Cottage Cheese: How to Best Enjoy It
Design by Maggie Rossetti for Thrillist
There’s nothing particularly sexy about cottage cheese. The texture averse has long been put off by its gloopy, curd-like form. A fad diet staple of the ’80s, cottage cheese carries a legacy of restriction. It’s got that sanitized look often associated with hospital food—bland and flavorless. Somehow, somewhere, it was Greek yogurt that rose to the top as the silky white vehicle of choice.
But a recent trend has shown that cottage cheese is simply a victim of bad marketing. Thanks to a few food influencers on TikTok, among other movements in the curd zeitgeist, surely, the humble milk product is making its rightful comeback as a ricotta-like, protein-rich snack. Wellness girlies on the social platform shout from the rooftops: “If you haven’t tried cottage cheese with pineapple, you’re missing out”; “This is your sign to whip your cottage cheese”; “She [cottage cheese] is the moment.”
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The creator of the viral Green Goddess Salad, Melissa Ben-ishay (@bakedbymelissa), often spreads cottage cheese alongside chopped vegetables on olive-oil-fried toasts. Danielle Zaslavskaya (@dzaslavsky), who has turned the internet on to caviar-topped Doritos and Joe & The Juice Tunacados, likes to snack on cottage cheese with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and onion salt. Both Emily Eggers (@legallyhealthyblonde) and Brittany Arnette (@toasted.table) have created a series showcasing the many different ways you can dress up cottage cheese, using everything from za’atar chili crisp and pistachio dukkah to salmon roe.
This trend makes complete sense, given the gradual shift back to real dairy. Plus, there’s the obsession with protein, and one cup of cottage cheese boasts as much as 28 grams, in addition to other nutrients like B vitamins, calcium, phosphorus, and selenium. Compound this all with Millennial bowl culture, and it’s…
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