Give Your Brownies A Protein Boost With This Simple Ingredient

There's not a lot of room in a high-protein diet for a sweet treat like a brownie. But let's say you'd really, really like to have a couple fudgy, melt-in-your-mouth German choco brownie bars as your cheat treat, you don't need to give up the day's protein goal just yet. Fold a bit of this secret ingredient into your homemade fudgy brownies and a "cheat" brownie can still pump up your protein count. That secret ingredient? Check your fridge and see if you've still got some cottage cheese!

Cottage cheese has been one of the go-to ingredients for anyone following a nutrient-rich diet or simply needing a protein boost for a long time, and not without good reasons. Let's say you add half a cup to your brownie recipe. According to the USDA, that will deliver up to 14 grams of protein while adding only 81 calories to the mix. Considering how each brownie serving only carries 6 grams of protein, that's about a double-boost with just one single addition.

The reason cottage cheese clocks such a high protein count lies in how it's made. To get cottage cheese, milk is acidified and separated into curds and whey, and those curds are packed with a milk protein called casein (also just so happens to be one of the highest-quality proteins you can find). Enticed? Here's the best part: not only is adding cottage cheese to brownies simple, but you can add it to every brownie recipe!

Other than the protein boost, the other thing we love about this trick is how you can take it to any brownie recipe. Take our ultimate fudgy brownie recipe for example. If you decide to pick it up, you'd follow through the majority of the steps like melting down the butter, whisking it with sugar, beating in the eggs and vanilla, and then folding in cocoa powder and flour. Literally nothing changes until the very end. After you've added the flour, that's when you can start stirring in your cottage cheese. Since most brownie recipes follow the same basic steps, you can use this hack with whatever recipe you prefer. It's as simple as "adding cottage cheese to the batter."

Speaking of, the next time you go on a grocery run to try this out, we highly recommend picking up whipped cottage cheese if you can find it. It's going to make your life a whole lot easier by blending right into your batter. Regular cottage cheese works perfectly fine, too, but you've got to give it a whirl in the blender first until it's smooth. When you mix it in, you'll get a nice, even texture sans any surprise lumps.

Once everything's mixed together, you can get to baking! After 20 or so minutes, take it out of the oven and do a toothpick test — when the toothpick emerges with few or no moist bits sticking to the wood, you're looking at your snack for the day: a double-protein batch of brownie that'll actually go toward your dieting goals!