Spanish Olive and Cheese board | Girl In The Little Red Kitchen

Travel to Spain to take a look at Olives from Spain and create an easy Spanish Olive and Cheese Board for your next gathering.

I don’t know about you but I love me some olives. It’s been that way since I was a little kid, it started with the black ripe olives and quickly escalated up to the green olives stuffed with pimentos and queen olives. So when the team from Olives from Spain invited me to attend Spain’s Great Match in NYC to learn and taste about Olives from Spain, plus Spanish wine, cheese and culture who was I to say no?

As soon as I arrived I was surround by tables and tables full of Spanish wine from every region and type you could think of. If you only thought they were a handful of Spanish wines available in the states, you were wrong. Along with the wine tasting Spain’s Great Match included tasting seminars to guide your way through Spain. My goal though was to find the olive table. Once I arrived at the Olives from Spain table I was greeted by a sight that any olive lover would want to see. An arrangement with bowls piled high of three varieties of Spanish olives – Queen, Green Olives and Black Ripe.

Before digging in I received some olive education from the Olives from Spain team! Did you know that most of the olives found in the United States come from Spain? They are a leading producer and exporter of table olives worldwide and those green pimento olives that you love so much most likely came from Spain! Of course as delicious as olives are, they are also healthy for you too. As part of the Mediterranean diet, olives make the perfect before dinner snack. Olives may contain fat but it’s the good monounsaturated kind, plus it’s a low-calorie and sugar free food. Did I mention since olives are fermented, it’s a good for your gut kind of food?

While great for snacking, olives are a versatile fruit – and yes they are a fruit they contain a pit! The flavor profile combines sweet, salty, bitter and sour. Olives from Spain touched on these flavors in the samples they provided at Spain’s Great Match with pairing them with salt (cheese), sweet (honey and fruit), sour (citrus) and salt coming straight from the olives themselves.

I couldn’t get enough of the Queen olives stuffed with goat cheese, apples, honey and extra virgin olive oil. Plus green olives with marcona almonds, piquillo peppers, honey, thyme, and cabrales cheese. All this olive talk inspired me to go home and pull together my own Spanish influenced Olive and Cheese board.

I love pulling together cheese boards just for a simple lunch for the two of us at home (granted paired down a bit) or gathering with friends or during the holiday season. The same rules generally apply when putting together your standard cheese board but I’ve put the focus on Spanish flavors and went heavier with the olives than I usually would. In fact, I took some of the flavors I tasted at Spain’s Great Match and paired them up with these great Olives from Spain.

Here are some suggestions for what to put together for your cheese board:

Spanish Olive and Cheese Board