Part 1 of 3 — A series on the fresh cheeses on American grocery shelves
Quark. Túró. Twaróg. Fromage blanc. Farmer cheese. Cottage cream. Cottage cheese. Walk through a specialty grocer in 2026 and you’ll likely see a few of these on the shelf and a marketer somewhere is probably inventing a fourth name as you read this.
The naming can be intentionally confusing because real cheese-making traditions don’t always map cleanly onto American grocery store labels. So here’s what’s actually going on in the fresh cheese dairy case: what each of these cheeses is, how they differ, and why we still make the one we make.
THERE ARE FEWER CHEESES THAN THERE ARE NAMES
All of these are fresh, unaged cheeses made from cow’s milk that’s been cultured (or sometimes just acidified) until the curds separate from the whey. They’re meant to be eaten quickly and not aged for months like a Gouda or Cheddar. What separates them from each other is mostly geography, technique, and how much whey gets drained off before the cheese gets packaged.
Marketing terms aside, there are really four cheeses on offer here.
Cottage cheese is the American one. The curds are cut into discrete chunks, drained, and then “dressed” with cream or milk so you end up with two textures in the tub, visible curds suspended in a creamy liquid.
Quark also called túró in Hungarian, twaróg in Polish, or recently rebranded as cottage cream, is the Central and Eastern European version. Same family of cultures as yogurt, but cultured longer and drained until it’s smooth and spoonable. Texture somewhere between thick Greek yogurt and sour cream.
Fromage blanc is the French take. Closer to quark than to cottage cheese, but creamier, less tangy, and traditionally made with whole milk or with cream stirred back in. The classic dessert is fromage blanc with honey and ripe stone fruit. It’s also a workhorse in French savory cooking.
Farm cheese sometimes called farmer cheese, is what we make. It’s the Eastern European and Jewish-American tradition: cultured cow’s milk, drained until firm and slightly crumbly. It’s the cheese inside pierogi, blintzes, syrniki, kolaches.
One small surprise worth mentioning before we go further: of the four, cottage cheese is by far the hardest to make. The other three are essentially culture, wait, drain; the patience does most of the work. Cottage cheese is the only one in the group that’s actively cooked, washed in cold water, and combined with a separate cream dressing that has to coexist with the curds without breaking them down. It’s the most familiar fresh cheese in the American grocery store, and also the most technically demanding to make well. That’s part of why most supermarket cottage cheese leans on stabilizers and gums, and why the handful of brands making a clean, additive-free version command a premium.
WHAT IS COTTAGE CREAM?
If you’ve been seeing “cottage cream” in food press lately, you may be wondering whether it’s a fifth cheese on top of the four already on the shelf. It isn’t. It’s quark, sold under a new name. Brands using the term tend to acknowledge as much directly on their packaging: cottage cream is the cheese you might know elsewhere as quark, túró, or twaróg.
The rebrand is a smart marketing move. Cottage cheese has been having a real moment in American grocery stores over the past few years; quark, despite being very prominent in much of Europe, has never quite broken through here. “Cottage cream” splits the difference. It borrows cottage cheese’s familiarity and quark’s creamy texture, and it lands at a name that sounds new even though the cheese itself is centuries old.
HOW THEY ACTUALLY DIFFER
Two useful ways to tell these cheeses apart in the wild:
Texture. Cottage cheese has discrete curds visibly floating in liquid. Farm cheese is firm and a bit crumbly. Quark and cottage cream are smooth and spoonable. Fromage blanc is smoother and looser than quark, almost pourable.
Tang. Cottage cheese is the mildest. Fromage blanc comes next. Then farm cheese. Quark is traditionally the tangiest, though several quark brands now market themselves as “non-tart.” That’s a flavor choice the manufacturer makes, not a rule of the category. The tang in any fresh cheese comes from how long the milk is cultured and how much of the resulting acid stays with the curds. Cottage cheese is washed, which removes most of the acid; quark is cultured the longest without a wash, which keeps most of it.
COMING UP NEXT
Texture and tang tell you what these cheeses are. The more interesting question is what each one is for why some of them sit on the shelf in single-serve cups designed to be eaten with a spoon while others end up in a baker’s kitchen. And once you understand that, the “high-protein” numbers advertised on the front of fresh cheese labels start to look a little different than they first appear.
That’s where we’re going in Part 2.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2: What These Fresh Cheeses Are Actually For — and the Focus on the Protein Numbers Part 3: Why We Still Make Farm Cheese the Way We Do
by Arend Elston
Sanilac Creamery - Makers of Zingerman's Cheese and Gelato
