Breanne
Carluccio
Culinary Portfolio
2026
2026
For Thousands of Years All We Did Was Cook Dinner
When I went to my first cheesemonger conference I learned about tyrosine and ate a Tête de Moine rosette filled with mimosa jam. This was at Counter Culture in Seattle, May 2024. I was in a room full of people who already knew that cheese was addictive, thanks to the tiny crunchy crystals that transmit dopamine. Someone was dressed up as a cow. We ate French cultured butter with spoons. A representative from Mifroma gave a presentation about their Swiss cheeses, and when it was time to taste the Alpenhorn the whole room erupted into flavor notes shouted over one another. I was too shy to yell that it tasted like movie theater popcorn, but I told my colleague afterwards and he nudged me, “You should have said that.”
During another presentation I learned that apparently humans have been eating cheese since 6,000 BC. A timeline was shared on the screen, broadly sketching the human origins of food: First there was water and ice. Then salt. Then oysters, scallops, mussels and mollusks. Horse, venison. Foraged mushrooms and greens. We started eating bread, and drinking wine and beer. We domesticated pigs, goats, and sheep. Cattle, of course. Then we made cheese. After that came pickles, chocolate, coffee, energy drinks, and lab-made meat. But what stayed with me from the whole presentation was a single phrase.
For thousands of years all we did was cook dinner.
This presentation was given by Adam Moskowitz from Maker to Monger. It examined our growing disconnection from food, and offered an antidote in the form of an unassuming question: “Can cheese foster meaningful connections?”
None of us were arguing with him on this point, but it was doubtful we could have if we tried. Adam had the easy confidence of a New Yorker and a sense of humor that carried the room along with him. Then somewhere in the middle of laughter he said something serious. Cheesemongers are caretakers and matchmakers, tastemakers and guides to terroir, sometimes even therapists for people who are afraid of food.
Sentimental or not, I believe it is true. Anyone who has stood behind a cheese counter knows that small bites and acts of kindness can mean more than they appear to. Every week when I stock the cheese case I’m interrupted by shoppers who can’t find what they’re looking for. Sometimes I can tell they need help but they’re too intimidated to ask. Or, they know what they want, but they can’t remember what the cheese is called.
I like to impress them with certain knowledge and pairings in the same way I imagine they like to impress their friends over dinner. I’ll say, “Nothing from Blakesville Creamery has ever disappointed me. If you’re a fan of soft-ripened goat, you have to try their Linedeline.” This usually eases the tension, and more often than not, the customers and I arrive at the same conclusion. Everything is very delicious, and very expensive. I try to be sensitive to that.
The last person to give a presentation at the Counter Culture conference was Courtney Johnson of Street Cheese. Her slideshow was titled Washington Cheese: A Regional Food System Story, and it was accompanied by a tasting plate of Washington-made cheeses paired with kimchi, pickled cucumbers, and daikon from a restaurant not too far from our conference location in SODO. An attendee sitting across the table from me expressed her enthusiasm for Sawtooth as I cut into the wedge. For the first time that evening I felt like I belonged there, because I was already very familiar with the cheese.
Cascadia Creamery is one of the rare examples of true cave aging in the United States. Where most cheese caves are engineered cellars rather than living geology, all of Cascadia’s cheeses are aged in ancient lava tubes formed by the eruption of Mount Adams some 18,000 years ago. Many Washingtonians know about the caves and have even explored inside them, but few realize that the natural cave air maintains an ideal temperature and humidity for aging cheese. This includes Sawtooth, their semi-soft, washed-rind cheese named after the Sawtooth Huckleberry Fields on the shoulder of the mountain.
Courtney once served as Executive Director of the Washington State Cheesemakers Association, and she spoke with the quiet assurance of someone who had spent many years thinking about regional food systems. Without saying a word, her thoughtfully constructed cheese board had already begun to tell the story of Sawtooth, but as I listened to her speak, I began to understand the larger story surrounding it.
Washington State has forty-nine active cheese makers, and supporting these makers is less about following a slogan than committing to forms of knowledge sharing that have existed for as long as people have been feeding one another. Buying cheese made close to home keeps the distance between the pastures and our plates intelligible, and it’s a choice that reflects more than a preference. It is a way of keeping food culture alive.
Farmers and cheesemakers are among the oldest workers in the world. But for that matter, aren’t grocers too? Before there were grocery stores, someone still had to stand between the farmer and the cook, arranging the harvests of the day into something people could carry home. That’s all we are still doing now, though we hardly think of it that way.
We rarely ask: what lives on the plate?
What lives between people eating together—working together?
What lives amidst soil and rocks and salt and water and ice and mollusks…
There is a joke among our collective that the food co-op is a grocery store, but not just a grocery store. We are one of the last remaining collectively-run food co-ops in the country. It’s an ongoing experiment, built this way on purpose, through community, volunteerism, and shared ownership of the work. On any given day I could be cheesemongering, cooking soup, washing carrots, or selling you a bottle of biodynamic, skin-contact wine. At the co-op we try, as faithfully as we can, to give pride of place to organic, artisan, and locally made cheeses. Yet they are rarely our best-sellers. Cheesemakers themselves often feel just as distant from the people who might love their work. Somewhere between the farm and the counter there is a gap, and it is the cheesemonger’s task to bridge it.
