Everyone deserve a break or even a party during the Halloween, even the cheese lover. Therefore, we decided to have an Ultimate Halloween Brunch Guide for Cheese Lover. When it comes to the perfect cheese platter, diversity is key.
It’s good to have a variety of cheese. What I mean by that is have a hard, creamy, and then one special or flavored cheese. Then you can build around those three if there’s specific ones you tend to like. It’s important to have those varieties but, ideally, you don’t want more than five cheeses on the board.
We therefore chooses Sharp Cheddar, Serenade Salami, Emmental and Brie Pere Cheese .
Other food can intensify and even change the flavor of cheese, so carefully choose what you serve alongside your platter. A simple water cracker works well, while thicker, biscuit like crackers are ideal with hard cheese varieties. Another popular option is a bread with nuts and fruits, like a pecan-raisin loaf or cranberry-walnut bread.
Grapes make an ideal accompaniment, with red, green or even delicate champagne grapes all being ideal. Brie, camembert and other soft cheeses pair well with white wine. Toasted nuts, dried fruit, quince paste (membrillo), slices of pear, fig cake and date cake are also popular selections.
Since it is Halloween how can we left Pumpkin out, therefore we decided to have some roasted balsamic pumpkin to warm up the palette.
Once you’ve chosen your cheeses and accompaniments it’s time to put the platter together. We chooses a large wooden board, with plenty of room, so that none of the cheeses touch against each other. This will prevent the stronger cheese flavors from interfering with milder tastes.
Don’t cut up all the cheese, leave them in large blocks and arrange your items in groups. To make the platter more visually appealing, try to stick to an odd number of cheeses, such as three for a small gathering, five for a medium get-together, or seven for a large group.
Arrange the cheeses from mildest to strongest, with blues almost always being the strongest cheeses on the plate, followed by washed rind cheeses. Once you have your cheeses arranged, place your platter in the centre of the room, or the table, and let people help themselves.
Some little tips to share with you from our experience;
- Remove cheese from the fridge one hour before serving, as the flavor is best when the cheese is at room temperature.
- Use the right knife for the right cheese. A knife with holes stops soft cheese from sticking and for hard varieties, a cheese plane will shave off shards and protect fingers.
- Provide more than one knife alongside the platter to avoid mixing all the different flavours together.
- Many cheeses are made with rennet (a product derived from calf gut). If you are catering for vegetarians it may be wise to include cheese molded in a vegetable source as well.
Since it’s a brunch we decided to have a pumpkin juice as our drink instead of wine. We ended up having a very good cheese palette and all our friends and family enjoyed it. As there is a lot of varieties, everyone get to enjoy it.
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xoxo, Joe
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