The High-Protein Food You're Probably Overlooking

First, yogurt started crowding out everything else on the dairy shelf. Then Greek yogurt muscled its way in. But one underdog dairy case food, which kept hanging on by its fingernails, is starting to fight its way back.

Some brands of cottage cheese, including Good Culture and Muuna, are starting to make it cool, launching snack-size containers with contemporary labels and mix-ins like acai and chia seeds, and hoping you’ll forget about its unfortunate melba toast, bland weight-loss diet phase. Even Breakstone’s is in on the act, with flavors like mango habanero.

Cottage cheese skeptics, stay with us, here. There’s more beyond the packaging and flavors to like about the stuff:

Cottage cheese contains more protein than two eggs.

And that’s just the protein in a personal-size cup of the stuff (5.3 oz)—in that size, those wannabe trendy cottage cheeses are weighing in at 16 to 19 grams of protein; eggs have about 6 g each. And your yogurt? Totally depends on which one you choose. Your Greek yogurt might have 15 g; the standard yogurt can have as little as 3 or 6 grams of protein.

It keeps low-carb eaters happy.

Options with fruit on the bottom will raise the carb count, but the plain stuff often clocks in at under 5 g of carbs.

Some brands contain probiotics.

Sorry, yogurt. You’re not the only one that contains the good-for-you bacteria known as probiotics. Some cottage cheeses, including Muuna and Nancy’s, have them, too. Even if your favorite brand doesn’t, you can load up those creamy curds with prebiotics—the food that nourishes probiotics already in your body—by mixing in foods like flaxseeds.

The curd issue doesn’t have to be an issue.

If you don’t like the texture of cottage cheese, smooth it out in a blender. Maybe even throw a little bleu cheese in there, too, for an extra zingy flavor. Or look for “whipped” cottage cheese, which has tiny curds and a very different mouth feel.

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You can make it taste like dessert. But it’s even better as lunch.

Manufacturers often tart up yogurts with sugary fruit-on-the-bottom concoctions or even flavors from the bakery case, like banana cream pie. You can make cottage cheese more treat-like if you want by adding dried or whole fruit, or even hazelnuts and honey or toasted coconut and blackberries. But we recommend exploring its savory side (not weird; remember it can go in lasagna) with these mix-ins:

Get the satisfying stuff.

Give yourself the best cottage cheese experience by following the same rules as you do with yogurt—skip the nonfat stuff and reach for a container that contains the real, creamy, satisfying thing.

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