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This is the sort of Brie that I ate for years before I started chasing after good cheese - Sweet, buttery, mushroomy, mild. It's mega-mart Safeway Brie. It's Brie with training wheels. Brie for Americans. Brie for folks who don't like French Brie. In other words, it's not stinky, it doesn't remind you of a barn, and it tastes like good mushrooms rather than bad mushrooms.

Yes yes yes, it's from France. So technically it's French Brie. But whenever I try Brie which is recommended by the folks who are suppose to be experts on cheese, or the folks who have actually been over to France and tried the local Brie, it's nothing like this. That "real" Brie is stinky, tastes a bit like cow, and has many complex flavors beyond the obvious buttery mushroom thing. So until proven otherwise, I'm afraid I can't classify this as "real" brie.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

How about this - I'll leave it to the reader whether that's good or bad. Is it bad that it doesn't look and smell like it was left under a couch for a few weeks? Is it good that it doesn't smell much at all, and even my wife who hates moldy French cheese likes it? I suppose the answer to these questions depends on which end of the cheese snob scale you fall on. You have the Max McCalman end where this is perhaps a nasty slap in the face of cheese honor. And then you have the Kraft grilled cheese end where most Americans (perhaps even myself) wind up.

So, okay, it's a long way from "real" Brie. Or maybe not. But rather than just leaving this cheese skewered on top of the fence, let me say that eating big chunks of this cheese spread on a nice baguette is one of my cheese happy places.