Before a dinner party in Bethesda around the holidays, I remarked on the rich, tangy Colston Bassett Stilton cheese friends served with small dollops of fig jam on rice crackers. “Oh, our cheese guy at Whole Foods [in Rockville] recommended it. He’s terrific,” one said, before dropping the buried lede: “And his name is Brie!” A week later, at a party in Kensington, the top of a wheel of bark-bound Jasper Hill Harbison had been lopped off so guests could spoon the creamy, velvety cow’s milk cheese onto slices of French bread. “Oh my God, where did you get this cheese?” I asked.
“From my cheese guy at Whole Foods. His name is—”
“Don’t tell me. Brie?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
I had to talk to the cheese guy named Brie.
“The name comes from having insane Greenwich Village parents in the ’50s,” jokes Brie Salzman, 66. “My middle name was Ely de Bretagne. A dear friend of my great-grandmother was named that, and my parents didn’t want people calling me Ely, so they added the Brie.”
Salzman’s early fascination with cheese dates to food shopping trips with his father to Dean & DeLuca and Murray’s Cheese, a well-known cheese emporium that was a few blocks from their house. He deepened his knowledge in the ’80s working for a wine, cheese and olive oil distributor in Spain. Returning to the States, he worked in medical reporting for magazines, winding up in Maryland in 1998 to take care of his mother, who had breast cancer. In 2013, a friend told him about a job opening at the Whole Foods cheese counter, where he became a Certified Cheese Professional. He works there Thursday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Salzman loves his job, matching people’s tastes and needs to the 250 to 300 cheeses the market carries. “If I feed someone something comforting and new, that’s a great way to start a relationship,” he says.
Here are Salzman’s suggestions for putting together a cheese board. (He says to take soft cheese out 30 minutes before serving and hard cheeses one hour before.)
Put a creamy cheese in the middle—say, La Tur, a tangy soft-ripened cheese from Lombardy in Italy, made from goat’s, sheep’s and cow’s milk. Then add various sheep’s, cow’s and goat’s milk cheeses of different textures (soft, semi-soft, semi-hard, hard) and flavor intensities.
Sheep’s milk cheese: Six-month-old Manchego (Spain) with quince paste and Marcona almonds; Pecorino or truffle-laced Moliterno al Tartufo (Italy); Ossau-Iraty, P’tit Basque with cherries or Roquefort (France).
Goat’s milk cheese: Pata Cabra (Spain); Bamboozle, a semi-soft goat’s and cow’s milk cheese from Goat Rodeo Farm near Pittsburgh; Sofia ashed goat cheese from Capriole Creamery in Indiana.
Cow’s milk cheese: Le Cremeux, a relatively new Swiss cheese that’s a creamier, milder version of Gruyère; French Comté, which Salzman calls “consistently magical, almost like cashew butter”; Grayson, a washed rind cheese from Meadow Creek Dairy in Galax, Virginia; and Moses Sleeper, a Brie-like cheese with a bloomy rind from Jasper Hill Creamery in Vermont, “one of the shining lights of American terroir,” says Salzman.
Find Brie Salzman at the Whole Foods Market at 11355 Woodglen Drive, Rockville; 301-984-4880; wholefoodsmarket.com
This story appears in the March/April issue of Bethesda Magazine.