Cottage Cheese Pancakes Micro Bake Off

For the love of protein (and pancakes)

I don’t know about you, but my Instagram feed is currently flooded with cottage cheese recipes (like this cottage cheese pizza crust, pumpkin gnocchi and cauliflower alfredo).

With people turning cottage cheese into everything from flatbread wraps to creamy vodka sauces, it led me to the more relevant question: are cottage cheese pancakes actually good?

Given the shelf life of fresh pancakes (very short), this micro bake off edition features just three tasters: me and my two roommates (Skyler and Kai). I hope you’ll forgive the limited data set and enjoy the (paraphrased) commentary.

Recipe Overviews

Here are the three recipes I tried, listed in alphabetical order. In preparation for this comparison, I compared 10 cottage cheese pancake recipes. While the ingredient list was generally pretty similar across the recipes, the differing techniques included a) blending the batter or b) adding whipped egg whites.

Ultimately, I nixed the recipe with whipped egg whites (who has the time! Also they looked pretty flat/underwhelming) and I eliminated recipes using oats instead of flour for the sake of consistency. I was mainly interested in investigating the ratios of cottage cheese/eggs/flour + the effect of blending the batter.

The ratios!

Big Man’s World: the blender recipe

This simple 6 ingredient recipe throws everything into a blender for easy assembly. It’s similar to Smitten Kitchen’s recipe but ups the cottage cheese, sugar, has relatively less flour and no milk.

Eating Bird Food: the low flour ratio

This recipe uses very similar ratios to Smitten Kitchen in almost every way except that it uses less than half the flour and almost no milk. I’d guess that most people who are making cottage cheese pancakes for health purposes would prefer a higher cottage cheese to flour ratio, so I was curious to try this one.

Smitten Kitchen: the benchmark

I was pleasantly surprised to find cottage cheese pancakes on Smitten Kitchen, shared in a way that wasn’t promoting them as a “healthy pancake,” just another delicious recipe and a creative way to use up cottage cheese. These looked essentially like standard buttermilk pancakes but with cottage cheese in place of the buttermilk, so I wanted to test these as the benchmark recipe.

The taste test

After making half batches of each of these pancakes, we taste tested all three pancakes plain. And between the three of us, our conclusions were pretty unanimous!

THIRD PLACE