The High-Protein Ingredient Your Breakfast Egg Bake Is Missing

Egg bakes are tasty and convenient breakfast casseroles that combine all of your favorite breakfast ingredients into one dish. As the name suggests, eggs are the common denominator in breakfast egg bakes, leaving countless possibilities for other ingredients. While bacon, sausage, and cheese are popular choices, cottage cheese is the protein-packed ingredient that'll add more than just nourishment to your breakfast egg bake.

Not only does cottage cheese contain almost double the protein of other hard cheeses you might add to your egg bake but it also has lower fat and a lower price tag. If economic and nutritious aspects aren't convincing enough, cottage cheese's tangy, rich, and mild flavor paired with the decadently creamy texture complements eggs and any other ingredient in an egg bake recipe.

Cottage cheese is a fresh cheese with no funk or saltiness, making it a versatile ingredient that won't upstage savory meats and cheeses. Just as we stir cream into a quiche or ricotta into scrambled eggs to bolster their consistency, blending cottage cheese with raw eggs will likewise instill a richer, heartier texture to your egg bake.

Cottage cheese can be a complete or partial substitute for the liquid dairy usually called for in egg bakes. To facilitate emulsion with beaten eggs and milk, you might want to blend cottage cheese curds into a uniformly smooth consistency.

Tasting Table offers numerous breakfast casserole recipes, each with distinct proportions of eggs, liquid dairy, cheese, vegetables, and carbohydrates like hash browns and bread. While you can add cottage cheese to any of these recipes for a tasty and nutritious enhancement, the amount of cottage cheese you add differs depending on the other ingredients in your bake.

For example, in an egg bake containing bread, like this sausage strata recipe or this croissant breakfast casserole recipe, you need a thinner egg and dairy mixture to facilitate the bread's absorption. Therefore, you should experiment with a partial substitute of ⅓ to ½ of the milk for blended cottage cheese. An easier route might be to use recipes that call for a mix of milk and heavy cream or sour cream, like this overnight eggs benedict casserole or this cheesy hashbrown casserole. In this case, you could swap the thicker heavy cream or sour cream with the same measurement of blended cottage cheese.

For simpler recipes with lighter ingredients, you can add a larger portion of cottage cheese. You could add a full 18-ounce tub of cottage cheese with a cup of milk to a simple egg and spinach bake. The cottage cheese will counter the lightness and thinness of milk and beaten eggs with a comforting density and a creamier texture and flavor.