When I heard that cottage cheese was experiencing some kind of renaissance, my first thought was: “This is what comes of complacency.” I’d thought of cottage cheese as being safely extinct, but per capita consumption statistics show that, while it fell slightly out of favour, it never really went away. And now it’s having a moment. Or the latest in a series of moments.

Cottage cheese allegedly owes its newfound fame to two things: a) claims that it’s a low-calorie superfood, packed with protein and calcium, and b) people on TikTok who have taken to making ice-cream with it.

When I was a child in the early 70s, cottage cheese was omnipresent, squatting in domed scoops on top of wet lettuce. Although it was mostly a dieter’s privation, adults were always trying to find ways to use it up on you – partly because it came in the most enormous containers. Back then, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it.

“Industrial” cottage cheese is a curdled, skimmed milk cheese, essentially what is meant by “curds and whey” although only some of the watery whey is retained, and the curds are normally “dressed” by adding cream. Factory-made cottage cheese had its first big moment during the first world war, when it was promoted by the US government as a cheap protein source.

As for those nutritional claims, it’s true that cottage cheese is good for you – almost exactly as good for you as milk, because that’s really all it is. It has more protein per calorie than milk – because it’s a denser product – but less calcium, because a lot of it ends up in the discarded whey. By weight, cottage cheese and milk contain roughly equivalent amounts of vitamin A, iron and potassium.

So it’s good for you – but can it ever taste good? Here are more than a dozen recipes aimed at making cottage cheese more a joy than a chore, plus a few odd ones that will definitely raise an eyebrow.

In order to better understand what it actually is, let’s begin with a recipe for cottage cheese itself. While it has never been very difficult to come by, cottage cheese is also incredibly easy to make at home – just heat some milk to not quite boiling (about 90C), add vinegar (roughly a tablespoon for every 240ml of milk used) and remove from the heat. Stir the mixture until curds form – it should only take a couple of minutes – and then pour it into a colander lined with muslin to strain off the whey. Season with salt, and add a bit of double cream if desired.

This DIY version is closer to Russian tvorog than it is to store-bought cottage cheese, but you can use either to make syrniki, a sort of fluffy, sweet Russian pancake. You may have to drain your cottage cheese a bit to approximate the relative dryness of tvorog.

Deborah Madison offers a more British take on the cottage cheese pancake, with sour cream and currants. You can also make savoury syrniki – with an onion and caraway seed sauce – following Alice Zaslavsky’s recipe.

Pierogi are Polish dumplings, generally boiled and then fried in butter, containing a variety of fillings including this one: potato, onion and cottage cheese. Yotam Ottolenghi’s wild garlic and quinoa cakes are simple patties formed of cottage cheese, cheddar, breadcrumbs and quinoa, fried and served with a salbitxada sauce made from red pepper, chillies, garlic, tomatoes and almonds.

Gibanica is a cheese and egg pie from the Balkans, and Spasia Dinkovski’s version (or, more specifically, her version of her grandmother’s version) involves layers of filo pastry interleaved with cottage cheese and feta. An interesting tip: after it’s been baked in the oven, Dinkovski suggests removing the pie from the tin and letting it cool while balanced on “four or five upturned glasses of equal height” to ensure a crispy bottom.

There are a lot of cottage cheese pasta dishes being churned out these days, mostly on the kind of healthy eating blogs that feature 1,000 words of personal nutritional journey for every 100 words of recipe. They are all easy to make and they mostly sound disgusting. Here are two that don’t: a simple cottage cheese pasta sauce from Eats by Ramya, and Jamie Oliver’s summer veg lasagne, with cottage cheese standing in for the traditional bechamel sauce. In America, where lasagne is often made with ricotta, cottage cheese is a more straightforward swap (although ricotta, produced using the whey leftover from cheese making, is generally firmer).

Cottage cheese can also be turned into a serviceable dip – start by whipping or blending it until the curds are ironed out, then add either spring onions, jalapenos and sun-dried tomatoes, or cannellini beans, walnuts and dijon mustard. Or you could make up your own: any dip recipe that calls for Greek yoghurt could profitably – if not preferably – be made with cottage cheese instead.

Turning to puddings, Nadia’s Healthy Kitchen offers an intriguing cottage cheese cheesecake. Rasgulla, a traditional Indian dessert, employs a homemade cottage cheese much like the one in the recipe up top, which is kneaded into soft dough balls, covered in a syrup made from sugar, cardamom pods and rosewater, and then cooked until the balls have doubled in size. Sprinkle with chopped pistachios and/or saffron threads before serving.

After this, the pursuit of cottage cheese innovation begins to get weird. It is possible, for example, to make flatbread out of nothing more than two eggs, a quantity of cottage cheese and some seasoning, although the result stretches the very definition of “bread” to breaking point. Likewise, this seeded cottage cheese loaf contains few, if any of the ingredients normally associated with bread. But it has got 7g of protein a slice, if that’s your thing.

If you were feeling experimental you could follow this headless body’s YouTube demonstration to produce a form of chocolate mousse made from cottage cheese, or you could try one of TikTok’s viral four-ingredient, high-protein ice-cream recipes. A word of warning: I tried this, and it does not taste like ice-cream. It tastes like cold sweetened cottage cheese, and I would argue that nobody needs protein that bad.