Before tasting more than two dozen varieties of cottage cheese, I wanted to understand how it’s made. The process turned out to be more involved than I, a self-professed cottage cheese lover, ever realized.
First, a starter substance, such as an acidic bacterial culture and sometimes microbial rennet, is added to milk, which coagulates the proteins. Next, the curds are cut into pieces, gently cooked to help them shrink and firm up, and then drained to remove excess liquid. Finally, the curds are combined with a “dressing” made of lightly acidified milk, cream, or buttermilk (or a mix of the three) and salt. Some makers also add stabilizers such as guar gum, locust bean gum, tapioca starch, or carrageenan to thicken the milky dressing. The result is a tangy, rustically textured dairy product.
In our testing, we focused on small-curd cottage cheese, which constitutes the majority of cottage cheese sales in the US, according to data from Circana. Even among this style of cottage cheese, curd sizes ranged from a pinhead to a pea.
We tested both whole-milk and low-fat cottage cheeses. When I was younger, low-fat cottage cheeses with 1% to 2% milkfat were prevalent (fitting with the focus on low-fat foods in the 1980s and 1990s). But today, whole-milk (4% milkfat) varieties are more popular. You can also find ultra-rich 6% milkfat cottage cheese, which for now claims a tiny fraction of sales.
We also included two low-sodium/no-salt-added options in the hopes of finding a suitable choice for people on sodium-restricted diets. (Traditional cottage cheese typically has around 400 mg of sodium per half cup.)
We tasted each cottage cheese without knowing which brand’s product we were sampling (though one cottage cheese superfan attempted to guess!). We primarily tasted the scoops plain but also had a variety of toppings available — blueberries, honey, chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, olive oil, and black pepper — to see how each cottage cheese stood up to both sweet and savory flavors.
Those that performed best were primarily lush and dry-ish rather than wet, gloppy, or pasty. Our favorites glistened bright white over drab or yellow, and they were almost all milky with a gentle tang, rather than sharp or barnyardy.
This article was edited by Courtney Schley and Gabriella Gershenson.
