The 2 For 1 Nacho Topping That Replaces Both Shredded Cheese And Sour Cream

Although you can get fancy with them, nachos are often less of an aspirational, intentionally meal-prepped dish and more the type of snack you can easily throw together, just one step above eating a straight bag of chips for dinner: They're a pile of hot chips with stuff on them, potentially ready to eat in under ten minutes, and sometimes that's what you need most. They're an un-precious Tex-Mex staple, invented by a Mexican restauranteur named Ignacio Anaya Garcia (nickname: Nacho) as recently as the 1940s, and often, most of the hodgepodge ingredients are kept on hand. 

Nachos are, at their best, an easygoing, satisfying and flexible meal. Which is why experimenting and innovating with nontraditional toppings is not a sacrilege, but scaffolding, building off of a crunchy, salty, and comforting foundation. So, and hear us out: cottage cheese on nachos. You might be more used to seeing it paired with canned pineapple, but functionally and structurally, cottage cheese sits at the esteemed intersection of shredded cheese and sour cream, both completely standard nacho toppings. 

Cottage cheese is tangy from fermentation and protein-rich (the "curds" are bunched-up milk proteins), and it's easy to spread or dollop. It's not going to melt and stretch like cheddar or jack cheese does, but it's actually pretty good warmed up, so you can use it in place of the cheese by heating it with the chips, or in place of the sour cream, by adding a scoop after the nachos come out of the oven or microwave. When your expectations are calibrated to utility, and you want to use what you have and bump up the protein, give it a try.

Much like the nachos themselves, cottage cheese is a blank canvas, milky and ever so slightly salty. It's sort of the cauliflower of the dairy kingdom, in the sense that it can be "secretly" added to a lot of recipes to increase the nutrient density. You can use it plain, straight out of the tub, which minimizes the dirty dishes. Or, if you feel inspired to make a minimal effort, you can stir or blend various seasonings into it, kind of like making a compound butter. Pretty much anything you think might be good on nachos can go into this step: taco seasoning, chili crisp, hot sauce, smoked paprika or cumin. If you are using a blender, you can easily throw some cilantro, lime, and jalapeño in there.

One thing to note, regarding chip density, is that cottage cheese can be a bit wet, so this method works best when applied with some restraint, on thicker chips, because the paper thin ones will get soggy faster. While cottage cheese will never be a 1:1 replacement for nacho cheese or sour cream on nachos, any kind of cheese, plus heat, on any kind of chips is going to be pretty good. It's in same category as #girldinner or getting-in-your-macros meals. It's as good way as any to finish up that tub of cottage cheese haunting your fridge. It's a functional, slightly oddball option that tastes good because nachos are forgiving and adaptable by nature.