Valentine's Day Special Charcuterie Board Recipe

Charcuterie boards may just be the perfect meal for Valentine's Day. Effortlessly elegant and full of creative opportunities, it's no surprise that charcuterie boards originated from France — the country of love. Have you ever wondered how to build a social media-worthy charcuterie board? It's one thing to have a kitchen stocked with meats, cheeses, and fruits, but it is another to assemble a work of edible art for you and your loved ones. Lucky for you, you've come to the right place, thanks to recipe developer Jennine Rye's customizable Valentine's Day charcuterie board recipe.

To plan and style a great board, there are 3 big things to keep in mind. Try to include 3 varieties of cheese, meats, and other accompaniments, such as fruits, nuts, or jams you wish to add to your board. This will help to provide balance and variety, both in style and flavor. Second, having a theme and color story is crucial to the cohesion of your charcuterie board. As this is a Valentine's Day charcuterie board, we have gone with romantic colors and incorporated heart-shaped ingredients. 

Finally, don't place like things next to like things. For your board to look balanced and beautiful, you will want to mix the different colors, shapes, textures, and flavors into a mouthwatering feast for your eyes, as well as your stomach. With the help our how-to guide, you'll be creating romantic and aesthetically-pleasing cheese and charcuterie boards. 

Creating the perfect Valentine's Day charcuterie board starts with selecting the best ingredients. For the ideal board, you will want 3 different varieties in each category — cheese, meat, fruits, starches, sweets, and others — in order to provide different flavors and textures.

Rye recommends choosing a creamy or soft cheese, such as a Brie, a harder cheese with a stronger flavor, such as a cheddar or  Stilton blue cheese, and a cheese that provides balance or additional interest. We've chosen a Wensleydale with cranberries for this board, but you can choose any of favorite cheeses. Similarly, you will want to choose dried meats that provide variety of taste and texture. For this board, we are using saucisson sec, prosciutto di speck, and bresaola. 

To accompany the meats and cheeses, we are using wholegrain crackers, date and walnut toasts, and pecan nuts as our starches; strawberries, grapes, and figs as our fruits; and finally, chocolate truffles, chocolate hearts, and candy hearts for our Valentine's Day-themed sweets.The most important thing when gathering ingredients for your charcuterie board is to make sure you pick foods you will enjoy. While this list of ingredients is a good starting point, if nobody enjoys blue cheese, there's no point adding it to the board; the wonderful thing about charcuterie boards is how customizable they are.

Before you can begin building your Valentine's Day charcuterie board, it's good to formulate a plan of attack; after all, like with most things, preparation is key. One of the great delights of a charcuterie board is the sheer wealth of choices, and the endless flavor combinations you can concoct. However, in your enthusiasm to design the most beautiful Valentine's Day charcuterie board, you don't want to end up with enough food to feed a crowd of 20. As a rough guide, Eat Cured Meat recommends roughly 6 ounces of dried meat or cheese per person on your charcuterie board, if it is being served as a stand-alone meal.

We also recommend maximizing the flavor of your ingredients by removing the meats and cheeses from the fridge 30 minutes to 1 hour before serving. Cheese benefits from being served at room temperature, so remember to factor this into your timings for the perfect Valentine's meal. 

We eat with our eyes before we eat with our mouths, so good styling is crucial to the perfect Valentine's Day charcuterie board. To create a visually-pleasing display, enjoy getting creative and play around with different shapes, colors, and textures when placing your ingredients; after all, putting together a charcuterie board is an art. 

We recommend starting with the placement of your anchor ingredients on the board: the cheeses. There are many different options for styling cheese; you could place them in blocks or slices, crumbled or fanned out, or in a separate bowl or plate if you choose a particularly soft cheese. Just remember not to group them together. Once the biggest items are in place, build out from there using the meats, the larger starches, and the fruits. Try to keep the board balanced by keeping similar ingredients apart from each other, and then fill the remaining gaps with the smaller food items, such as nuts and candies.

All of the items can be heaped up, placed in messy stacks, fanned out, or placed into small bowls. Remember that part of the joy of charcuterie boards is it's decadence, so it's preferable to have the board look like it is overflowing, rather than leaving large empty spaces.

There are many beautiful ways to display food on your charcuterie board. If you choose to include salami, or another kind of sliced round meat in your selection, an elegant way to vamp up the romantic styling of your board is to create salami roses.

To do this, you will need an egg cup or a shot glass, and roughly 10 slices of your chosen meat. Start by folding a single slice of salami in half over the lip of the glass. Repeat this action with the rest of the meat slices, overlapping them around the cup or glass. When all of the meat has been used, simply turn the cup or glass over, give it a little twist, and you'll have a beautiful charcuterie rose to add to your Valentine's charcuterie board. 

Finishing touches make all the difference, so don't forget to add the right utensils, such as cheese knives. Charcuterie boards pair wonderfully with red wine, and for Valentine's Day, we recommend some candlelight and a bunch of red roses to provide the perfect finishing touches for your evening.