DIY Tasty Cheese Ball. Save a Bundle Make it Yourself! Yumm!

Have you seen the price of cheese balls in the grocery store? They are expensive. They are especially expensive once you know the ingredients and how easy they are to make.

The taste of store bought cheese balls is nothing to compliment either! These cheese balls have not kept up with our ever widening and sophisticated taste requirements either. They became boring. Well, that can be fixed!

Cheese balls are such a good idea for a party when done well. Let's save the cheese ball!

Get ready for the big Super Bowl Party by making a couple of these for your family first. Then make up the family favorite to take to the big Super Bowl Party. Or it is nicer to make several smaller cheese balls rather than one large one. This gives you the chance to make a couple of flavors as well as making the cheese ball easier to carve off a hunk for that cracker!

Why did we quit taking cheese balls to parties? It was more than the unfortunate high prices and low flavor of the commercial cheese balls. It was the use of bad ingredients. The old favorite cheese ball was bland, fatty, and salty. It was so 1960’s! Cheese balls also got bigger and bigger and harder and harder. This made them difficult to serve on the grazing table.

What’s more, cheese balls have a bad reputation due to some unfortunate recipe ingredients. For one thing, why add nuts when all they will do is get soft and add little crunch? Roll the cheese ball in nuts if you want to just don’t put them in the cheese ball. Why not roll the cheese ball in herbs and crispy onion bits (like this recipe does)?

Use quality ingredients. The basic cream cheese is needed to hold the cheese ball together but the sky is the limit for the flavorings.

Add some unusual cheeses. This recipe uses a nicer brand of pre-shredded packaged extra sharp cheese. There are finally some nice brands of pre-shredded cheese being sold in the grocery store. Adding goat cheese is a wonderful change. Adding bleu cheese is a wonderful change up too! If the cheese you need is only sold in a block, place it in the freezer for a bit to make it hard and therefore easier to grate.

Add some flavors from other cultures. We like chopped green or red chiles in our cheese balls. We also like Greek spices in our cheese balls with chopped scallions. If you use an item like dried tomatoes be sure to drain them thoroughly and chop them well.

Try some lemon pepper salt. Try some Southwestern Chipotle spices. You can make a small cheese ball for your experiments. That way if one experiment crashes and burns you don’t waste much.

The bacon used in the cheese ball here needed to be chopped finely to make it more pleasing to eat. Bacon makes nearly everything taste better! Make the bacon fresh though, the jarred bacon bits don’t suit well here.

The cheese ball’s bad reputation was, in some part, due to the high fat content of the cheese ball. You can take cheese balls down a notch in fat by substituting Neufchatel cheese. Neufchatel cheese is sold right next to the regular full fat cream cheese. Usually, it is less expensive too! It is about 1/3 the fat.

So, repair the reputation of the cheese ball. The cheese ball is fast and easy to prepare, inexpensive to make, and a real crowd pleaser if made with updated ingredients.