Curd surge: TikTok recipes drive a national cottage cheese shortage
If you've spotted a cottage cheese-shaped hole in the dairy aisle recently, you're not alone. Australians' suddenly insatiable appetite for the product has left dietitians grinning and supermarkets scrambling to restock.
The curd surge is being driven by trending recipes on social media, which emphasise the cheese's high protein content. On TikTok, cottage cheese is touted as a core ingredient in everything from dips to ice-cream to bagels.
It's a welcome development for accredited practicing dietitian Anna Debenham. 'As a dietitian, I've always been a big fan of cottage cheese,' she said. 'For the last decade, we've been trying to incorporate it into people's diets without much success.'
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Debenham said cottage cheese's recent ascent to 'it ingredient' was great to see, although she noted it had made it harder to find in supermarkets. A representative from Coles said: 'We have been seeing tubs flying off the shelf faster than we can keep up.'
Both Coles and Woolworths said they were working with suppliers to improve availability.
Nick Hickford, chief commercial officer of Bulla Dairy Foods, one of the country's largest cottage cheese manufacturers, said the company had been scaling up production by adding manufacturing shifts and hiring more cheese makers to keep up with the product's 'significant double-digit growth'.
'This is quite a unique situation,' Hickford said. 'While we have seen shifts in consumer preferences within the dairy industry, such a rapid and widespread resurgence of interest in a traditionally niche product is rare - but exciting.'
Debenham said cottage cheese had significant nutritional benefits, since it is high in protein, low in fat and lower in sodium than other cheeses. 'In the cheese world it's one of the healthiest options. It's also pretty budget friendly.'
'There's so much that trends on TikTok that's absolute nonsense, so harmful,' she said. 'But the cottage cheese trend is awesome, because it's utilising a healthy ingredient in creative ways.'
Debenham has even tried a few viral recipes herself. She praises cottage cheese as a base for dips, with the addition of chickpeas, avocado or other vegetables. On the sweet side, 'I've tried cottage cheese mousse, and that was surprisingly delicious,' she said.
Guardian Australia also attempted one viral recipe – two-ingredient cheese crisps made by baking cottage cheese and powdered seasoning in a moderately hot oven, which has been viewed more than 1m times on TikTok.
Given the limited availability of cottage cheese, we tested the recipe using four soft white cheeses: cottage cheese, quark, feta and bocconcini. Our first attempt, cooking the chips at 190C for 30 minutes, as per the original TikTok instructions, was a tar-black catastrophe.
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On our next attempt, we lowered the oven temperature by 20C (most Australian ovens use convection heat; most American ovens do not); shortened the cooking time by five minutes and used baking paper instead of tin foil to line the tray.
This batch of chips was somewhat more successful.
The outer edges of the cottage cheese chip burned before the centre became crisp, resulting in a chewy, limp disk with a mild sour taste. The quark chip was worse: floppy, grainy and strongly sour. Meanwhile, a cube of low-fat feta remained steadfastly cube-shaped throughout the cooking process, but acquired a springy, halloumi-like texture.
A piece of bocconcini became by far the best chip. It melted across the baking tray then formed a lacy, golden layer that was crisp but not burnt. In addition to a satisfying crunch, the bocconcini chip had a mild taste that did not overpower the onion-salt seasoning. At 16g protein a hundred grams, bocconcini has a higher protein content than cottage cheese – but almost 10 times the fat.
This substitution still received a thumbs up from Debenham . 'Look overall, I see that as a pretty healthy snack,' she said when described the two-ingredient recipe. 'Maybe combine it with a bit of fruit to get a bit of fibre.'
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