped into quenelles (page 138 and page 156) or just spooned (page 96). Others require a vessel of some kind. Be creative. You can use simple round ramekins to hold liquids (page 20–21), as well as small pitchers, cups, or anything else you can imagine.
Choosing the order for the cheeses is not so simple. There can be disagreement, even among professionals, as to the order in which the cheeses should be placed. They should go from mildest to strongest, but most cheeses are neither extremely mild nor extremely strong but are somewhere in the middle. Should the fresh crottin come before the stinky chällerhocker? Absolutely. But should the Emmentaler come before or after the Vermont Shepherd? That’s anybody’s call. In some cases, as with very pungent washed-rind cheeses, a blue may not be the last on the plate.
The order on the plate is further complicated by the condiments. Generally, one doesn’t want to coat one’s palate with sugar before tasting savory flavors. (That is why drinking soda with a good meal is a travesty.) Sometimes, however, we pair fudge or some other slightly sweet condiment with a mild cheese. It’s a conundrum—you shouldn’t eat the candy before the pesto, but you shouldn’t have the Époisses before the Chabichou.
So what do we do? We say don’t worry about it. You should present the cheeses in an order that makes sense and can be explained, but don’t split hairs. All those cheeses of moderate strength in the middle of the plate can go in whatever order you are comfortable with. If you need to, you can use the condiment as a tiebreaker.
You may also, especially with large platters, disregard the order. You can put the cheeses and accompaniments in an attractive layout on a platter that is neither a line nor a circle (page 66–67). You are creative that way. You can split up a large platter on multiple, smaller surfaces, as we’ve done on page 44–45. You can even spread them out around the house so that one plate is in the living room and another in the kitchen, encouraging your guests to move around the party.
In practice, almost no one eats each cheese with its condiment in its entirety before moving on to the next. Most people will try each cheese, decide what their favorites are, and then bounce around from cheese to cheese. It’s all right with us.
What about the cheese itself? Cheeses can be presented in so many different ways. Hard cheeses can be cut into cubes, matchsticks, or pie shapes. Soft cheeses can be spooned out or spread on bread. Others may be cut into wedges or crumbled into chunks.
You have probably noticed from the photos in this book that we love a pie-shaped wedge. You can see how we do that in the cutting guide (page 202). This is not just for aesthetics. Cheeses age differently on the outside than they do on the inside, so the flavor of any given cheese is different close to the center than it is near the rind. The pie-shaped portion includes paste from the center, the rind, and everything in between. The fact that it looks cute on the plate is just lucky.
With very large wheels of cheese it is a little unwieldy to get center and rind in one reasonably sized portion. A wheel of Comté, for instance, is upwards of eighty pounds and about two feet in diameter. Some cheeses are even bigger. In those cases, you are going to buy a wedge that represents only a small section of the whole wheel. Cut the cheese into half-ounce to one-ounce portions in whatever way suits your presentation. We like matchsticks (page 85), which are symmetrical and stackable (and actually larger than real matchsticks), but we are also happy to crumble up a hard cheese so the portions are randomly sized and shaped (page 84). Cubes just remind us of bad cheese boards filled with grocery store Cheddar that our parents put out at parties in the ’70s and ’80s, so we don’t go there. But there are no rules, so we can’t stop you from doing whatever suits you.
Your cheese presentation should be beautiful to look at and fun to eat. You want to aim for variety in how your cheeses are cut and how the accompaniments are presented. Various colors and textures are also nice. Although it is good to balance the flavors and styles and present them in a logical order (mildest to strongest, more or less), the most important thing about the presentation is that it is yours!