zompist wrote: ↑Sun Mar 22, 2026 12:05 am
rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Mar 21, 2026 10:24 pmAlso, I have never tried cottage cheese fried rice before. I'm morbidly curious.
I assume this is some Bengali cheese that's better than the horrible American cottage cheese?
I haven't eaten any American cottage cheese. I have eaten a lot of chhana. I'm confused because I know chhana as an exclusively sweet dish, never savory. I mean, many popular Bengali sweets are made with a base of chhana:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhena
Many times, my breakfast has been chhana with sugar when I was in school. It has a granular texture and a hint of dairy flavor. It's good with roti. The more sugar you add, the more it tastes like dessert:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasgulla The idea of chhana fried rice sounds absurd on the face of it, like cookie dough fried rice or cake mix fried rice.
I have never eaten it with fruit like American cottage cheese. My mother might have cooked the chhana in some way before serving it with sugar. I can't remember.
I'm not sure what chhana would taste like in fried rice. Possibly like savory lumps of nothing. I suspect what's going on here is that vegetarians are using chhana as a ground meat substitute. They are taking advantage of the fact that it's not going to melt no matter how much you heat it. Maybe it retains the granular texture after cooking. Like it absorbs the sugar in desserts, it might soak up savory flavors too.
I'm being specific about "chhana" because there are many types of cottage cheese that are prepared in different ways. Normally, if you say "cottage cheese" in India, people think of paneer. Paneer is nothing like chhana. It's always eaten cooked with savory dishes. Paneer is very soft when cooked. I struggle to taste any dairy in paneer. I wonder if chhana will lose its taste like paneer. They are both dairy.
