Skip to content
FuelMyAthlete
All recipes

Breakfast

Vanilla cottage cheese smoothie

The highest-protein drink here with no powder in it. Good breakfast, good after a hard session.

Servings
1
Total
4 min
Skill
Easy

What you need

Ingredients

Making for

1 serving

  • Low-fat cottage cheese0.5 cup
  • Bananas1 each
  • Milk1 cup
  • Honey1 tbsp
  • Pure vanilla extract0.5 tsp

Quantities scale linearly with servings. Round to the nearest practical amount when shopping.

Steps

  1. 1

    Cottage cheese and milk alone, 30 seconds, before anything else

    Half a cup of cottage cheese and one cup of milk, blended by themselves until completely smooth with no lumps at all. Cottage cheese is curds, and curds need time and speed to break down. Blended alongside frozen fruit they never fully go, and the result has a texture people describe as wrong without being able to say why.

    0:30

  2. 2

    Now the frozen fruit and the vanilla

    One frozen banana, half a cup of frozen mango or berries, half a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a tablespoon of honey. The vanilla is doing more work than it looks: it is what makes this taste like a milkshake rather than like blended cheese.

  3. 3

    Blend 30 more seconds

    Thirty seconds is plenty now that the curds are already gone.

    0:30

Coach's notes

  • About 26 g of protein with no protein powder involved, which is more than most powdered shakes and is real food.
  • Use low-fat rather than fat-free. Fat-free cottage cheese is noticeably more sour and needs more honey to cover.
  • Nobody who drinks this can tell there is cottage cheese in it, provided step one was done properly. If they can tell, step one was not done properly.
  • Real vanilla extract, not imitation. It is one of the few places the difference is obvious.