How To: How Much Cheese Should You Serve?

If you're making a cheese board, you might be thinking “How much cheese do I need? I'm having people over. I need to order. I go up to, if I'm lucky enough, the cheesemonger counter at my cheese store, and I don't know what to ask for. I don't know how many cheese's, I don't know how much I need. There's so many choices and cheeses. I'm feeling overwhelmed.” So let me help you.
Picking out how much cheese you need is the easy part. Deciding on the cheeses you want to serve, that's the hard part, but if you're at a good cheese store, that's the fun part because you'll get to try the cheese. So let's think about this. First you need to think about who is going to eat this cheese board. If it's just you and your spouse, your significant other, your best friend, you kind of know how much cheese you two can go through. But let's say you're having a party for 10 people and you want a cheese board for these 10 people. Here are the things that we would need if you came into our store. One, we would say, “Is this one of the appetizers like, is there going to be a big buffet of appetizers before dinner? Is everybody bringing something? Are the people coming going to be hungry or are these usually the kind of people who, like pick at things like their birds and don't eat or, you know, are you entertaining a bunch of people who just ran the Boston Marathon?”
That's going to matter on how hungry they are. Are you serving a big meal after such that you don't want them to fill up on the cheese board? So those are the things we want to know. In general let's start with the median point. So the median point is that we would say for every cheese that you serve you want to have one ounce for somebody. So if you had four different cheeses, you want to make sure that you have one ounce of each of those cheese for that person. Let's do some easy math. If you have 10 people coming over and you want them each to have one ounce of four different cheeses, that's four ounces times 10 people is 40 ounces. Then you have to just do a little math and divide that forty by sixteen ounces, because that's how many ounces are in a pound. That's the math. That's it. So, you need 40 ounces of cheese.
You can even just take that number to your cheesemonger and they can help you figure it out.
And technically, you really just need 10 ounces of each of those cheeses.
If this is one of those parties where people you don't expect people to eat a lot or there's going to be a lot of options, there's going to be hummus, there's going to be dip, there's going to be a crudite, there's going to be some homemade guacamole, all those things. maybe you only want to figure in half an ounce per person, or maybe this is your son's volleyball team and they're growing boys and you need 8 ounces of each cheese because I don't know, they just can eat a lot of cheese, but think about that, and start with that as your starting point with one. That would give each person about a quarter pound of cheese to eat if we're sticking with that median and that's a good basis for starting.
And the other thing to think about, as you try those cheeses that you're deciding on is, if it's a, a triple cream. It's a cheese that you took one bite of and you're like, “I immediately want more”, know that your guests will do the same thing. So maybe you want a little bit more of that one and a little bit less of the blue because you love the blue. But you know, at least three people that are coming who don't love blue. So you can do a little math there and your cheesemonger and the person behind the cheese counter at your grocery store can always help you. Cheese Math is not a hard thing. It's just a couple simple equations and you will have a beautiful cheese board.