I know, I know. You’re sick of gratuitous cottage cheese. You don’t want any more cottage cheese toast, cottage cheese “ice cream” or Brussels sprouts dipped in cottage cheese and mustard. I hear you. I thought I was done with it, too.
But then I saw author and “Real Housewives” alum Bethenny Frankel’s cottage cheese bagels, now with more cottage cheese.
“My whole personality is not Chanel, it’s not caviar, it’s not chicken salad, it’s not ‘It Ends with Us.’ It’s bagels,” she says earnestly, swooning over her love of these bready rings of power much in the way I do myself, “This is very big.”
Her new take is a riff on an older “magic,” two-ingredient Greek yogurt bagel recipe. I made those a few years back, and while they are edible, I found them underwhelming — sort of biscuit-y, somehow both tough and lacking the characteristic chewy crust, and with a misplaced tang.
Frankel’s new bag(el) is to use whipped cottage cheese instead of yogurt, and to add an extra 1/4 cup of it. The final recipe makes four bagels and consists of just 1 cup of flour, 1½ teaspoon of baking powder and 1¼ cups of cottage cheese blitzed in a blender or food processor, all shaped, brushed with egg wash and sprinkled with salt and seasonings. They’re baked at 375 F for 25 minutes.
Frankel notes that shaping them is a bit tricky because the dough is very sticky and suggests adding some extra flour before forming them the way you’d like. “Like any movie, it all happens in the edit,” she quips.
Her results look scrumptious — crusty, salt-studded and deeply brown, and as a registered dietitian, I like the idea of a quick, homemade food that is a balance between carbs and protein all in one bite. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with a regular bagel, and indeed my personality is heavily invested in their worth, but even a grocery-store bread-aisle bagel has as much carbohydrate as most adults should have at a single sitting, and those extra delicious, extra giant bakery bagels are almost always more than that. Including a whole one can make it harder to also get things like fruits or dairy without going a bit overboard.
So, a bagel with high-quality protein built right in? That’s a big selling point for me. But, just as importantly, I suspect that the extra cheesy protein might improve the texture compared to the yogurt bagels, so color me intrigued. Let’s try them!
The first step is to blend up the cottage cheese until it’s smooth. I actually prefer the texture of whipped to regular for everything from dips to lasagna, so go ahead and do the whole container if you’d like.
Next, I whisked the flour and baking powder to make sure the leavening was evenly distributed, and just mixed the dough until all the flour was incorporated. There’s no kneading. The dough is very sticky but I tried plopping a quarter of the mixture onto a little scattering of flour, sprinkled more on top and patted it gently into a disc. Then, I moved it to a corner of the parchment and poked a hole in the middle. With that little bit of minimal handling, I found I didn’t need the bench scraper that Frankel used.
The final step is the egg wash, and I chose four different toppings just to try them out: chunky pretzel salt, nigella seeds, Parmesan and cinnamon sugar. They really were ready for baking in the time it took to preheat the oven.
Mine needed a couple of extra minutes on the top rack of the oven to brown enough, but once they were done, I was very happy with the result. I let them sit for about 15 minutes before slicing. (That’s critical for any bread, to avoid a stodgy, gummy crumb when you cut through too soon.) The texture inside is very tender, more moist than your average bagel, and they need toasting to stand up to a spread of butter or cream cheese. The hole is mostly closed, but having it there in the first place allowed for even baking. The outer crust is wonderful — chewy, crisp in spots, and flavorful. It’s not exactly a bagel shop bagel in terms of texture — more like an English muffin-bagel — but for a fresh, breakfast-y roll in 35 minutes flat, I’ll happily call it bagel-adjacent.
I tried using gluten-free flour for the cinnamon one (King Arthur’s Gluten-Free Measure for Measure flour, for the record, but your mileage may vary with other flours), and it’s not as fluffy or chewy, but it worked remarkably well for an unyeasted gluten-free bake. I also tried making separate batches with low-fat grocery-store cottage cheese versus a higher-priced, higher-protein brand, and they worked equally well.
My one complaint is that they spread out rather than up, making for a flattish bagel, but it’s thick enough to allow slicing for a sandwich. I might try baking them in English muffin rings or a jumbo muffin pan next time — and there definitely will be a next time! — to see whether that improves the shape without leaving them underdone in the middle. A doughnut pan or parchment cylinders stuck in the holes would maintain shape, too.
Both the bagel I stored overnight in the fridge and the one I sliced and froze kept their character; it might have actually improved the texture a bit, making it slightly drier and more bagel-like. I tried a few different methods of reheating but the most successful was popping them in the toaster right out of the freezer.
The egg wash is important to both appearance and outer texture, and it also gives your chosen toppings some sticktoitiveness. Don’t skip it.