This Is the Very Best Cottage Cheese (and I've Tried Most of Them)
It’s the tastiest and packs the most protein.
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When I was home for the holidays last year, I was in a snacky mood. Alas, my parents have always maintained what Tik Tok describes as an “ingredient household,” or, in other words, a house in which there are no snacks – just ingredients for cooking and baking, like cherry tomatoes, croutons or raw almonds. I wasn’t going to find any chips, but I opened the fridge hoping to encounter some pre-cut veggies to munch on. A cottage cheese container with smart, minimalist branding – Good Culture – peered out from behind heads of lettuce. This was a newcomer. Intrigued, I took a small spoonful.
I hadn’t eaten cottage cheese in years, but nevertheless I was expecting something somewhat flavorless and reminiscent of diet food. Instead, the bite was perfectly balanced, like masterly-crafted amuse bouche: creamy, slightly tangy and savory. Were my culinary school teachers to ever taste it, they would pronounce it "perfectly seasoned."
From that moment on, I stared buying plain Good Culture cottage cheese from my Whole Foods. Sometimes I’d buy the low-fat version which has slightly more protein, but often I’d reach for the full fat and enjoy it with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.
Come this past March, though, I noticed a woman swiping the whole shelf of single-serve Good Culture containers into her shopping basket. The next few times I went, the plain flavored single serve containers and large tubs were all totally sold out. There seemed to be a Good Culture shortage, and I soon realized Tik Tok was to blame.
Without missing a beat, I bought the 365 brand of cottage cheese. But it was not the same. Neither was that from Trader Joe’s. Both lacked that perfectly savory quality, and instead tasted flat and unsatisfying. Adding some salt myself didn’t fix the problem. They were also thinner than Good Culture, which I now realize is luxuriously thick and creamy. As the Good Culture shortage persisted in every single supermarket around me (clearly everyone else liked it too), I tried the other biggie brands as well (six total, no need to mention names) and not a single one held a candle to the flavor of Good Culture.
Plus, after reading the nutritional labels of other cottage cheeses, I realized Good Culture seems healthier. It has a few more grams of protein per equivalent serving, not to mention it has live, active cultures like Greek yogurt.
Finally, it occurred to me to that I could simply order Good Culture cottage cheese online (come on, duh), and knock on wood, now I’m always able to have it on hand. May I suggest you do the same?
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