Pear and Blue Cheese Croccantini Bites

1. Take both cheeses out of the fridge 30 minutes before you start.
2. Mash them together with a fork until the mixture spreads but is still flecked with blue.
3. Grind black pepper through it, then taste it and leave the salt alone.
4. Quarter and core the pear, then slice each quarter thinly across.
5. Turn the pear slices through the lemon juice so they hold their colour on the board.
6. Lay 24 croccantini out on a board in rows rather than a pile.
7. Spread a level teaspoon of the cheese onto each cracker, right out to the edges.
8. Lay a slice of pear on each one, folded once if it overhangs.
9. Scatter the chopped nuts and the thyme across the whole board rather than bite by bite.
10. Thread the honey over from a spoon and serve within 30 minutes.

The version you can build two hours early

Fresh pear is the part with a clock on it. Cut fruit gives up water, the water goes into a thin cracker, and half an hour later the base has lost its snap. So there are two ways to run this. Build with pear and serve inside thirty minutes, or swap the pear for slivers of pear and hazelnut fruit paste and build up to two hours ahead. The paste is a 75g pyramid that is 79 per cent pear on the ingredient panel, firm enough to slice with a warm knife, and it sits on a cracker without weeping into it. The fig and almond pyramid does the same job with more caramel and less perfume behind it.

The other lever is the cracker. Mini Croccantini in rosemary puts a herb note under the cheese, which suits the fig version better than it suits the pear. Whichever you use, spread the cheese all the way to the edge. A blob in the middle means the first bite is bare cracker and the last one is all cheese, and on something this small there are only two bites to get right.

Two live pieces answer the questions this one deliberately does not. Quince, fig or pear fruit paste for cheese is where to settle which paste you want, and which cracker goes with which cheese covers pairing across a whole board. Christmas finger food has the rest of the tray.

Common questions

What is a croccantini?

It is a thin, crisp artisan cracker, and the name comes from croccante, the Italian word for crunchy. The original is flour, two oils and sea salt and nothing else, which is exactly why it works under a strong cheese: there is no seasoning arguing with what you put on it. The mini format is the one to buy for this, an 85g pack of small crackers where each one is a single bite, so nobody has to snap a big cracker in half over a board.

Can you assemble these ahead of time?

With fruit paste, yes, up to two hours ahead on a covered board in a cool room. With fresh pear, build them as people arrive. If you want the fresh version and you want to be ready, do everything except the assembly: mash the cheese and keep it in a piping bag, slice the pear into lemon juice, chop the nuts. Then the tray takes four minutes.

What can you use instead of fresh pear?

Fruit paste is the closest swap and the more practical one, cut thin so it does not overwhelm the cheese. Beyond that, a sliver of dried fig, a halved seedless grape or a spoonful of chutney all work on the same build. What matters is that whatever goes on top is either dry or firm, because anything juicy will soften the cracker underneath it.

La Panzanella Mini Croccantini Original is $6.50 for an 85g pack. It sits with the rest of the La Panzanella range on our crackers shelf, next to the fruit paste and the festive entertaining essentials. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100.