Going soft (cheese).

A good low-fat hard cheese is hard to find. It wouldn't even take a half-dozen fondue skewers to spear the handful of tasty, low-fat, low-saturated-fat cheddars, swisses, and mozzarellas we uncovered last month (see Sept. 1995, p. 10).

But soft cheeses like cottage and ricotta and other dairy products like sour creams, cheese spreads, and dips are another story. There you can usually find low-fat alternatives that won't offend your palate ... or your blood vessels.

RICOTTA

You can thank your lucky lasagnas that ricotta is now available fat-free. Use it and you'll save eight grams of fat and, better yet, five grams of artery-clogging saturated fat. Since your sat fat allowance for an entire day is around 20 grams, five grams is nothing to sneeze at.

Looking for no-fat will also keep you out of the "part-skim" ricotta trap. Turns out that the part that's skim is pretty skimpy (it lops off only three grams of fat).

One thing that isn't lopped off when cheese-makers take the fat out of ricotta is calcium. A quarter-cup serving of Precious or Sorrento Fat Free, for example, supplies almost a third of your calcium requirement for an entire day. Most ricottas also give you a nice shot of protein and some riboflavin, zinc, and vitamin A.

COTTAGE CHEESE 

Odds are you've already figured out that the low- or no-fat ones taste about as good as the full-fat ones. But you probably don't have a clue what to do about the sodium.

The cottage cheese world is divided into two camps--those with 50 milligrams of sodium or less in a half-cup serving and those with 300 mg or more. The first group is so tasteless it's hard to eat; the second borders on too salty to be good for you. And that's a pity, since a half-cup supplies almost a third of a day's protein and at least seven percent of a day's calcium.

Our advice: Eat the lowsalt stuff if you can find a brand you like. Or add 1/4 tsp. of salt to a 16-oz. no-salt tub. You'll end up with just 200 mg of sodium--and plenty of taste--in each 1/2-cup serving.

And if you like fruit in your cottage cheese, find a good-tasting plain brand and cut in a little fresh fruit of your own. That way, you'll avoid the corn syrup that's added to most flavored cottage cheeses.

SPREADS

Cheeses that are soft enough to spread on crackers and bagels can be almost as nutrient-rich as regular cheeses like cheddar. That makes them far better for you than cream cheese.

Our favorite "Best Bite" was Boursin Light, which tasted like a wonderfully spiced cream cheese. Kaukauna Lite 50 Port Wine Cheddar was also flavorful and creamy.

CREAM CHEESE

Don't kid yourself. Cream cheese is closer to cream than to cheese. Smear two tablespoons of full-fat Philadelphia on your bagel, for example, and you'll be downing ten grams of fat, six of them saturated. You'll also be missing out on a good chunk of the calcium, protein, and riboflavin of regular cheese.

And while the same amount of whipped cream cheese has a little less fat (thanks to the added air), to get real savings you need to head for the fat-free cream cheese shelf. Just don't expect any miracles.

Alpine Lace had an off flavor and a gummy consistency. Healthy Choice was better: it tasted cheesy, though not too creamy. And Philadelphia Free and Lucerne had the right consistency, but lacked a little oomph in the flavor department.

They're all made using safe gums, so if you find one you like, enjoy. For a bit more flavor, you can go up to three grams of fat. We liked Friendship Reduced Fat, the only low-fat cream cheese we tried.

SOUR CREAM

Tablespoon for tablespoon, sour cream has far less fat (3 grams) than butter or margarine (11 grams). And if you use just a tablespoon of sour cream on your baked potato, it won't break your saturated-fat bank.

But if you eat it by the cup, it's worth looking for a lower-fat version. That won't be difficult. All the no-fatties we tried on baked potatoes tasted fine.

DIPS

Most tortilla-chip dips (they'll usually have the words "cheese," "nacho," or "queso" in their names) contain more water than cheese. That explains why they're so calcium-poor... but not why they're so sodium-rich.

The fat-free sour-creambased dips aren't vitamin and mineral superstars, either. As for taste, the best we can say is that none of our "Best Bites" were real bombs. But you should be your own judge. The information for this article was compiled by Ingrid VanTuinen.