Turkuterie

It’s a tail as old as time: It’s the evening after Thanksgiving dinner, and your guests don’t want a full meal but are feeling a little peckish. Try a bird of a different feather this year, and serve this festive and impressive fruit and cheese display as the centerpiece of your holiday dessert table. We’ve packed this cheese board with fruits and cheeses appropriate for an autumnal after-dinner snack that everyone will want to gobble up!

When building a cheese board for a crowd, we suggest using the rule of 3: Offer at least one hard cheese, one semi-hard cheese, and one soft cheese, and build your board and accoutrements around that. Some examples of hard cheeses are Parmesan or Manchego. Semi-hard cheese is a broad category with a diverse array of cheeses including cheddar, Gruyère, and Havarti. For the soft cheese, we recommend using one that can still hold its shape when sliced, like brie or Camembert.

Some good fall fruits for this project are apples, pears, and grapes. If you’re using apples or pears in your tail feathers, be sure to toss them in a small amount of lemon juice to help keep them from browning as they sit. You could also include some fun and fruity, fall-ish accoutrements like quince paste (great for cutting and shaping into tail feathers!), candied nuts, or dried fruits.

When building your turkuterie board, try to keep in mind that the things that make a turkey’s tail so iconic are their bright colors and distinct patterns. When selecting your fruits, cheeses, and crackers, try to be mindful of creating diverse shapes and colors across your turkey’s tail. As you arrange everything, take care to create repeating patterns across the tail (be sure all your apple slices are facing the same way, for example).

We’ve created our turkey body with half of a Bosc pear. We think that pears with a bigger “booty” and a smaller “head” make for the most charming turkeys! Whole cloves make the perfect eyes, and you can use a scrap of yellow cheese as the beak. When you’re building your turkey, all of the toppings should be radiating out from the center pear, each layer beginning underneath the previous one, to give the appearance that each row of feathers is starting behind the previous row. A good tip for creating a beautiful cheese board is to limit negative space, so fill in any blank spaces with small things like nuts or grapes.

Did you try making this? Let us know how it went in the comments!