What exactly is cottage cheese? It’s made by combining ordinary milk with specific bacteria to culture or ferment into soft curds. The soft curds can be drained away from the milk to form cottage cheese. The typical cottage cheese available in grocery stores is high in protein, low-fat and low in carbohydrates. While cottage cheese in not extremely low in calories, an ½ cup serving will provide 12 grams of protein and 5 grams of fat. Even the milk by-product remaining from production, whey, is high in protein. Whey is a favorite supplement of body builders, judging by the body building sections in health food stores.
If you are asking ‘What’s tasty about cottage cheese?’, here’s a quick recipe for yummy cottage cheese !
2 scoops of cottage cheese (4% milkfat)
Dash sea salt and black pepper
1 teaspoon of Ranch salad dressing
Combine the ingredients in a small cup and mix
Eat this and you will never think of cottage cheese as just a breakfast food again. Prepare this recipe and you can serve it as an everyday lunch appetizer or with a salad before Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.
If you are a body builder looking for a protein rich supplement to support muscles or if you are laid low with a cold or the flu and in need of soft food that’s easy on the stomach cottage cheese can fit both bills. It’s also the original, old school diet food for weight-low because it relatively low fat. But even if you don’t have any particular food needs and you usually are in a rush in the morning to get to work, nothing beats the speed of scooping cottage cheese from its original container into a small bowl for a quick breakfast or snack.
It’s fortifying, fast and efficient to eat.
Cottage Cheese is high-protein at 12 grams per ½ cup serving (that’s almost as much as a small hamburger) and relatively low-fat. But cottage cheese, unadulterated, is a food you have to force yourself to eat.
Cottage cheese could be so satisfying to eat, if it weren’t for, well, the taste. At best, it’s oddly bland-tasting. At the it’s worst, it will leave you the sensation of eating liquefied chalk.
If you are a regular cottage cheese eater, you probably have experimented over the years with ways to somehow improve the taste. But cottage cheese never, really, fully combines with most other foods added to it, like peaches. Peaches and cottage cheese is a tradition breakfast dish. But somehow, the cottage cheese actually detracts from the sweet lush juiciness of peaches. The same goes for tropical fruits like pineapple and mango which also don’t look as colorful in the same bowl with cottage cheese.
Body builders seem particularly dismayed about the lack of ways to improve the taste of the cheese. They like it because of its high protein content. It seems so logical to combine cottage cheese with something sweet, typically fruit, usually drowned in heavy sugary syrup.
But cottage cheese is no typical food: It has very little smell, unlike other cheese foods and it’s eerily bleach-white. This is a hint: To put it frankly, cottage cheese needs some spice. The above recipe with Ranch dressing is a good place to start experimenting. Try eating cottage cheese with a little cooked spinach or use it in a lasagna dish. Move beyond breakfast into dips, baked dishes and desserts. Think savory not sweet!
Sources:
Foods that Harm, Foods that Heal, publisher Reader’s Digest
