The World’s Most Underrated Cheese...That Everyone Already Knows About

The beauty of cottage cheese is far greater than TikTok based protein hacks

Cottage cheese seems to have become the cool kid on the block ever since Tik Tok went wild with people super stoked on protein. According to people who eat 250 plus grams of protein a day it can help you lose weight and get you jacked and I’m sure lots of other weird stuff. I don’t care. Cottage cheese is good on its own merit. 

This stuff is classic in the way that The Odyssey is classic. That is to say, it’s over 5000 years old and Homer talks about the cyclops Polyphemus making cheese by storing milk in animal stomachs where enzymes kick off a fermentation to make cottage cheese in The Odyssey! I know I am not selling this stuff with that lovely bit of info, but don’t worry, if you don’t like cottage cheese, I’ll buy your share and eat that too. Cottage cheese, like all cheese — and let’s be honest, most things — is a product of fermentation. (Cheese, coffee, and beer are all here thanks to fermentation, that’s like the trinity that makes up my core values.) The flavor is often described as sour, but unless you’re horribly lifelong lactose intolerant, you know that cheesy flavor.

Cottage cheese is kinda my “I liked that band before they were cool.” Except I am going to bet that cottage cheese does not stay on top of the cheese world for long. Even I understand it can be a bit of a hard sell visually and texturally. I grew up eating cottage cheese all the time. My favorite was pairing it with either applesauce or pineapples, but it also works great plain out of a bowl with a spoon, or on toast. I caught flack about liking it from fellow kids, but also from my grandma, who thought I was crazy. I didn’t understand because I thought it was so good. It is here that I admit that not all cottage cheese is created equal. Cottage cheese needs to be creamy and thick, it needs to have a few different sized chunks but only in a small range, and it needs to be fairly fresh. If the curds can move freely in the cream, it’s far too thin. The number one brand on the market has been king my whole life. Does that sound like it’s just familiar to me so that’s what I like? Sure, but that’s not gonna keep me from telling you that it’s the best. The cheese in question is The Very Best Grade A Pasteurized Knudsen Lowfat Cottage Cheese - 2% Milkfat - Small Curd. Luckily for everyone, this is the exact one that they sell a whopping three pound tub of at Costco for the low low price of $4.89. A steal and a half and always on my Costco list. I kid you not when I tell you that I have done blind taste tests to confirm that this cottage cheese is not only identifiable but inarguably the best. It doesn’t take much for me to identify the one that slaps. The three pounds only intimidates me because I know I could eat it all in one go if I ever really lost control. 

Considering its recent surge into the zeitgeist, cottage cheese is simultaneously underrated and overrated and I feel like it should be in the “cheese kicks ass and we all love it” conversation for more reasons than strategic ones where if you blend it you can make bread. Although I absolutely want to try that and then spread cottage cheese on toast made from that bread. I guess thank you TikTok for getting generation Z into cottage cheese, I am not sure the marketers are doing a very good job. I fret at the idea of cottage cheese popularity dying with me and my old transitional-on-the-low-end millennial ass. This promo is my favorite thing TikTok has done for me except perhaps for getting me into budots music…