Fluffy cottage cheese pancakes with raspberries + maple lime syrup
Confession: I've jumped on the eat-more-protein bandwagon.
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The world is in the grip of a protein fetish and I’ve been researching it lately for a feature (the July issue of delicious magazine). I’m no fan of all the protein enriched products now spreading across supermarket shelves - from bottled water and energy bars to breakfast cereal and yoghurt. Manufacturers want us to think these products are better for us because they’re protein-enhanced, which isn’t true, and that we need to eat this stuff to be healthy, which we don’t.
In the course of my research I did discover that for a woman of my age, weight and activity level, I should have been eating more protein than I was. And it’s been no hardship smuggling a bit more into my diet. Steak, chicken, nuts, eggs, seeds … bring them on. But I was intrigued by cottage cheese, and fell down a curds and cream rabbit hole. In case this trend has passed you by, sales of cottage cheese, along with other high-protein foods like yoghurt, have soared recently as growing numbers of people jump on the bandwagon.
For me, it’s an odd trend. I associate cottage cheese with lettuce leaves and strict dieting; in the olden days it was served as a lumpy cold splodge on the side of exceptionally boring low-cal salads. Perhaps topped with pineapple chunks. But peer into TikTok and cottage cheese has been reborn: whipped and spread on toast, blitzed into smoothies, churned into ice cream and transformed into ‘cheesecake dip’. At the time of writing, this cottage cheese flatbread had apparently gone viral. I’ve no desire to try it, like many of these ‘hacks’.
But I was intrigued by Carla Lalli Music’s foray into cottage cheese (her cottage cheese recipes are for paid subscribers, but you might want to consider subscribing to Carla: I love her energy, she’s funny and can cook). She offers a recipe for a Turkish style eggs dish that uses whipped cottage cheese and yoghurt, and a herby, garlicky ranch-style dressing that she slathers on a salad sandwich. Really, she’s just subbing other types of dairy with cottage cheese, but why not when they’re delicious?
So, here’s my contribution to the carnival of cottage cheese. These thick, tender and fluffy babies echo ricotta pancakes, with the advantage that cottage cheese is cheaper than ricotta, easier to find in my neck of the woods and contain more protein (cottage cheese varies but the kind I bought contains 11.5g per 100g, quite a bit more than ricotta).
A hasten to add, this is not a low-calorie recipe designed for weight loss. By my reckoning they come in at about 25g of protein per serve, so they will fill you up. But they’re drenched in a buttery sauce spiked with maple syrup and lime juice. Which means that most importantly, they taste absolutely delicious.