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Despite the impending loss of street cred, we're fully prepared to announce that we have a favorite cottage cheese. And, no, we're not octogenarians. We're not even trying to build up momentum for some lame new diet. We just happen to love cottage cheese—and we don't mind telling people that the best cottage cheese around is Friendship Dairies 4% California-Style Small-Curd Cottage Cheese. Among the 13 brands of full-fat, small-curd cottage cheese—including both organic and non-organic varieties—sampled recently by a panel of Epicurious staff, it was determined the best tasting and best textured. For our methodology and the full list of cheeses we tasted, scroll to the bottom of the page. First up, the rankings!
Our Favorite Cottage Cheese: Friendship
To understand what we liked best about Friendship cottage cheese, you should know what we didn't like about many of the other brands we tasted. A large contingent were too sour or had a bitter aftertaste. On the whole we liked a milder cottage cheese, but not too mild—some specimens were so bland they undoubtedly earned their outdated reputation of being boring. Friendship, however, was slightly tangy—but still mild comparatively—with defined curds that retained a bit of texture and chew instead of dissolving straightaway into grainy pebbles. It was also on the dryer side—among the vast array of cottage cheeses, there are generally two consistency types: dry and wet. To make dry cottage cheese, milk is lightly fermented, resulting in fresh cheese that's cut into curds, drained, and rinsed. To make wet cottage cheese, those dry curds are then tossed with a "cream dressing." Too much dressing (or a dressing lacking in richness) means a soupy—even watery—cottage cheese. Friendship does have added cream, but it only adds richness to those milky, tightly-grouped curds, without yielding the sloshy liquid found in some other brands.
BUY IT: Friendship Dairies 4% California-Style Small-Curd Cottage Cheese, $2 for 8 ounces at AmazonFresh
The Best Organic Cottage Cheese: Good Culture
Drier even than our winner was this organic brand. It has a slightly cheesier flavor—so, not as mild as Friendship, but still very pleasant to eat on its own. It can go sweet or savory easily—I'd probably even choose it over ricotta, which I often find too grainy and bland when cooked. It also has the smallest curds of any cottage cheese we tasted, which may or may not matter to you.
BUY IT: Good Culture Whole Milk Classic Cottage Cheese, $6 for 16 ounces via Whole Foods on Amazon
The Best Wet(ter) Cottage Cheese: Daisy
Some tasters on the panel wanted a higher liquid-to-curd ratio than what Friendship offered, and while Daisy was by far not the wettest cottage cheese we tasted, it was significantly wetter than our two leads. The flavor is very mild, but it tasted fresh with a sweet milkiness. It was tied with Trader Joe's for third place after our blind tasting—and they are admittedly quite similar in texture and appearance. Upon further inspection, we liked that Daisy only has three ingredients: cultured milk, cream, and salt—as opposed to the stabilizers present in Trader Joe's and most of the selections that placed lower in the rankings—which gave it the edge to nab a place in the winner's circle.
BUY IT: Daisy 4% Cottage Cheese, $3 for 16 ounces on AmazonFresh
What We Were Looking For
I took an informal poll to determine whether the Epicurious staff as a whole preferred large-curd or small-curd cottage cheese, and while the margins were slim, my colleagues ultimately leaned in favor of small curd. It's an important distinction since the difference can mean more than just curd-size comparison. Traditionally, rennet is added when making large-curd cheese, speeding up the curdling process and producing a less sour cheese. That said, many of today's commercial brands prepare both cheeses identically, so in some instances it really is just a curd-size comparison.
Regardless, we went with small-curd to maintain consistency across the board and chose brands that are easily accessed across the United States. We chose only full-fat cottage cheeses—which is usually indicated as 4% milkfat—since lowfat and nonfat varieties often have a host of stabilizers that give them off flavors and make them perform poorly when cooked (i.e. those stabilizers break down, resulting ina watery mess instead of a creamy dream).
We also tasted only plain cottage cheeses for the same reason we chose plain Greek yogurt when conducting that taste test: we wanted to taste the unadulterated product. After comparing tasting notes to brand labels, we discovered that cottage cheeses with an excess of stabilizers (including carrageenan and a variety of gums) routinely fell to the bottom of our rankings; however, in a surprise twist, Friendship does contain stabilizers—though much fewer than the five different types found in at least one other brand—if you'd like to steer away from them completely, go for Good Culture or Daisy.
Finally, our favorite cottage cheese had to have good texture: defined curds that were chewy, but not rubbery; creamy, but not grainy; and that had a pleasant flavor that was neither too sour nor too bland.
How We Tested
All cottage cheeses were stored in the same refrigerator and then gently stirred and spooned into unmarked white bowls right before the tasting. Samples were tasted in random order by a panel of Epicurious editors and staff in a blind tasting. No additions to the cheeses were allowed, but we did have sliced apples available for palate cleansing between samples. No distinction was made between organic and non-organic products during testing.
The Other Cottage Cheeses We Tasted
In alphabetical order:
Trader Joe’s 4% Small-Curd Cottage Cheese
