Mini Artisan Crackers with Sea Salt 110g
$4.95
Hand-packed and dispatched from our Corio, Victoria warehouse, with free delivery Australia-wide on orders over $100.
By Dewi Salim, Hamper Building Lead at The Gourmet Pantry.
Four things make a grazing box for two: a carrier, something soft, something sharp and a sweet finish. Pack them into a box about 25cm by 18cm, fill the gaps with nuts, and add the cheese on the day you eat it. That is the whole build, and it is the one our packing room uses.
Four roles, not a long shopping list
A box is not a board. A board can spread sideways until it looks generous. A box has walls, so everything has to earn its footprint, and past four flavours a small box starts to read as clutter rather than abundance. Our hamper team packs to that constraint every day in Corio, just outside Geelong, and the small format is the hardest one to get right.
The carrier is the floor of the box and the thing you eat everything else on. For two people that is one 110g pack of Mini Artisan Crackers with Sea Salt, rustic, lightly salted and small enough to hold a topping without snapping in half. A flatter second cracker gives the box a change of texture, and the gluten free rosemary crackerthins do that job while giving a gluten free eater something in the box that is theirs. If someone is coeliac rather than avoiding wheat by choice, make the crackerthins the only cracker in the box, because wheat crumbs travel.
The soft thing should be a spread rather than a dip. A 110g jar of roasted red capsicum tapenade is sweet, smoky and stiff enough that it will not run across the box on a warm afternoon. The sharp thing then cuts through it: kalamata olives finished in red wine vinegar, of which half the 185g jar is plenty for two, with the rest going back in the fridge for sandwiches.
The sweet finish is deliberately in two parts. A wedge of pear and hazelnut fruit pyramid sits beside the cheese and reads as savoury. The Marc de Champagne dusted truffles sit in a corner and read as dessert. Between them, a 75g bag of rosemary and sea salt macadamias fills the awkward gaps that boxes and jars leave behind, which is the practical reason nuts turn up in so many hampers.
The one thing we do not sell is the cheese. That is the half you buy fresh on the day, and it is the half worth spending on.
Method
How to pack it
- Line the box with baking paper and let it come up the sides. It stops oil marking the box and lets you lift the whole thing out in one piece afterwards.
- Set the rigid things in first: the olives and a spoonful of the tapenade in their small cases at one end, the truffle box at the other. These are the anchors and everything else packs around them.
- Cut the fruit pyramid into 1cm wedges and sit them against the soft cheese, where they will be eaten together.
- Cut the firm cheese into batons rather than slices. Batons stand up in a box, slices slide and end up in a pile at one end after a car trip.
- Stand the crackers on edge along the long wall, like files in a drawer. On edge they carry their own weight; laid flat under cheese, a good third of them break before anyone opens the lid.
- Fold the cured meat into loose ribbons, if you are using it, and press them into the gap between the cheese and the crackers.
- Tip the macadamias into whatever gaps are left, then tuck the cherries in last so they sit on top and stay visible.
- Cover and chill if it is travelling. Take it out of the fridge 30 minutes before you eat so the cheese comes back to itself.
Making it ahead, and how it keeps
The pantry half is the make-ahead part, and it is genuinely make-ahead: jars, nuts, crackers and truffles all sit in a cupboard for months, so a box for Christmas Eve can be bought in October and forgotten about. The fresh half is a five minute errand on the day.
Once it is assembled with cheese and meat in it, treat it as a 24 hour thing. Covered in the fridge it is fine overnight, but crackers sitting next to cheese go soft after about four hours, so if you are building it the night before, bag the crackers separately and slot them in at the last minute. Out of the fridge, the Australian food safety guidance for ready-to-eat food is the two hour and four hour rule: under two hours out and it can go back in the fridge, between two and four hours it should be eaten, past four hours it goes in the bin. On a 35 degree Boxing Day that clock runs faster than it feels like it should.
The good news about a box built this way is what happens on 26 December. There is no half a platter to deal with, because everything that is left is sealed: half a jar of olives, the rest of the tapenade, whatever truffles survived. The only thing you have to eat up is the cheese, which is not a hardship.
Questions we get asked
How do you make a grazing box for two?
Pick one carrier, one soft thing, one sharp thing and one sweet finish, then fill the gaps with nuts and fruit. In practice that is a pack of crackers, a jar of tapenade, a jar of olives, a fruit paste and a box of truffles from the pantry, plus about 180g of cheese bought fresh. Line a small box, put the jars in first, and stand the crackers on edge along one wall.
What size box do you need for a grazing box?
For two people, about 25cm by 18cm and 8cm deep is the size that works. It holds two cheeses, two crackers, two jars and a sweet without anything stacked on top of anything else, and it still fits on a lap or a small balcony table. Go much bigger and you are buying food to fill space; go smaller and the crackers have nowhere to stand.
How long does a grazing box last in the fridge?
Assembled with fresh cheese and cured meat, about 24 hours covered in the fridge. The limiting item is not the cheese, it is the crackers, which soften within about four hours of sitting against anything moist. Keep them in their pack until you serve if you are building ahead. The unassembled pantry items keep for months, which is the whole argument for buying them early.
Everything in the pantry half of this box lives in our festive entertaining essentials range, alongside the crackers, jars and sweets we pack into hampers all December. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100, and orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched from Geelong that day. Australia Post carries it from there, so give a Christmas Eve box a few days of clear air.
Scaling this up rather than down, the quantities and the build order are in our guide to cheese board ideas.
Products in this recipe
$59.95
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