Cottage cheese ranch
Units
Temperature
Servings
Ingredients
Dressing
- 300 g cottage cheese, full fat; the low fat kind blends thin and tastes chalky rounded
- 60 ml buttermilk, or water, but buttermilk is what makes it taste like ranch rounded
- 15 ml white wine vinegar rounded
- 12 g chives rounded
- 10 g fresh dill rounded
- 10 g flat parsley rounded
- 6 g onion granules rounded
- 6 g garlic granules rounded
- 5 g coarse black pepper rounded
- 4 g fine salt, cottage cheese is already salty, so taste first rounded
Method
Method
- Blend the cottage cheese, buttermilk and vinegar alone, with no herbs, for two full minutes. This is the whole technique. It will look grainy and wrong at thirty seconds and smooth at two minutes.
- Add everything else and pulse briefly. Blending the herbs at speed turns the dressing grey-green.
- Rest an hour so the dried alliums rehydrate.
Why cottage cheese
It is the highest-protein dairy you can buy that still blends into a sauce. A serving of this carries about 7 g of protein against roughly 2 g for the same amount of sour cream ranch, and it has around a third of the fat.
The curds are the only obstacle, and they are purely mechanical. A blender solves them completely; a whisk never will.
Notes
- Full fat, always. Skimmed cottage cheese blends watery and has a chalky aftertaste that the herbs do not cover.
- It is thicker than ordinary ranch and makes a better dip than dressing as written. Add another 40 ml of buttermilk for something pourable.
- It keeps 5 days and thickens further. Loosen with buttermilk.
- The same base takes any of the yogurt dressing directions, so caesar, green goddess and dill pickle all work from here.
Ingredient substitutions
- Cottage cheese is Hüttenkäse in Germany and körniger Frischkäse on some labels. Both work. Quark is smoother already but much sharper and has a different, tangier character.
- Skyr is the next best high-protein base and needs no blending, though it is noticeably sourer.