The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The comeback snack
Plenty of people are betting that cottage cheese is ready for a spot in your fridge again,
Cottage cheese began life in America as an easy, economical way for colonial cooks to make use of milk left over after they skimmed off the cream. By the 1970s, its amicable presence in recipes and on diet plates had made it a star. Fame is fickle, and so are the nation’s eaters. Cottage cheese fell out of favor, and now spends its days hanging out in stodgy pint containers near the sour cream, while yogurt sprawls out across acres of the dairy case, dressed up in cute little tubes, flip tops and French glass jars. America loves a comeback, though, and there are plenty of people who are betting that cottage cheese is primed for one. “Every seven years or so another wave comes through where we try to reposition cottage cheese,” said Dave Potter, president of Dairy Connection in Madison, Wisconsin, which sells custom cultures and enzymes to cheesemakers. “That’s about where we are now.” This time, with help from both big food companies and smallbatch cheesemakers, it might actually work. On the mass-market side of the equation, the nation’s largest dairy producers are targeting younger people looking for a protein-rich, natural snack they can eat instead of a meal. (Cottage cheese can have twice the protein of some yogurts, though it has a lot more sodium.) A couple new players have jumped in, including Muuna, the first product from Israel’s largest food manufacturer to be sold in the United States. American companies like Dean Foods, the nation’s largest dairy company, have given their cottage cheeses makeovers, packing them into smaller, sexier packages and asking retailers to move them away from the sour cream and closer to the yogurt. New lines have interesting mixes of fruit and nuts, and some producers are experimenting with millennial-friendly additions like probiotics and chia seeds. Flavors are expanding beyond dusty stalwarts like pineapple to include Kalamata olive, habanero chile or cumin. The goal, according to industry analysts, is to “uncottage” cottage cheese — or, as one dairy executive put it, “Chobani it.” But the road back is not going to be easy. Yogurt outsells cottage cheese by roughly 8-1, said John Owen, a senior food and drink analyst who prepared the annual cheese report for Mintel, a market research company. Even though yogurt sales have started to flatten, American shoppers still bought $8.5 billion worth in 2017. “Yogurt got adopted by big food in the way cottage cheese never did,” he said. To use the terminology of food marketers, yogurt wears a health halo. Cottage cheese, long linked to the drudgery of dieting, is fighting a punishment halo. “Yogurt always had a better back story than cottage cheese,” said Jonathan Kauffman, author of “Hippie Food: How Back-tothe-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat.” Kauffman, like many people, has let cottage cheese fall out of rotation: “It’s one of those foods I don’t eat, but I feel like I should.” Unlike yogurt, which is a matter of adding a culture to milk and waiting for it to thicken up, cottage cheese is one of those foods that is deceptively simple to produce but difficult to do well. It’s like making really good scrambled eggs, but takes hours. You have to take it low and slow. “Good cottage cheese takes a little craftsmanship,” said Potter, of the Dairy Connection. That’s where cheesemakers like Sue Conley and Peggy Smith, founders of Cowgirl Creamery in Marin County, California, come in. In the 1990s, Conley learned to make cottage cheese from Potter. It was one of the first cheeses she and Smith produced when they opened their original creamery in Point Reyes Station, California, in 1997. The key is very fresh skim milk from a well-run local dairy, Conley said. Next comes a simple starter culture that feeds on milk sugars to create lactic acid. Overnight, luscious, tender curds slowly form. In the morning, cheesemakers cut them into pieces no bigger than peas. They cook and stir the curds for about 1 1/2 hours to release some of their acidity. Then the cheesemakers drain the whey and wash the curds three times. The last step is the dressing, which is the term for milk or cream that is added to the curds to make them creamy. The dressing determines the fat content of cottage cheese, and is where most of the flavor lies. Cowgirl Creamery uses creme fraiche, and calls its pleasantly tart product clabbered cottage cheese. The cheese will be sold in Northern California and online, with plans to expand distribution on the West Coast in the fall. It’s not inexpensive. A 5.3ounce container will cost a little less than $3. Conley suggests eating it the way cheesemakers do after they finish a batch: Rip open a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips and use it like a dip. Cowgirl Creamery interrupted production in 2012 because the process requires a lot of water and California was in a terrible drought. But this month, the creamery has started making the cottage cheese again at its Petaluma, California, facility to the joy of people like Janet Fletcher, a cheese writer who published a love letter to it in The San Francisco Chronicle. “I abandoned cottage cheese when I left home,” she wrote. “Tasting Cowgirl Creamery’s superb product made me want to welcome cottage cheese back into my life.” When cottage cheese is good, it’s delicious, something the cheesemonger Kate Arding found when she tasted Cowgirl Creamery’s version before production stopped. Arding, who grew up eating (and not really liking) cottage cheese in Britain, began a quest to persuade skeptical customers. “They’d taste it and get this glassy-eyed look,” she said. “You could see their faces just change.”