Recipe: Cottage Cheese Muffins with Roasted Red Peppers and Feta (2024)

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updated Jan 21, 2020

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Many morning meals and recipes can be divisive in the same way that brownies (fudgy or cakey?) or chocolate chip cookies (soft, chewy, or crisp?) often are. There are people who tend towards the savory side of things and others who would choose a fruit scone, muffin, or stack of pancakes before they’d ever order eggs at brunch. That’s not to say you can’t dabble in both (I certainly do!), and it’s not to say your preferences don’t come in waves or vary by the season, but I think many of us have a definite proclivity.

So today is for all the fans of savory breakfasts. Meet my new favorite super-simple, high-protein, naturally gluten-free muffin.

My recipe today is a riff on The Kitchn’s recipe for savory cottage cheese muffins with prosciutto and chives that we shared last year, which in turn is a riff on a recipe by Heidi Swanson at 101 Cookbooks. These muffins come together quickly and are a great high-protein option for those of us who are looking for a bigger hit of protein in the morning or might be trying to avoid carbs. Plus, they’re gluten-free!

But before we get too deep into the recipe here, I think it’s important to have an honest moment about how we’re defining muffins. In many ways, these are really more like deluxe baked eggs that happen to be made in a muffin tin than those more traditional fluffy, flour-based muffins. Instead, these veer more towards an easy soufflé.

I choose to call them muffins instead of baked eggs because they still contain many of the elements and ingredients of a good muffin: a combination of flours or meals, baking powder, eggs, a bit of liquid. You can also still eat them out of your hand, just like regular muffins. This is all to say that regardless of what you call them, they may just become a new weekday favorite in your house like they’ve become in ours. I certainly hope that’s the case.

Now, in truth I’d never made a cottage cheese muffin before and had my doubts. But I set out to create one that would be super savory, with a mixture of cornmeal and almond meal — and that would highlight vegetarian ingredients like sweet roasted red peppers, salty feta, and snappy fresh chives. It was inspired by the 101 Cookbooks post as well as our riff on it last year, but I also made quite a few further tweaks and changes.

When I pulled them out of the oven, I was more than pleasantly surprised. The tops had puffed up and domed ever-so-slightly, and they’d turned a pretty shade of golden-brown. When I sliced one of the muffins in half, it had the texture of a very airy, eggy muffin. They are delicious warm (although they’re equally nice at room temperature), energizing without feeling overly heavy or decadent, and travel well, too. And perhaps even better: they’re great for up to five days if kept covered in the refrigerator. I simply pull one out and microwave it first thing in the morning or bag it up on busier days when I know I’m bound to have breakfast out of the house.

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