This holiday season, you could fashion a cheese plate with a curated selection of pricey items you deliberated long and hard on. Or you could take the safer but no less dazzling route: Grab an everyday cheese you know you like and transform it into a stand-alone centerpiece. With a few drizzles of olive oil, some aromatics, and a sweet and a savory companion, feta is just the cheese to morph into a sultry, molten appetizer.
This roasted feta with grapes and olives is an oven-to-table affair: In the pan it’s baked in, lop up a jagged piece of feta, crisp on top and silky-warm inside; a juicy grape; and a meaty olive, all draped in a spiced oil. You could embellish further with nuts or honey or lemon zest, or dig in just as it is, friends hovering nearby for their turn. Even better yet, it’s amenable to your whims and pantry. If you don’t like feta, there are options for you.
Feta, a bright, sharp cheese, has acidity that makes it reluctant to melting. When it hits high heat, whether pan-fried, grilled or roasted, it will mostly maintain its shape, but the outsides will blister to a crisp while the insides slump. Similarly, you could use halloumi, manouri, sliced wheels of goat cheese or even dollops of ricotta. But feta needs friends. It’s salty.
Taking inspiration from that festooned cheese board you no longer have to make, we add briny olives and grapes to roast alongside the feta. When roasted, grapes go from sweet to candylike, their outsides caramelize, and their insides turn jammy. Swap in cherries, tomatoes, plums, apricots or pears as you wish — any fruit that will emit juices into the baking dish. The brininess and intense punch of Kalamata olives are a good contrast to the grapes (and we know from Greek salad that feta and olives get along). If you don’t like olives, use capers, shallot wedges, radish halves, chopped preserved lemon or even cubes of dry-cured chorizo — something aggressively flavored to shake up the bite. The bonus to Kalamata olives, though, is that they kind of look like grapes, so you’re never really sure what’s in each bite. Surprise!
