The Unconventional Cheese You Need For Game-Changing Garlic Bread

Few foods are as beloved as garlic bread. The classic dish, consisting of only a few simple but impactful ingredients, can serve as a comforting snack, a side dish, or as a wonderful vessel for soups, sauces, and pastas. It's incredibly versatile and adaptable, which naturally means that people have come up with different ways to upgrade garlic bread — from doubling down on your garlic usage to avoiding the mistake of using melted butter. But something you may not have considered before is what kind of cheese to use.

Many garlic bread recipes call for stretchy mozzarella, but if you want to improve your garlic bread in a less conventional way, try swapping it out for some creamy Brie cheese instead. While mozzarella has quite a mildly tangy, milky flavor with a touch of sharpness, Brie has a creamy, mushroomy, and somewhat buttery profile that boosts the butter and garlic present in the dish. Already quite soft by design, it melts super easily when heated. This, combined with the rich flavor of the cheese itself, will accentuate the other ingredients to tip your garlic bread into the zone of true extravagance.

There are a few methods for applying this cheesy upgrade to your garlic bread. While you can shred or even grate mozzarella (depending on how hard it is), Brie is too soft for these methods. In place of these, you have a couple of options in how you pair your Brie with your bread. One method would be to simply chop up the cheese into cubes of strips and lay them over individual pieces of bread. Just be careful not to have too much of the cheese's rind concentrated on one piece, since it will be considerably more bitter than the cheese encased within it.

You could also try baking the Brie wheel in its entirety and dipping your garlic bread into the gooey molten cheese. Alternatively, you could opt for cross-hatching a whole loaf of bread and slipping pieces of Brie into the slits. Whichever option you choose, you can be sure that adding Brie — with its balance of robust creaminess and subtle earthiness — to your garlic bread will prove to be a real game changer for such a familiar and beloved dish. You might even want to consider pairing your Brie with other melty cheeses to enhance your garlic bread, like fontina. Rest assured, you won't feel limited to just mozzarella from here on out.