Breakfast Charcuterie Board

by terri mchugh

Even though the term charcuterie is mainly reserved for meat and cheese boards, it’s inspired a whole culture of interesting boards! Am I right? Honestly, it’s my favorite way to enjoy any meal these days. So I thought I would share that love with you all!

Over the next weeks I will be sharing how to build a few different types of meal boards, including fun sweet treat spreads.

Since everyone loves breakfast- let’s start there! I know for some, the art of building a plentiful board can seem intimidating. I promise there is NO wrong way to do it. There ARE however, a few tips that can help ensure a beautiful looking board.

First things first: what do you love to eat? Make a list of what you would like to include. For breakfast, I like to include fresh fruits, waffles, pancakes, and crispy bacon. You can add any type of foods you like. Eggs, sausages, etc. the key to some of those “messy” foods are containers. The first step in arranging my board/ tray/ decorative dish is adding small containers or bowls that can hold all of the messy/ runny foods. Including sauces, jellies, and honey. That will help you avoid sogginess throughout the board and it just looks beautiful.

From this point, you can start filling up your board with the “biggest” food on your menu. In this case for me, it was the pancakes and waffles. I arranged those in a fun and equal pattern throughout the tray. Focus on the “large to smallest” view in mind when arranging. After the pancakes and waffles I added in the crispy bacon. I also think having balance makes the board look great! If you notice mine, I tried to keep the same amount of food evenly distributed. In some cases you won’t be able to do that, however, as long as you can carry out balance with your choice of garnish, it will look well proportioned. For me, the green grapes served as that decorative fruit that was evenly spread out.

When you’ve reached about 90% of building your board- this is the time to think “fillers”. For me, the key to a beautiful board is making sure there aren’t any empty spaces! Again, there ARE different kinds of board and they’re all wonderful in their way. I tend to love the abundant looking ones. Just a preference! So if that’s you too, you’ll want to write this down! Inspecting your board for gap spaces between foods is everything. I went around adding blueberries and strawberries to make sure all was nice and full. I also went back and added an extra layer of green grapes to the board. Giving it an abundant 3D look. Even a few extra pieces hanging off the board is ok!

Lastly you’ll want to add those utensils that will serve as both a way to pick up the food and an overall beautiful aesthetic.

I dig the natural wooden spoons/forks so I invested in a few! You can find those here

That’s all it takes to build a delicious and beautiful spread! Stay tuned for more on how to build lunch boards. Coming up next!

Until then 🙂

XOXO, terri