Spend any time on social media in the last month, and no matter what your For You Page normally looks like, you probably stumbled onto a plethora of cottage cheese recipes. It was the great equalizer — revered by intuitive eating dietitians, protein-conscious muscle-builders, and weight loss accounts alike. If the idea of cottage cheese as a trend sent some of you into a cold sweat with flashbacks of growing up in the 80s and 90’s when it was the crash diet food, you’re not alone. (Does anyone else remember that episode of MTV True Life where the beauty queen ate nothing but bowls of plain cottage cheese, even at restaurants? *shudders*.) Hear me out: This iteration is a far less toxic one. In fact, the recipes looked, dare I hope, delicious.
After looking through my saved videos and realizing a large majority of the recipes relied on the containers of curds, I was intrigued. What if I spent two weeks trying as many recipes as I could and reporting back? An honest account of what recipes were actually tasty, worth making, and didn’t make me feel deprived or like I was on a slippery slope to a 1,200-calorie diet. Here’s a look inside my cottage cheese journey.
Breakfast
Before we get too far into this story, I have a confession: I like cottage cheese. I grew up eating it on salads and one of my childhood favorite snacks (and current, tbh) is cottage cheese and a drizzle of Western dressing. So while my taste buds may be different from yours, I tried my best to be objective about whether or not I liked a recipe because I like cottage cheese or if it was a good one and I couldn’t taste the ingredient.
The first attempt in this category was eggs. Stirring cottage cheese in my scrambled eggs is an easy way to increase the protein (about 12 grams per half cup) and has a similar texture and taste to adding shredded cheese. But ‘similar’ is the keyword there, and if you’re not a cottage cheese fan, this wouldn’t be the recipe I would recommend.
Dinners
The best technique I learned from this challenge was blending cottage cheese. A few quick spins in the blender and it whips the curds into a smooth, creamy consistency that sits in the middle of sour cream and yogurt. For many people, the off-putting part of cottage cheese is the texture and this eliminates that initial barrier to trying it again. Once you have a blended container of cottage cheese, the kitchen is your oyster: Mix it with parmesan, chicken stock, and seasoning to make a protein-rich sauce, make like Moira and fold it into your burrito fillings, or even make a high-protein taco bowl.
The Italians won’t like this tip, but my mom taught me to use cottage cheese in lasagna as full-fat ricotta was too rich tasting (an unpopular opinion, I’m aware). I’ve since evolved to prefer half cottage cheese and half ricotta in my lasagnas.
Stealth Health Life is a TikTok account I discovered that makes drool-worthy high-protein dishes and many of his creations rely on cottage cheese — but you’d never know it by looking at them. I made his Queso Chicken and Rice and Green Chili Queso Mac N Cheese Bowls this month and they got a 10/10 from me. Like blending extra vegetables into a kid’s dinner, you cannot taste or see the difference.
Snacks
In cottage cheese-mania, one trend that drew the most discussion was cottage cheese and mustard. While I like cottage cheese and mustard separately, this did not sound appetizing to me. And if I’m being fully honest: This was a tip-toe into an unsafe-for-me diet mindset I wasn’t willing to take. I won’t claim to know everyone else’s motivation for it, but eating something just because it was high-protein and low-calorie was not going to be my journey.
That being said, I am a dip girly. Perhaps it’s my Midwest roots showing or maybe it’s universally delicious, but sometimes I plan snacks purely as a vessel for dip. One such recipe was mixing our aforementioned blended cottage cheese with a packet of Hidden Valley ranch powder (my love for ranch is definitely a Midwest trait). This became my afternoon snack during the work week — baby carrots, bell pepper sticks, pita chips or pretzels, and a little bowl of my cottage cheese ranch. You absolutely cannot taste that it’s cottage cheese — I would recommend this recipe even to the cottage cheese haters among us — and the creamy texture is just like using Greek yogurt or sour cream. One tip: Look for the lower-sodium ranch packets (or the dressing packet, not the dip); cottage cheese is saltier than Greek yogurt and my first attempt was much too salty.
Dessert
The cottage cheese recipes that initially gave me pause were dessert-themed. Yes, this cookie dough recipe has cottage cheese as an ingredient — a whole 1/2 cup worth. The stuff is even getting into people’s high-protein ice cream. But, I couldn’t find a recipe that lived up to the TikTok hype — the cookie dough was fairly dry, crumbly, and lacked flavor. It didn’t taste bad but I wasn’t excited by it either. If we’re judging based solely on cottage cheese, you couldn’t taste it at all (truly!). However, I would rather have a really good chocolate chip cookie or a spoonful of cookie dough and get my protein elsewhere than make this again.
There’s no requirement to test new recipes or like cottage cheese. If you sit solidly in the ‘cringing at the mention of cottage cheese’ camp, feel free to skip this challenge. As far as food trends go, this one is pretty healthy — both in mindset and recipes. I liked cottage cheese before and am even more impressed by its versatility after these last few weeks. While you won’t find cottage cheese cookie dough, you’ll absolutely find a jumbo container of plain cottage cheese in my fridge at all times now.
