For The Perfect Holiday Cheese Board, Emphasize The Fruit Options

The menu is set: A succulent main course of roast meat, perhaps a whole ham, turkey, or roast beast. Sides abound — from potatoes to casseroles to vegetables cooked in every way, shape, and form. And the last thing you want to worry about when preparing this whole holiday smorgasbord is serving an appetizer. How will anyone have room for the delicious feast you worked so hard to make if they snack away their appetite?

But let's look at the classic holiday cheese board differently. Let's see it as a refreshing, eye-catching way to whet the palette before the heavy feast. Use your cheese board as an opportunity to focus on a food group that is often overlooked at holiday meals: Fruit! Yes, it is called a "cheese" board, but that doesn't mean we can't use our board to balance out the hearty, dense foods we'll be serving at dinner.

When constructing any cheese board or dinner menu, it's always a smart idea to use foods that are in season. For the holidays, focus on fruits that are in season during the late fall and winter. Citrus fruits like mandarin oranges, clementines, and tangerines are fantastic in-season options to zest up your holiday board, both in taste and color. Slice up your citrus to make them easy to access and to show off their vibrant colors. Or, take the exotic fruit route with persimmons or kumquats. Sweet, cool persimmons can also be served sliced like your citrus, but you can simply wash and dry your tangy, tiny kumquats and serve them whole.

Fresh fruits are a delight, but don't count out dried fruits either. Balancing a cheese board is all about different tastes and textures, so dried figs and apricots are great choices to bring a gummy, chewier feeling to your fruit-forward board. Serve the dried figs sliced in a bowl and make this holiday favorite fruit the centerpiece, scattering the citrus and dried apricots in bunches around it.

Looking for a way to utilize a cheese board favorite fruit that isn't in season during the wintertime? Try making wine-marinated grapes for a tantalizing splash. Wine marinating elevates your typical grapes-on-the-vine traipsed across the cheese board with a sugary punch, and lets you save opening that fancy bottle of wine for your main course.

In typical cheese board construction, the usual rule of thumb is to begin with your cheeses and build your board around those choices. But here, we're letting the fruit be the star. So taking the recommended fruits previously mentioned, let's find the cheeses that pair best.

Our citrus fruits are sweet but tart, so pair them with cheese with very little salt content, such as goat cheese or Alpine-style cheeses. Going too salty here can result in a bitter combination with our sour citrus. Goat cheese pairs great with figs, as well.  And don't be afraid to lean into fruit-infused cheeses like Stilton to create cohesion. This is a fruit-forward board, after all. You can choose to skip meats altogether with this kind of board, but if you're looking to add a savory salty bite, you can't go wrong combining sweet figs with salty, cured prosciutto. Just keep thinking fruit-forward and your cheese board will be invigorating instead of overwhelming, for both you and your guests.