How-To | Create The Perfect Cheese Board

A cheeseboard is a unique and fun way to bring people together, elevating any gathering with good food, an impressive, Insta-worthy display, and a great conversation starter. And mastering the clean up (and obliterating any lingering cheese odors) is easier than you think! Grazing board experts Shelby and Savannah DiMarco, founders of Sorella Collective, shared their best tricks for creating the perfect platter.

Meet Sorella Collective

Hi! We’re two sisters, Shelby and Savanna, born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Sharing a vision of bringing loved ones together, we founded Sorella Collective to offer hosts cheese, charcuterie, fruit and crudité boards that elevate any gathering. Good food and meaningful conversation are the roots that make a beautiful life. Being taught that giving back is the key to happiness, we provide quality foods that are not only good for the soul, but also to the community around us.

STEP 1:
The Cheese

How much cheese to buy? If you’re serving food along with the platter, plan to purchase about three or four types of cheeses totaling about four ounces per person. In general, it's best to round up (especially if your guests are cheese-lovers).

When we pick our cheese, we look for a variety in texture, taste, milk and shape. With this particular board, we went for a more spring-inspired approach with lighter and tangy flavors. We think goat works best as it also pairs beautifully with the fresh spring produce at the markets.

Our Goat Picks:

• Nettle Meadow Kunik (creamy, tangy, soft)
• Humbolt Fog (pungent, floral, semi-soft)
• Truffle Tremor (earthy, acidic, dense )

One to two hours before guests arrive, pull the cheeses out of the fridge—they're best served at room-temperature to fully reveal flavors. Scatter the cheese around the board. We love leaving spaces between the cheeses to fill in, creating a beautiful flow.

STEP 2:
The Charcuterie

When we pick our charcuterie, we look for a nice balance in flavors. We always go with an herbaceous, a spicy/peppery and a mild usually in the form of a little medallion as people have named it, "salami candy". Our signature look is folding "meat flowers". They're super simple and bring so much texture and height to the boards.

STEP 3:
Salty Flavors

For a salty balance, nuts and olives are an absolute cheeseboard staple! We love these small green olives found at most markets, along with our favorite nut—pistachios! Other nuts we recommend are raw walnuts (spiced walnuts to up the flavor), and dry roasted almonds.

STEP 4:
Sweet Notes

We love pairing delicious and beautiful citrus like blood oranges, pink grapefruit and cara cara oranges. They also make such a great palate cleanser as you're moving along the board.

Next, we cascade fresh berries around. Strawberries, blueberries and blackberries work perfect. See those little pink berries? Those are lemonade blueberries which are our FAVORITE berries by a landslide—variations of pink, what's not to love?! Other sweet treats we love to use are dried blood orange slices, dried persimmons, dried figs, golden flame raisins and a jar of honey to drizzle. They work wonderfully as decoration and gap spots too!

STEP 5:
Decorate

Lastly, to finish off the board, decorate with flavors and sights of the season. We love using orange blossoms, kumquat branches, edible flowers and rosemary! A little foraging to elevate your cheeseboard will be sure to impress your guests.

STEP 6:
Enjoy!

When all that cheese and grazing guests have left nothing but crumbs and fruit smears, absorb unwanted odors in your kitchen and fridge by filling a shallow bowl with Scented Vinegar and leaving out for a minimum of 15 minutes. Clean up your board with our Kitchen Soap Bar, which was made for wooden kitchen tools, and clean any utensils and glassware with Dish Detergent, Dish Brush, and Glass & Crystal Cleaning Brush. For our step-by-step cheeseboard cleaning how to, click here.