Watch how it’s made
Every step in 0:50 — from the ingredients to the finished dish.
This is what a flavored yogurt pot is pretending to be. A single strawberry yogurt from the chilled aisle commonly carries 15 to 20 grams of sugar, most of it added. This jar carries 10 grams of carbohydrate in total, all of it from the fruit, and 15 grams of protein.
It takes three minutes and travels well, which is the whole argument for making it rather than buying the pot.
Read a flavored yogurt label once
It is worth doing once, properly. Pick up a strawberry yogurt and look at the carbohydrate line, then look at how much of it is sugars. In most brands the fruit accounts for a small fraction and the rest was added.
Plain cottage cheese with real strawberries stirred through gives you the same idea for a third of the carbohydrate, and you decide how sweet it is rather than a factory deciding for you.
Cottage cheese against Greek yogurt
Both are high in protein. Cottage cheese carries slightly more per gram and noticeably less lactose, which matters if dairy sugar affects you.
The difference people care about is texture. Cottage cheese is lumpy, and if that is the objection, blending it for twenty seconds turns it completely smooth. Blended cottage cheese is indistinguishable from thick yogurt and keeps all of the protein.
Sweeten it, or do not
Ripe strawberries in season need nothing. Out of season they can be tart enough that a snack without any sweetener feels like a punishment, which is how good habits get abandoned.
A few drops of stevia or a little monk fruit costs no carbohydrate. Vanilla extract does more than either: it reads as sweetness to most people without being sweet at all.
What the almonds are for
A tablespoon of sliced almonds adds crunch, about 3 grams of fat and a gram of fiber. More usefully, it changes the eating experience from one soft texture to two.
That matters more than it sounds. Snacks that are uniformly soft get eaten fast and satisfy less than the same food with something to bite.
Building it the night before
Assembled in a jar this holds two days refrigerated. The strawberries release a little juice which colors the cottage cheese pink, which is harmless and looks better than it sounds.
Keep the almonds in a separate twist of paper and add them when you eat, or they soften into the fruit juice.