One dairy product that hasn’t reached the artisanal crowd at farmers’ markets is local organic cottage cheese.  That you can rarely find it might be reason enough.  For a while Lauren Pignatello of Swallowtail Farm and Creamery used to offer her farm-made cottage cheese.  I loved it for its marvelously creamy texture and its inimitable tang and sweetness from cultured raw milk.  I would buy it at the farmer’s market each week along with Swallowtail’s prized Greek Yogurt. I didn’t use the curds for anything fancy as in baking or other dishes but rather found it a great snack, swiping a spoonful or two when the mood struck to relish the purity of flavor that this simple curd cheese displayed. It’s also not very fattening and has loads of protein and calcium making it the ideal food for healthy eating.

Hood Dairy's Original Cottage Cheese

Hood Dairy’s Original Cottage Cheese

Alas she stopped making it.  “Too much trouble, not enough time (or money in it).”

Back in the day (if you’re old enough to remember), cottage cheese was the darling of the diet world in the 1970s. As a staple of the ladies’ luncheon crowd or the go-to for office workers who’d pack a lunch of cottage cheese and fruit to take to the office for a diet lunch, it had its moment in the sun.

Today millennials drive the market instead for Greek Yogurt over cottage cheese, the latter seeming so dairy dowdy.  But there are signs that cottage cheese might be making a comeback.  Recently the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled “Could Cottage Cheese Ever be Cool Again?”

Still, it has a way to go.  Look at the dairy case in supermarkets and natural food stores like Whole Foods and you’ll find cottage cheese with loads of additions packed into those curds.  Fruit, spices and herbs are the big thing now in cottage cheese.  But the shelf space is still not overflowing with cottage cheese products.  Yogurt is  king.

Clockwise: Tourmaline Hill cottage cheese; Supernatural Kalona cottage cheese and Hood's Original Cottage Cheese, "Country Style"

Clockwise: Tourmaline Hill cottage cheese; Supernatural Kalona cottage cheese and Hood’s Original cottage cheese, “country style”

But I got the idea after reading the article to renew my quest for the enjoyment of real old-fashioned cottage cheese.  After all we have artisanal butter and cheese, old-fashioned buttermilk and pure, raw heavy cream and milk–all getting a lot of attention.

At the Deering Oaks farmers’ market last weekend, I asked Doug Donahue of Balfour Farm Dairy if his dairy ever made cottage cheese?  I got the usual answer: not enough interest in it and not profitable. Another shopper standing next to me overheard my question and told me that he thought Tourmaline Hill Farm—a few stands away–makes cottage cheese.

Tourmaline Hill Farm cow-s milk cottage cheese

Tourmaline Hill Farm cow-s milk cottage cheese

Tourmaline makes both cow and goat milk cheeses and there on Tourmaline’s counter cheesemaker Lisa MacLeod proudly displayed her 8-ounce container of old-fashioned cottage cheese.  She told me that this was the first week offering it and hoped that it would take off.

Supernatural Kalona cottage cheese at Portland Food Co-op

Supernatural Kalona cottage cheese at Portland Food Co-op

It was all that farm-fresh dairy cottage cheese should be.  It’s made using raw milk that’s cultured and the curds rise to the top after a simple simmering period, straining the curds which become the basis for the cottage cheese.  It was rich, with a hint of salt, a slight tang and a velvety texture within its large curds.

I did some research into what was available at the supermarkets, including Whole Foods.  They all had the standard products, and many of them now have additions like fruits, vegetables, honey, maple syrup, herbs—but none offered the old-fashioned pure product, certainly none like Tourmaline’s.

Cottage cheese pancakes with a sampler of (right to left) Tourmaline, Hood and Kalona

Cottage cheese pancakes with a sampler of (right to left) Kalona, Hood and Tourmaline

Hood Dairy, local to New England, makes what comes closest to an old-fashioned cottage cheese.  It’s called Country Style, the dairy maker’s original cottage cheesse.  It’s very creamy; the curds are medium small, with plenty of bite and nice flavor, salted just right.  It was one of the better commercial-grade cheeses around.  It’s a natural product, no growth hormones though it has all the usual thickeners and stabilizers in the mix.

The Forest Avenue Hannaford carries it but only in the small serving size whereas Shaw’s has the big 16- ounce container.

I also went to the Portland Food Co-op to see if they carried a pure, local product.  They have an excellent “real” cottage cheese from a dairy in Iowa that makes a natural, organic cottage cheese called Kalona Supernatural.  It’s from a dairy cooperative in the small farming community of Kalona, Iowa.

How could you not love the goodness and creaminess of cottage cheese

How could you not love the goodness and creaminess of cottage cheese

This was excellent cream-top cottage cheese, so creamy that you should give it a few stirs to re-incorporate the cream with the curds.  It had good flavor, nice saltiness and was nearly on a par with the goodness of the Tourmaline’s cheese curds.

Will cottage cheese make a comeback?  If more dairies—commercial and small-batch—ramp up their product as a pure natural product without additives, it might have equal shelf space to give a move-over nudge to the continued omnipresence of yogurt.