Meat and Cheese

Rock the party with meat and cheese

The secret to an amazing dinner party or get-together can be summed up in three words: "meat and cheese." Seriously. You can decorate all you want. Create the perfect playlist and invite the most glittering guests. It's not until you put meat and cheese on the table that your shindig jumps from "OK" to "OMG!" A brilliant meat and cheese board kicks everything up three notches and cements your status as host supreme.

Here's an inside tip: if meat and cheese are the secret to a great party, Wisconsin Cheese is the secret to a great meat and cheese platter. When you set out chunks of Wisconsin gouda, parmesan, gorgonzola, or gruyère, you're giving your guests a taste of the highest-quality, most award-winning cheese on the planet. And that kind of star power is sure to send any soirée into overdrive.

Take a look through our website to meet Wisconsin's most famous residents – our 600+ varieties of cheese. Search our index for a great cheese fondue recipe or ideas for your next social bash. Or scroll down for our best tips on pairing meat and cheese on the charcuterie platter.

How to pair meat and cheese

When building your meat and cheese board, start by selecting 4 to 6 cheeses that offer a nice balance of taste and texture. We like to add these cheeses to our cheese platter shopping list:

• Soft cheese like mozzarella, feta, burrata, and mascarpone
• Semi-soft cheese like brick, fontina, havarti, Monterey Jack, and muenster
• Semi-firm cheese like gouda, provolone, Colby, and mild cheddar cheese
• Hard cheese like aged white cheddar
• Blue cheese like gorgonzola, cheddar blue, and marbled blue jack
• Washed-rind cheese like brick or limburger
• Fresh cheese like queso fresco and cream cheese

Next to your cheese, you'll want a spread of meats that include:

• Whole-muscle cuts like coppa, prosciutto, bresaola, Jamón Ibérico, Jamón Serrano
• Forcemeats like chicken liver mousse, salmon rilletes, duck paté
• Cured sausages like salami, speck, capicola, pepperoni, soppressata, chorizo, saucisson sec

To round out your meat and cheese board, consider adding:

• Nuts like pistachios, Marcona almonds, macadamia nuts, candied pecans, cashews, pine nuts
• Vegetables like pickles, sweet cherry-red peppers, artichokes
• Bread like hearty crackers, toasted crostini, baguette slices
• Fruit like olives, dried fruits, berries, grapes, sun-dried tomatoes, figs, dates, slices of apples and pears
• Dips, spreads, and jams like honey, mustard, hummus, artichoke dip, fig preserves, olive tapenade

Wisconsin: where great meat and cheese boards are born

If there was a Meat and Cheese Hall of Fame, it's a safe bet the all-time great meat and cheese boards would be made with Wisconsin Cheese.

Wisconsin is one of those places that does one thing better than anyone else, anywhere: we make the best cheese in the world. With more than 5,500 trophies, our cheesemakers have won more awards than cheesemakers from any other state or country. We have the only master cheesemaker program in the world outside of the one in Switzerland, and we're the only state in the country that requires a license to make cheese – that's how seriously we take this stuff.

So, when you're building your next meat and cheese board, be sure it's Wisconsin Cheese you're slicing and cubing. That's when you know your meat and cheese platter is truly Hall-of-Fame material.