Give Your Super Bowl Charcuterie A Sporty Vibe With A Salami Football
The upcoming Super Bowl isn't merely an opportunity for the two remaining NFL teams to determine who's best; it's also an opportunity for us as fans to make our most impressive snacks for our favorite Super Bowl party.
Designing a charcuterie board with Super Bowl-inspired salami ribbons and other game-themed snack items is among the sportiest ways to impress your guests or fellow partygoers this year — visually and gustatorily — even those who claim they're just there to watch the Super Bowl commercials.
@kaelimaee the salami football AHH so happy with how it turned out!!! 🏈🍓🤍 #fyp #foryoupage #superbowl #superbowlfood #food #charcuterie #charcuterieboard #foodtok #easysnack #football #superbowlparty
The beauty of cured meats like salami and prosciutto is that they can easily be formed or folded into a variety of evocative display shapes like ribbons and roses. But save the salami rose for Valentine's Day a few days later. For Super Bowl Sunday, folded salami ribbons provide the best method for shaping a big game-themed centerpiece for your board, like a salami football with cheesy stitches, or a salami goalpost around which cheeses, fruits, nuts, and other charcuterie board staples may be artfully arranged.
How to make a salami ribbon football with cheesy stitches
Experienced charcuterie board creators will probably be familiar with the salami river, a design concept in which twice-folded (or quartered) salami is displayed in a gently curving river shape that serves as a divider for other snack items on the board.
The salami ribbon is a similar but simpler concept, as the cured meat is only folded over once before being formed into the preferred shape. The folded salami pieces stay in place via the slight pressure they exert on one another. With the salami river, by contrast, toothpicks are sometimes used to hold the design in place.
To shape your salami ribbons into a football for a Super Bowl party-themed board, the folded pieces should be pressed into the appropriate configuration (a football, because of its pointy ends, is a prolate spheroid), and then are filled in with a second group of ribbons to cover the center portion. A folding knife with a corkscrew, one of the essential tools for proper charcuterie presentation, can be used to cut the cheese slices to mimic a football's iconic lacing.
More ideas for your Super Bowl charcuterie board
Footballs and goalposts are among the most commonly used images for Super-Bowl-inspired charcuterie boards — and salami ribbons, as noted, are an excellent choice to represent them. But so, too, is another cured meat: prosciutto. In fact, because prosciutto is so long and thinly sliced, it can be folded in half and then layered into fan-like ribbons that are a bit more sophisticated than those featuring salami. Cubed cheeses are also easily formed into football-themed shapes.
Drawing football-related images as decorations is another option. Strawberries dipped in chocolate, for example, provide a perfect canvas for white icing in the form of football lacing or stitches.
Another way to make cheese a bigger design feature is to use alphabet letter cutters on provolone to spell out Super Bowl, touchdown, or other football-related terms. This idea can even extend to the teams that are playing. Making letter boxes – SB for Super Bowl — to hold your charcuterie is yet another creative option.