Why You Should Consider Adding Cottage Cheese To Baked Goods

Cottage cheese is a tangy, light dairy product with a delightfully lumpy texture that health enthusiasts and dieticians rally around. However, instead of eating a serving with chopped pineapple or carrot sticks, you should try using cottage cheese in your baked goods. With a flavor profile somewhere between sour cream and cream cheese and a good balance of fat and protein, cottage cheese will upgrade the flavor and nutrition of all kinds of baked goods, from bread to cookies, to cakes.

You can use it as a substitute for many dairy products used in cakes, breads, and tarts like sour cream, cream cheese, ricotta, mascarpone, and yogurt. Its rich, creamy, and tangy flavors can adapt to sweet or savory baked goods. Cottage cheese can even substitute a large portion of butter in baked goods, instilling a fluffiness to bread doughs and tenderness to cookies and cakes.

Both wet and creamy cottage cheese and dry cottage cheese are useful to baked good recipes, depending on the texture and flavor you seek. Dry cottage cheese will work well for baked goods with crispy or airy textures like crackers and flakey pastry dough; wet cottage cheese will make moist and fluffy cheesecakes, doughnuts, sweet rolls, chocolate chip cookies, and cakes.

There are plenty of recipes for cottage cheese desserts to try, from two-ingredient cottage cheese bread to lemon cottage cheese cake, to fluffy cottage cheese chocolate chip cookies. Cottage cheese will break down and emulsify into any batter or dough very easily if you want a smooth crumb. You can add cottage cheese to a blender with wet and dry ingredients as an easy dump-it batter for pancakes or birthday cakes. Even the process of mixing it into bread dough with an industrial mixer is enough to flatten and blend the curds.

If you want to facilitate the breakdown of curds into a more creamy, whipped version of cottage cheese, use small curd. It's also advisable to use cottage cheese with at least some fat content for the best flavor and moisture. Full-fat cottage cheese still has less fat and more protein than many of the dairy products it substitutes. If you're using it in a dense, ultra-creamy cheesecake, you might need to add more fat to cottage cheese with a few tablespoons of heavy cream. On the flip side, you can safeguard against too much moisture by draining the curds.

Even if you aren't looking to add extra protein or lower the fat content of baked goods, cottage cheese is a textural and flavorful upgrade that you can add to any recipe. You can use it in its clumpy form to transform a skillet cornbread into a fluffy yet moist corn pudding souffle.