The One Brand To Look Out For When Buying Brie Cheese

Bake it up all warm and gooey or throw it on a wooden cutting board with other snackable delights – whichever way you serve brie it is always a delicious treat to add into your culinary rotation. Typically made from cow's milk (though you might also see goat's milk brie), a good brie will have a mellow earthy, nutty flavor and a creamy — almost runny — interior encased in a firmer rind with a slightly tangy kick. Anyone who has gone to their local grocery store to put together a charcuterie board will attest there can be an overwhelming number of brie options to choose from. We sent one of our dedicated taste testers on a mission to sample 9 brie cheeses available at the grocery store to find a clear winner once and for all.

We evaluated these soft-ripened cheeses on taste — obviously — but we also took creamy texture and flavor complexity into account. While all of the brie sampled performed very well, there was one that stood out against the rest: Le Fromager from Fromager d'Affinois. We chose this particular cheese as our favorite because it delivered a more complex flavor profile than the others. One surefire way to test whether a brie is worth your time (and tastebuds) is by tasting the rind. Eating the rind is a matter of preference, but if your cheese is at the right temperature and it hasn't gone bad, the rind should have a pleasant, mushroomy quality to it, which this one definitely does. The cheese is also wonderfully creamy thanks to the addition of heavy cream in the ingredients.

Even though we categorized Fromager d'Affinois Le Fromager in the brie category, this cheese is not technically considered a brie. Though the company that makes it — Fromager d'Affinois — deems it "similar in appearance to a brie," as well as refering to it as "the ultimate crowd pleaser," the biggest difference between Le Fromager and a traditional brie is the flavor. Le Fromager boasts a milder, yet still complex, flavor profile than your typical brie.

Because of its gentle flavors, Le Fromager is considered a good party cheese with broad appeal. Its party platter reputation is only boosted by the fact that the Fromager d'Affinois site recommends this cheese be paired with a bubbly effervescent drink like Champagne. Who are we to argue? When it comes to food pairings, this soft-ripened cheese does well with fruitier ingredients that play against its subtle, buttery flavors; figs, apples, or nuts like cashews and walnuts go especially well with this cheese.

Made from milk produced by mountain-raised cattle in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of France, Le Fromager will run you anywhere from $24 a pound from a specialist supplier up to $36 a pound — which is about a whole round of cheese — when sourced on Amazon. However, if you're just buying a wedge for your grazing table you're likely to spend less than $10 at Whole Foods. Considering this is an authentic French cheese that uses an ultrafiltration technique which increases the nutritional value, this is a pretty great bang for your buck.