Advanced options
Three to five cheeses beats ten: one hard (cheddar, manchego), one soft (brie, camembert), one blue (stilton), plus a wildcard (smoked, goat, washed-rind). Take everything out of the fridge an hour before serving: cold kills flavour. A knife per cheese stops the blue colonising the brie.
What The Cheese Board Calculator Works Out
- Total cheese: guests x grams per person: 60g a head when the board shares the table with other food, 80g as the after-dinner course, 100g when it is the dinner. A hundred grams looks mean on the scale and generous on the plate.
- Variety: three cheeses for up to four guests, four for a typical table, five from a dozen up. The caterers' consensus prefers fewer, larger pieces over deli-counter confetti: proper wedges read abundant, ten slivers read like a tasting exam. One hard, one soft, one blue, then wildcards.
- Accompaniments: about four crackers a head, neutral enough not to compete, plus fruit and chutney for sweetness against salt and something crunchy. Beware the everything-bagel board where six chutneys leave the cheese a garnish at its own party.
- Number of cheeses (advanced): override the suggestion; the table below the results divides the total by role, weighted towards the hard and soft anchors (35% and 30%) with the blue at 20% and wildcards sharing the rest.
- Crackers and leftover allowance (advanced): set crackers per person (shown as boxes of about 25) and a percentage extra for leftovers, which regrade gracefully into toasties, sauces and the freezer-tolerant grating tier.
- Cheese budget (advanced): total weight x your average price per kg. Supermarket anchors run GBP 10 to GBP 15 per kg, cheesemonger wildcards GBP 25 to GBP 40, so GBP 18 is a fair blended figure; per-kilo arithmetic favours whole small cheeses, and British cheese is in a golden age.
- Drinks (advanced): port at 75ml a glass (ten to a bottle) or red at 125ml (six), for the glasses each you plan to pour.
- Fruit and chutney and out of the fridge (advanced): grapes, chutney, nuts and figs scaled to the table, and the reminder that cheese leaves the fridge a full hour before guests arrive. Each cheese gets its own knife, rinds stay on, and pregnant guests appreciate a labelled board given the NHS small print on unpasteurised and mould-ripened cheeses.