Christmas Charcuterie Board Recipe

An all red-and-green Christmas Charcuterie Board recipe. PLUS! a grocery shopping list in spreadsheet format that you can download for excel or google sheets and sort by category and color!

Jump to Recipe

If you're looking for ideas for easy holiday entertaining, a Christmas Charcuterie Board with all the red and green ingredients for the season has high wow-factor for relatively low effort.

Jump to the printable recipe and grocery shopping list in spreadsheet format you can downloadfor excel or google sheets and sort.

Happy Forking Holidays!

What You Need for a Christmas Charcuterie Board

Normally I stick to silver and white for a "winter wonderland" theme for anything Christmas, but the challenge of finding enough green, let alone green cheese for a charcuterie board, was too fun to pass up. Who knew there was actual cheese that's meant to be green? Now, all of us.

Aside from green cheese, here are the categories of things you need for a Christmas Charcuterie Board:

• large board or platter
• charcuterie, which will be the bulk of your "red" on the board
• 3-5 cheeses, most of which fall into the "white" category
• all the red, green, and white accompaniments
• winter and christmas-themed cookie cutter if you want to create shapes from the cheese to add some "flair" to the board

Detailed recipe and instructions for the Christmas Charcuterie below!

Red and Green Christmas Charcuterie Board Grocery List

And to make things EVEN EASIER for you because who couldn't use some help during the Holidays, I put the Grocery List of all the possible ingredients in a download-able spreadsheet so you can pick and choose the things you like or substitute ingredients that may or may not be available.

The grocery list is color-coded, categorized by grocery store department so you won't be dashing back and forth through the store. The list includes specific brands so you can find some of the ingredients that might not be as widely available in chain grocery stores. Hello, green cheese? Peep the list for the resource.

Pro-tips for Christmas Charcuterie Board

Charcuterie and cheese boards are generally pretty obvious and self-explanatory—gather the ingredients then put them on a wooden board!—but here are a few pro-tips for making it a little easier when prepping for entertaining.

• Colors. Took a minute to figure out how not to make a rectangular cheese board with red, green, and white look like the flag of Italy or Mexico, but we got it all to work by creating diagonal "stripes" of color on the board.
• Advance. Prep all the ingredients in advance, which includes washing vegetables and fruit AND cutting some of the sturdier cheeses.
• Parchment paper. If using a wooden board, lay down a sheet of parchment paper or butcher paper first. This not only makes clean-up easier, but also protects the board from stains from oils in the charcuterie and cheese, as well as ingredients like beets.
• Let cheese loosen up on the counter. Let cheese "loosen up" at room temperature for about 30 minutes before serving. If you're putting together a large board like this one, that 30 minutes might be "built-in" to the time that you're building the board.
• Brie cut-outs. To make the cut-out shapes on the Brie or other soft, bloomy-rind cheese, make sure the wheel of cheese is cold, straight from the refrigerator. If the Brie is already soft, you can put it in the freezer for about 20 minutes. It is much easier to slice and cut soft cheeses when they are cold. Carefully slice the top rind off the wheel of cheese. Use a cookie cutter—metal cookie cutters work best here but a sharp plastic cookie cutter is ok—to cut a shape out of the rind. You can either replace the rind on the brie with the negative cut-out space and leave it as is, or place the shape on the wheel (as pictured on the boards here).

Watch a Video of Building the Board

Does it feel like the Holidays go by at warp speed? They do, just watch this video of building a Christmas Charcuterie Board.

TOOLS and EQUIPMENT

• extra large 28x16-inch wooden board
• best large 20x15 cutting board that can do double-duty as a cheese board
• if you don't have a board, use a sturdy all-purpose baking sheet
• round wooden board, 3 diff sizes 12-inch to 18-inch diameter
• favorite all-purpose 7-inch chef's knife (expensive but worth it!)
• multi-purpose small condiment bowls for dressings
• I have a gajillion of these tiny spoons for dips, dressings and spreads on boards
• salad spinner to wash and prep veges
• this produce/vege wash to clean produce