Cottage cheese is now hip. You’ll know that already if you’ve been scrolling through TikTok where #cottagecheese has received 1.1 billion views, or if you have a Gen Z member in your family who is casually tossing this previously derided diet food into your shopping trolley.
This time round, cottage cheese is a lot more glam than its Scarsdale diet days. It’s supercharged with casein and whey proteins that stave off hunger, and is now better known as the high-protein, low-carb cream alternative.
It all kicked off when Lainie Kates (@Lainiecooks) shared her recipe for strawberry cheesecake cottage cheese ice cream on TikTok back in March.
“I still can’t get over this healthy ice cream hack that has almost 60 grams of protein,” she raved. “I’m obsessed,” read her caption – and soon everyone was obsessed, with #cottagecheeseicecream racking up 43.5 million views and recipes that range from whizzing it up with strawberries to more indulgent Snickers bars for the “better-for-you dessert”.
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You could of, course, just stick with the savoury recipes, such as the high-protein cottage cheese dip from Kylie Sakaida, an LA-based nutritionist who has 2.5 million followers on her @nutritionbykylie TikTok account – cottage cheese, minced garlic, basil, dill, oregano and black pepper – or have it with your avo toast like @bakedbymelissa (2.4 million followers). But what would be the fun in that when you could be scrolling endlessly on an app that is designed to suck you in for hours?
Gen Z get most of their recipes on TikTok and it doesn’t seem to matter that they are videos that are less than a minute long, with ingredients lists and written instructions in short supply. The video-sharing platform exploded during Covid lockdowns and videos with the hashtag #FoodTok have amassed 70.6 billion views.
In 2021 recipes for baked feta and cherry tomato pasta, and Dalgona whipped coffee went viral; since then Gigi Hadid’s spicy vodka pasta, cloud bread, pasta chips, four corner tortilla quesadilla, salmon rice bowls, baked oats, pesto eggs, corn ribs and Thomas Straker’s compound butter have all been viral food crazes. More recently it has been pickles, pizza lava toast, the Big Mac taco, fruit roll-up ice cream, chocolate-covered strawberry yoghurt clusters, upside down pastries, lemon popcorn and flavoured water.
Yumna Jawad of @feelgoodfoodie (1.9 million followers), who has a fascinating video on how to make a butter candle, says everyone is frying feta now: Make a circle of crumbled feta in a hot frying pan, dollop some tomato pasta sauce in the middle, crack an egg on top of it and fry until you’ve got golden frazzled bits at the edge.
In fact, egg recipes are hugely popular, with 130.5 million views for the #eggrecipe hashtag. It’s the type of recipe that works well on TikTok: quick, easy, tasty and, of course, high in protein.
Verna Gao, @vernahungrybanana, makes scrambled eggs with chilli oil. Heat a frying pan, add chilli oil, add two beaten eggs, turn off the heat and cook with the residual heat, using a spatula to scramble the eggs. Serve on top of smashed avocado on toast.
For @mishas_kitchen’s cloud eggs, separate an egg, whisk the egg white with a milk frother, pour into a small heated pan, like a tortilla pan, drop the egg yolk in the middle and cook until done.
While the sales of cookbooks have been flagging, TikTok creators with their millions of followers have revitalised the publishing world, topping the best-seller lists. Joshua Weissman (@flakeysalt, seven million followers), who shares the secret to making a more solid brown butter – put it over a bowl of ice water and whisk the melted, nut-coloured butter until it is emulsified into a creamy mass – sold 316,000 copies of An Unapologetic Cookbook.
The very quirky Dylan Hollis, whose niche is historical recipes, (@bdylanhollis, 10.2 million followers), has sold more than 165,000 copies of Baking Yesteryear and Joanne Lee Molinaro (@thekoreanvegan, three million followers) has sold 102,000 copies of her cookbook, The Korean Vegan, which also won a James Beard award. Molinaro’s is a particularly appealing account to follow (just in case you feel like a dive down the TikTok rabbit hole); she weaves stories of her life into recipes using beautiful images.
The TikTok algorithm favours videos that get a huge level of engagement, and it’s not just the clever food hacks and viral recipes that win out. The hashtags #jellosalad and #jellosalads have an accumulated 55.3 million views. If you want to know why, check out @eczemmma’s video (5.5 million views), where she asks her ‘grammie’, Sheila, to go through the recipe. It includes lime jello with mayo and cider vinegar – to which, when it starts to set, you add cottage cheese, grated carrot, crushed pineapple, chopped cucumber and black olives. It’s a Southern thing, apparently.
