Forget Cottage Cheese — Give Scrambled Eggs A Silky, Creamy Kick With This Italian Ingredient

When you need a fast, easy, satiating meal, there are few better choices than scrambled eggs. Chock full of protein, vitamins, and healthy fats, they can easily be popped onto crunchy toast and into sandwiches, making them perfect for any time of day. However, if you want your homemade scrambled eggs to taste restaurant-worthy, there's one thing you can't skimp on, and that's dairy. Many restaurants cook their eggs in a rich pool of butter, but you can also achieve rich, creamy flavor by dolloping fresh ricotta directly into the eggs themselves.

Though cottage cheese is often the soft cheese of choice for infusing scrambled eggs with additional nutrition and flavor, ricotta and cottage cheese are decent substitutions for each other. Especially if you're not a fan of the mild tang cottage cheese is known for, ricotta's more neutral earthiness may be your first choice. Plus, a few spoonfuls of ricotta in your scrambled eggs make them soft and creamy with almost no additional effort.

Measuring out one or two tablespoons of ricotta per egg, you can put this scramble together in two different ways. The first is to whisk the ricotta into your eggs before scrambling, and the second is to fold the ricotta into the eggs when they're set but still soft. The first method takes a little longer to cook, while the second requires careful timing to ensure the ricotta is incorporated smoothly, but both yield a fluffy, rich, pale golden scramble.

Whisking the cheese into the eggs with other seasonings is the easier method, even though the extra moisture also means more time in the pan. However, it's a fairly foolproof way to upgrade your scramble, as choosing to fold the ricotta into soft-set eggs in the pan can prove finicky. Add the cheese too soon, and the extra moisture may leave your eggs needing more time to cook, while adding the ricotta too late means the eggs are too set to mix with the cheese smoothly.

Either way, once you've mastered your chosen technique, there are lots of tasty ways to enjoy this recipe, and plenty of delicious things you can add to your scrambled eggs that pair beautifully with the ricotta. Think breakfast toast on hearty wheat topped with hummus, ricotta eggs, and a spoonful of olive tapenade, or a prosciutto and egg breakfast sammie with a smear of romesco sauce. You could even add them to a bowl of savory oatmeal with crumbled bacon and Parmesan cheese in the oats.

You can also zhuzh up the eggs themselves with seasonings and ingredients commonly enjoyed with ricotta. For instance, try adding the oil from a jar of sun-dried tomatoes to your cooking fat, or stirring a spoonful of pesto into your eggs in addition to the cheese. Aromatic herbs like thyme or basil are also delicious options.