Follow Ina Garten's Shopping Advice To Pick The Right Cheeses For Your Cheese Board

Few courses are more irresistible than cheese plates; they always please a crowd while entertaining and are fun to experiment with. We're always looking for tips on creating the ultimate cheese board, pairing cheese various with fruits, olives, nuts, spreads, and carbs. The whole point is that there's something for everyone, no matter their taste preferences, and there are things for people to discover, try, and talk about. But that's where things can get a little tricky — how many cheeses should you aim for? What kinds? How different should each be from the others? Luckily, Ina Garten has us covered. With the Barefoot Contessa's most popular cookbook being the ultimate hosting manual, Garten always saves us with her genius advice on cooking, shopping, and entertaining, all of which achieves delicious, memorable results with the least amount of stress possible. 

The biggest mistake you can make when assembling a cheese board is overloading it, overwhelming guests with options. To make things easy, Garten breaks down a few categories to check off with your cheeses. First, think flavor: She recommends representing a range with somethingcreamy, buttery, and rich like brie; something sharp and maybe nutty like a cheddar or pecorino; and something that's unique, like fresh, funky goat cheese. Then, think texture, which this flavor range nails: You want that creamy element, which you get from brie and goat cheese; something harder like the cheddar; and maybe something crumbly like parmesan.

Garten's format is a guaranteed formula for success — you'll have all the basic cheese categories represented, but you won't have too many for guests to get through. Within each flavor and texture bucket, get creative. Creamy can apply to brie or Camembert or goat cheese, and goat cheese can come rolled in herbs, nuts, or dried berries — you can even decorate your own goat cheese with show-stopping edible flowers. Sharp cheeses can also be your hard or crumbly options, ranging from cheddar to pecorino along with earthy Neufchatel and nutty Gouda. For your more novel section, think funky, earthy, and herbaceous with bleu cheeses, goat cheeses with bolder mix-ins, and any cheeses made with additional ingredients like spicy peppers or truffles. Arrange cheeses on your board from mildest to strongest so guests experience them without one flavor dominating others.

Garten recommends following the simple path all through assembly. Citing advice from a friend, she centers boards with grapes, surrounds the grapes with the cheeses, fills the spaces with just a few other accompaniment options — perhaps a fruit, a vegetable or olive, and a spread — and then adds crackers. Garten also adds an elegant aesthetic touch by placing all of this on top of fig leaves from her garden — you can get any large, flat leaves from the florist to give your perfectly balanced cheese boards an effortless, lovely finish.