How To Make The Viral TikTok Recipe

After watching nearly a billion videos of folks making this, with small variations here and there, I decided that I couldn’t live another day without trying it in my own kitchen. I also reached some conclusions on what made for seemingly-tasty results vs. subpar ones:

• Using fat-free cottage cheese, the variety that most of these TikTokers opted for, is a hard no in my book. These people always ended up plunging their spoon into what looked (and sounded) like a literal ice rink, so I knew I needed to use cottage cheese with the highest fat content possible. That’s usually 4% for most brands, but the bigger the number, the better.

• Cottage cheese is salty, which means it needs a decent amount of sugar to counteract its salty bite if you’re going to make it into a palatable dessert. And keep in mind: Colder foods actually need more salt, sugar, or flavor in general to taste great when they’re frozen, so I knew I’d likely need to use more than the measly splash of maple syrup that these TikTokers were adding.

• While I do think putting the base into an ice cream machine to churn it would technically be cheating, I knew it would still be important to give the whole mixture a generous stir every hour or so as it sat in the freezer. Keeping things moving is the best way to avoid massive ice crystals without any special equipment, and it adds very little extra work to the entire process.