The Best Way To Serve Prosciutto On A Charcuterie Board For More Pleasant Bites

For such an aesthetically beautiful cold-cured meat, prosciutto is loaded with a bunch of naturally stringy fat. It's fine — you can say it. Anyone who's ever assembled or snacked on a charcuterie board before knows it to be true. You got all dolled up for this dinner table, and now, your teeth are packed with meat strings like Mary Poppins' bottomless tapestry bag, and you're excusing yourself from the table to run off to the bathroom and rifle through the medicine cabinet for floss (please, God, there has to be some floss in here). In any culinary arena, part of preparing a successful dish is familiarizing yourself with your ingredients, and if you know that long strips of prosciutto are tough to eat, then take an extra step to mitigate the challenge and slice them into smaller bite-sized segments.

Those long, paper-thin strips that come packaged in the grocery store are sliced from a large salt-cured pig leg. This massive leg is cut into those familiar long prosciutto slices using a long-bladed knife, cutting along the entire length of the leg. It's no wonder, then, that the buttery prosciutto strips foodies know and love are so long and fatty — that's the appeal. Butchers even have to slice against the grain to properly free the prosciutto from the leg. But, as such, it's worth it to give those scrumptious strips another slice for aperitivo serving.