Photo: 123RF
It was a mainstay of the 1970s, and now it appears cottage cheese is making a comeback.
TikTok is making it cool again. Google searches are at a 20-year high, and the New York Times has even devoted space to investigating the so-called 'cottage cheese comeback'.
Chef Julie Biuso told Afternoons in the past ricotta cheese had "bumped" cottage cheese over.
She said one of the reasons cottage cheese was becoming popular again was its low fat content, between 5 and 15 percent.
"What they are doing now and I think it's great, although I won't really try, is making it into ice cream, cookie dough and sponges ... in the same way you could use ricotta or quark ... those very fresh, soft white, cheesy type of products."
The trend going around is a cottage cheese mustard dip.
"Good luck to them with that. You're probably really going to taste the mustard because the cottage cheese itself, it's quite firm, the balls of protein, and if you eat it on its own, it kind of makes your teeth stick together."
Biuso said another way to eat cottage cheese was simply putting it on bread with some salt or spice, or crunchy peanut butter, or lime juice, avocado, fresh chopped coriander and chilli.
She said there were a lot of ingredients in the cottage cheese available in New Zealand.
"It'll have cream, salt, preservative, stabilizer, flavour. It'll also probably have some enzyme like rennet. So yeah, there's quite a lot of stuff in there.
"But it does have some merit ... some protein, calcium."
