Imagine a cheesecake so good, you can still imagine the taste weeks after eating it. Recently I offered to take a dessert to a friend’s dinner party and my mind immediately went to cheesecake, which has been my favourite dessert from childhood. It’s something about the pairing of crunchy, nutty crust and rich, creamy slightly tart filling, textures and flavors that complement each other perfectly, that makes it irresistible. And that thrill of eating something entirely decadent just for the sheer indulgence of it.
There are of course cheesecakes and cheesecakes. Some are baked and others are simply refrigerated until set. And then there’s the New York Cheesecake, which I’d read about but never cooked. Why “New York” cheesecake, I wondered. What was New York’s claim to provenance?Â
According to the website Bakefromscratch, cakes made from cheese date back to ancient Greece, although I suspect we wouldn’t recognise them as “cheesecake” in the contemporary sense. As for the New York designation, Arnold Reuben of Reuben’s Restaurant and Delicatessen is credited with creating it in the 1920s. That others also vie for the title of founder goes without saying, as by the 1900s cheesecake was the craze in New York and most restaurants had their own versions. Whatever the truth, I think there’s a certain cachet to “New York cheesecake” as opposed to a common and garden variety lemon for example.Â
Everyone knows that the staple ingredient of cheesecake is cream cheese, however its inclusion is also a result of American inventiveness. According to the website cheesecake.com, in 1872 a New York dairy farmer, in trying to replicate French Neufchatel cheese, stumbled upon a process that created cream cheese, soon to be packaged and sold under the brand name still widely available today – Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
New York cheesecake is special for reasons other than its name. To grasp its distinctions, we can divide cheesecakes into “traditional” and “New York”. Cheesecakes World offers a comprehensive definition of both, but in summary the ratio of creamy ingredients, i.e. cream, cream cheese, milk, sour cream etc. determines the type of cheesecake. Traditional cheesecakes are lighter, rely more on cream, sour cream etc., and have a thinner batter. New York cheesecake uses much more cream cheese in relation to other ingredients, resulting in a thicker, creamier batter, a denser texture and a tighter crumb when cooked. As well, it relies on more eggs, maybe 4-5 as compared to 2-3 for the traditional version.Â
Both types of cheesecake include a biscuit based crust – basically crushed biscuits mixed with melted butter. American recipes will tell you to use Graham crackers, which aren’t sold in Australia. Our nearest equivalent is Arnott’s Granita although I’ve used various other kinds successfully. For this one I used some Dutch Speculaas biscuits left mircaculously uneaten in the biscuit tin and they were great.Â
Traditionally, New York cheesecake is served without any topping, presumably to better display its nicely bronzed edges and puffy golden top, whereas other kinds of cheesecake often have fruit or cream or even chocolate toppings. I decided to ignore this bit of NY cheesecake lore, and make a mulberry topping, (the freezer still bulging with the frozen summer bounty of our prolific little mulberry trees).Â
The dessert option decided, all I had to do was choose a recipe from among the 25,600,000 that came up on Google. I’m a bit like Alice Toklas in that I love trawling through recipes, albeit of the digital kind rather than print but time being as usual of the essence and as a NY cheesecake novice who needed hand-holding, when I found a great YouTube video I went with that.
It’s called “Creamy and Decadent New York Cheesecake (no waterbath)” and is by Brian Lagerstrom, previously unknown to me but an upbeat New York kinda guy who inspires confidence. He won me by saying he’d spent the last week making every kind of cheesecake mistake. Learning from someone else’s mistakes is always better than learning from your own. You can find it below.
He incorporates a couple of variations in his recipe, one being the inclusion of goat cheese, which I didn’t use, and the other adding toasted walnuts to the biscuit crumb crust, which I did with happy results. I also added a bit of cinnamon which worked well. In terms of the crust, he recommends a double crust (up the sides as well as on the bottom), which after following his inspired method of moulding it into the tin, I managed to achieve. Previous efforts at creating this kind of crust have never turned out well for me (crumbling towers best describe the outcome).Â
He also stresses the one “big baddie” potential pitfall with this recipe, which is having the cheesecake crack during or after baking. This is what waterbaths are designed to prevent, but that all seems like too much messing about to me, and happily his recipe doesn’t call for one.Â
Another couple of hints if you’re tempted to try this, after baking it needs refrigeration for preferably 24 hours before serving, and the ingredients for the cake itself (cream cheese, eggs, etc.) must be at room temperature. Nothing worse than being mid-prep and realising the eggs or whatever are still chilled out in the fridge instead of being ready to roll. Often it doesn’t matter, but with this it does.
I’m happy to report that after following the instructions religiously and peering anxiously into the oven every five minutes to check for cracks, mine turned out high, wide, smooth and crack-free.Â
And when it came to the ultimate taste test, presentation at the table, it was a resounding success. It looked good, I have to say. Crisp, crunchy, biscuity coloured crust enfolding a towering slice of rich, dense creamy cheesecake, over which drizzled the deep purple mulberry topping in all its succulent juiciness. An artistic masterpiece, its beauty only superseded by its taste. Truly the big cheese of cheesecakes. Hedonistic, indulgent, decadent it may be, but so worth it. Now, having gazed at the photos on here, I want it again. Now.