On Thursday nights you might find us in the kitchen behind the cheese case at the Westside having a private tasting party. It isn’t really private, of course. Anyone can join. We usually try to pull in unsuspecting shoppers, coworkers, and friends whenever the opportunity presents itself. On this night the plate was rich with coffee jello and cream, freeze-dried grapes, cherry tomatoes, and mulberries from Oyster Bay Farm, fresh sliced radicchio and persimmon, C’s sage and corn polenta, and heavily salted salmon roe from the fish M and O had just caught. There were also my cheese contributions: Malghese and Cantal Jeune.
Cantal is like French cheddar, and Malghese is essentially caramel—thick, chewy, tender, and sweet. It coats the whole mouth and sticks to everything. When I told them it’s richer because sheep’s milk contains more fat than cow’s, they took a bite and said, “Malghese tastes like Taleggio, but better!”
When I successfully convince someone to try a stinky cheese, they are always astonished to realize the odor is deceptive. My proudest moments are undoubtedly when I feel I’ve transformed someone’s tastes.
That night, I went home feeling like the luckiest monger in the world, not only for that small triumph, but because someone had pressed a beautiful, freshly caught salmon fillet into my hands before I left work. I cooked it as soon as I got home, blackening it in the cast-iron and finishing it with a spoonful of yuzu marmalade. I ate it with some day-old mashed potatoes, freshened up with a quick whip of goat milk kefir, and a side of Swiss chard sautéed with garlic. It was a simple dinner, but it tasted like good fortune.
Until that night I had never eaten salmon eggs before, at least not that I could remember. There was the occasional scatter of tiny fish eggs rolled onto sushi, which I knew well enough and hadn’t cared much about, but salmon roe was another matter entirely. O explained that the male salmon is called a buck and the female a hen. She laughed as she said, “My mom always told me to catch a hen if I want the eggs.” The roe itself was bright and firm and shining. Each bead held together until it burst softly against my tongue. When it did, it released a clean rush of salt and something cold and mineral that tasted unmistakably of the ocean, more truly, it seemed to me, than the ocean tastes of itself.
Our impromptu tastings change with the seasons, just as the produce and cheeses in the case do. They’re not planned in any formal way, and there are weeks at a time when our schedules don’t align. But when we’re all in the room together, I try, as best I can, to make sense of the moment—to pair things thoughtfully from whatever we have at hand and whatever my coworkers have carried in from their own kitchens.
There was one evening when it struck me, quite suddenly, that these tastings were rituals, no less than sitting down to dinner. In truth, they often replaced dinner altogether, or unfolded at that quieting hour around six when most people start leaving the store to sit down at home. I reasoned that it could never have been otherwise. None of us were simply clocking in and clocking out. Something more communal was taking place.
This is what happens when a cheesemonger, a produce monger, and local farmers volunteering on shift decide, almost without speaking, to pool their small treasures. A slice of cheese is cut, a jar of preserves opened, a fennel bulb shaved thinly with a knife, and the delicate fronds scattered. Fruits and vegetables pass across the tiny produce counter, and we taste them together, curious and attentive, trying to discover what pleases the tongue. It is a kind of joy made possible not only by our own labor, but by the labor of many others, whose work we feel very close to in those moments.
At a different time in my life, I would have sworn that sheep’s milk cheese wouldn’t have mattered that much to me. At that conference in Seattle, I was too shy to shout that Alpenhorn tasted like movie theater popcorn, but there’s no doubt I would yell about it now. I can hardly keep my mouth shut, but it’s also because I can’t stop eating.
I get excited when a new cheese lands on the shelf. I want to know where it comes from and why it exists. Is it name-protected? Is it a thousand years old? Is it a rendition of Morbier made in Tennessee? I tell anyone who will listen that feta should be bought in bulk, still floating in brine the color of over-fortified vitamin water. I talk about goat creameries too—about how a log of Salt and Pepa chèvre from Lost Peacock, with a squeeze of lemon, and a tin of smoked mackerel will transform a bowl of pasta into something more memorable. Some days I even feel like bragging about breaking down an eighty-pound wheel of Parm. It doesn’t get old. It doesn’t get easier either, but when I drag the hooked knife through the rind, I love the strength it requires. I feel it in my triceps the day after, and whenever I receive a small cut in the process, I hear my coworker’s voice telling me that it’s only a kiss from the king.
What ancient thing tells us to eat Stilton with hazelnuts? I can’t say exactly, but it seems so familiar. I work in a grocery store to feed my community and I think it’s a little bit funny. Some days I’m a cheesemonger. Some days I’m a cook in the kitchen. Other days I’m inside the cooler stocking yogurt and Soyrizo, laughing as I climb the metal shelves to reach the green juice at the top. Still, every day, I think about how it feels to believe in something so earnest under this fluorescent lighting.