It’s a retro food that’s made a comeback thanks to social media.
Cottage cheese — long a polarizing dairy product — is now cool, with over 200 million views for #cottagecheese on TikTok.
Users are racking up millions of views on videos sharing their twists on the curdled milk product, using it to make dips, dinners and even desserts.
“Consumers are engaging a lot with new ways to use cottage cheese – whether blended and frozen as a high-protein ice cream alternative or as an ingredient in recipes such as savory breakfast toast, pasta dishes, or post-workout smoothies,” Corey Christofel, Cultured Dairy Brand Manager of Dairy Farmers of America, said in a statement to The Post.
It’s long been considered nutritious, but now it’s also being celebrated as delicious.
“It like kind of checks all the boxes, it’s good for you and it tastes good,” said Melissa Ben-Ishay, the CEO of food company Baked by Melissa, who has a large online following of people who look to her for healthy recipes.
Ben-Ishay, 39, has 2.2 million TikTok followers, thanks in part to viral cottage cheese she shares, such as cottage cheese with cucumber on toast.
“A lot of what you see as going viral is just good, and it will always just be good,” the cottage cheese enthusiast added. “But people either didn’t know about it, [or they forgot about it] and that’s why it went viral.”
Ben-Ishay’s favorite brand of the product is Good Culture, which launched in 2015 and has worked to update cottage cheese’s taste and image.
Last year, it secured $64 million in Series C funding.
Ben-Ishay says cooking with cottage cheese is a fun way to packs more protein in dishes.
She also loves the nostalgia factor of serving it to her seven and five-year-old kids, just as her mother did to her when she was young.
“I just have like such a vivid memory of eating that cottage cheese,” the New Yorker recalled fondly.
Danielle Zaslavshaya, 39 and an influencer, says cottage cheese based recipes were a staple in her middle eastern household. Born in Ukraine and raised in Miami, Zaslavshaya had a cottage-cheese hiatus after childhood until she started eating it again when she met her husband three years ago and was served it by his sister.
“I started eating it in its simplest form like just you know, raw cottage cheese with adding like things to it,” she recalled.
Though she admits that the smell and texture can be offputting, Zaslavshaya is thrilled the curdled dish is getting it’s time in the sun.
“I feel like it falls into that unfamiliar food category that just had a resurgence and people just started you know showing the health benefits [including] that it has a lot of protein and there’s like different ways to eat it,” she said.
For both her and Ben-Ishay, it’s not just a passing fancy.
“I think for me, cottage cheese is not a trend. It’s something that I was reminded I love,” mused Ben-Ishay.
Zaslavshaya says you just have to embrace it.
“People love cheese,” she said. With cottage cheese, you have to get past the idea that “it’s weird, it’s something that my grandma eats.”