Viral recipes like this are the perfect fodder for the genre of “duet” videos where TikTok creators such as chef Gordon Ramsay (@gordonramsayofficial, 39.6 million followers) comment as the video plays – “What the hell is that?” – picking it apart incredulously, step by step. You can see how this would have major Ramsay appeal. Being featured in a Ramsay duet or stitch video is a TikTok badge of honour.
Rage-baiting is a thing, which is far more intentional than a jello salad crime against food. Food is aggressively slapped down on the table, blenders whizz up spaghetti, crisps and sweets, food combinations are vile, and punchy ASMR heightens the drama.
Andy (@andyslife247, 2.5m followers), who is a self-professed “menace to society” captions all of his videos with “tag someone for no reason”, dumps food down on the table, uses his hands to mix the ingredients and seeks to outrage. His “waffle mess” featured on a Ramsay duet, where he slings an egg on a waffle iron, and then adds it to a bowl of streaky bacon and ice cream. A deep-fried pizza which was first coated in batter also features.
Eli Betchik (@elis_kitchen, 119.4k followers), an artist who likes to keep things a bit darker, describes themselves [they/she] as “the most evil chef on TikTok”. Betchik will crush crisps in a food processor, mix them with red jelly and allow it to set in a brain-shaped mould before demolishing it all when it is set.
Crushed crisps are a trend on TikTok, the new alternative to panko breadcrumbs. Not going for shock value, but with a massive 53.2 million followers, Japanese food TikToker and former personal trainer, Bayashi (@bayashi.tiktok) is a proponent of the ASMR video genre. In a 39-second video he shows how to make crispy chicken fillet, with a soundtrack of chopping, cooking and sizzling. Get a chicken fillet, prick it all over with the prongs of a fork, crush a container of Pringles, whizz them to a crumb in a blender, dip the chicken fillet in the crumbs, dip it in a beaten egg, then dip it in the crumbs once more, and cook in a pan of foaming butter till golden outside and cooked inside.
While you may not want to whizz up a container of Pringles just yet, if you’re looking for inspiration on what to cook when you’re low on ideas and your pantry and freezer is loaded with food, August DeWindt on @theres.food.at.home (3.5 million followers), has you covered.
Food hacks
Kelly Hurst (214.9k followers), started the craze for hacks on TikTok by posing this question: “Show me the life hack you randomly saw one day, that is now an unconscious, standard practice in your life.” Here are some of the food hacks that have been shared:
- When butter is hard, straight from the fridge, use a potato peeler to cut off thin strips, grate it, or use a sieve to make it easier to spread. If you have a small, foil wrapped pat of butter, pierce one side with fork prongs and squeeze so that the butter comes out in thin squiggles.
- When you’re grating cheese, pop the grater into a plastic bag so that all your cheese goes in the bag, not all over the place.
- To peel a hard-boiled egg, tap the pointy end lightly on the counter to make a small hole. Peel away a little bit of the shell. Turn the egg over, tap the broader end on the counter to make a slightly larger hole. Go back to the pointy end and blow into it with a bit of gusto and watch the egg pop right out.
- To drain pasta, don’t pour the pasta into a colander – instead, place the colander on top of the pot and turn the pot over to allow the water to drain out while the pasta stays in the pot.
- To make it easier to peel garlic, put the entire bulb into the microwave for 10-20 seconds, the papery skin will peel off with little effort.
- If you want to have minced garlic to hand, crush the cloves of garlic, add olive oil and freeze it flat in a Ziploc bag. You will be able to break off chunks whenever you need it.
- Bring a stale baguette back to life by sprinkling it lightly with cold water and reheating it in a 180 degree oven.
- If you don’t have a pastry brush, use a slice of baguette to brush on an egg glaze or olive oil. It also works nicely for slathering butter on to corn-on-the-cob.
- To make a fourfold wrap, make a cut in the wrap from the centre outwards, fill each quadrant with a different filling, eg, cheese, avocado, shredded meat, chopped onions, then fold each quarter over on itself to form a triangle. Have as a wrap or toast in a sandwich grill.
- For a tasty and easy sorbet, freeze grapes, strawberries or any berries, then whizz up and serve.
- If you have the room, store your cling film in the freezer; cold plastic is easier to tear off the roll without it sticking to itself.
