Menorca Tapas and Preserves: How to Put Together a Board at Home
You don’t need to cook anything elaborate to put together a great spread of Menorcan produce — sometimes the best thing is to let the ingredients speak for themselves. Here’s the guide to building a tapas board with what you’ll find in our shops.
The base: cheese and sobrasada
Mahón-Menorca cheese and sobrasada are the starting point of any Menorcan board. For a balanced spread, combine at least two curing stages of cheese — a mild and a cured one, for example — alongside sobrasada for spreading. As a rough guide, count on about 80-100 g of cheese and 50 g of sobrasada per person if there’s more on the table.
The salty note: olives and pickles
Good olives dressed with Mediterranean herbs add the salty counterpoint the board needs against the richness of the cheese and sobrasada. Light pickles do the same job — they cleanse the palate between bites.
The liquid touch: oil and bread
A good Menorca olive oil for dipping toasted bread is the finishing touch that ties the whole board together. Serve the oil in a small bowl on the side rather than pouring it straight onto the bread — that way everyone controls how much they use, and the bread doesn’t go soft too soon.
The sweet contrast: honey
A little Menorca honey in a small bowl, for dipping cured cheese or a piece of sobrasada, rounds off the board with that sweet-salty contrast that never fails.
Order of serving
- Place the cheeses and sobrasada in the centre first, leaving space around them
- Fill the gaps with olives and pickles, in small bowls
- Add the toasted bread around the edges, not stacked, so it stays crisp
- Finish with the bowls of oil and honey, ready for dipping
What to drink with the board
For more detailed pairings depending on what you put out, we have a full guide to pairing Menorcan products — from which wine suits each cheese stage to how to serve gin as an aperitif.
Where to buy it all
Everything you need for the board is available at our shops in Mahón and Sant Climent. If you’d rather have it already combined for you, build your own gourmet basket and collect it ready to go.
