Thanks to its neutral taste, cottage cheese is a versatile ingredient that can be used in plenty of dishes, from simple toast or pancakes at breakfast through to a high-protein chocolate mousse. In many of these dishes, other flavors like chocolate or berries take precedence, but one Polish recipe allows the creamy, tangy taste of cottage cheese to shine through on its own.
That dish is called gzik, and it could be roughly described as a cottage cheese dip. It originated as an affordable food option, since its ingredients (mostly just cottage cheese, herbs, and sometimes vegetables) were readily available at the time it was first created. It hails from the area around the western Polish city of Poznan, but it’s popular enough that it’s often described as a broadly Polish dish. Because it’s pretty simple, gzik is quite flexible: You might find it as a spread to go on bread at breakfast (or anytime, really), or served as a sort of sauce over baked potatoes, in a dish called Pyry z gzikiem (roughly “potatoes with cottage cheese” in Polish, pictured above). You might even encounter a sweet version of it with sugar added.
Since gzik is centered around cottage cheese, you’ll want to get a high-quality brand of it. Technically speaking, it’s made with a farmer’s cheese known as twaróg, but this is roughly just a dry version of standard cottage cheese. Some recipes also use quark, which is a similar curdled dairy product that’s rare in the United States.
What you’ll need for gzik
Since twaróg and American cottage cheese differ a little (twaróg is dryer), you may want to track down dry curd cottage cheese or make it yourself at home, if possible. That said, wetter cottage cheese is probably fine, as Polish recipes add ingredients like sour cream that will give it a wetter consistency. So, beyond your cottage cheese, you’ll want something like sour cream, or yogurt, if you want something with less fat. Strictly speaking, all you need on top of these dairy products is some salt for seasoning, and you have everything you need for the most simple version of gzik.
That said, there’s no one way to make gzik, and extra additions are common. Some of the most popular options are thinly chopped chives, radishes, or green onions. However, feel free to get playful: It’s not uncommon for dill, garlic, or yellow onions to find their way in. Hard boiled eggs are even a possibility, if you want your gzik to lean more towards an egg salad kind of concoction. Everything just gets mashed together with a fork until it’s well mixed — but you don’t need to smash it all together until it’s perfectly smooth. It should be something you can throw together in just a few minutes — just add bread or something to dip in it and you’ve got all the makings of a light breakfast or a snack.
