Review: Boarderie Charcuterie Trays

Sure, you can shop for hours for ingredients to put together one of those fancy meat and cheese boards for your next party, or you can hit up Boarderie, and have them do the heavy lifting for you. This artisan company, based in Florida, specializes in charcuterie trays with all the hard work taken care of. They’re smartly assembled, artfully arranged, and shipped overnight in chilled boxes ready for you to unwrap and set out for your guests.

The company has dozens of options, but the main decision is around size: small boards serve 2-3, medium 4-5, and large 9 and up. Options with cheese only, cheese and meat, and versions with baked brie are all available, as are holiday-themed offerings, though the “holiday” theming you get with a big tray cheese and meat is necessarily fairly slight.

Boarderie sent me the large Thanksgiving-themed tray for review, which I received as promised two days before the holiday.

The tray was quite heavy, and it’s served on a real (if thin) wooden board that you can reuse. (The as-received wrapped version is pictured at right.) Note that the tray itself is not covered in food but rather in smaller paper trays each of which usually contain various cheeses and meats, 3 to 5 in total. You’ll need to unwrap each of these mini trays individually, unbag nuts and any candies, open jars of marmalade or olives, and set out crackers, which are also included. Figure about 10 minutes of effort to get everything looking perfect.

The board we received included a whopping 37 items, and a map outlines what everything is. I was surprised that the majority of the cheeses were not traditional offerings but rather flavored or infused items, including merlot pecorino, blueberry Wensleydale, and wasabi horseradish cheddar, which was my personal favorite of the bunch, along with a truffle moliterno al tartufo. Quite a few had fruit or even flower infusions or coatings — which weren’t my personal favorite but which seemed to be crowd-pleasers all the same.

The meats (four in total) were more traditional, with truffle salami and finocchiona perhaps the most popular items on the board. I would however have preferred the charcuterie to have been sliced a bit thinner. A total of eight different dried fruits, five kinds of nuts, and two candies — including seasonally appropriate pumpkin spice malted milk balls (also delish) — rounded out the tray.

Everything on the tray was high in quality and thoughtfully laid out, and while there were components I liked more than others, there wasn’t anything I didn’t enjoy.

Ultimately the board beat us. With five noshers and two days of grazing, there was still about a third of the board left when my guests finally packed it in. I opted to stop eating cheese at that point for the sake of my waistline — and because the picked-over board was starting to look a bit worse for wear by day three. Ideally this would be a one-night affair; I’d say the large tray can easily provide heavy snacks for a party of up to 20 people.

With that in mind, the $249 price tag on the large board doesn’t seem excessive — particularly considering shipping is free for orders over $139 (the price of the 2-3 person tray). My advice for smaller groups: Order a larger tray, and only serve some of the smaller internal trays at a time. This will not just help with waste but also with avoiding analysis paralysis in picking your next bite.

Check it out at boarderie.com. A

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