New York Cheesecake

New York Cheesecake is a very famous and appreciated cake all over the world now by most of the people. A seemingly simple sweet to make, it requires a few tips for its complete success.

It seemed to be a very popular dish in ancient Greecebut when it has been conquered by the Romans, this cake started to become famous quickly in most of Europe and later also in America. One of the most popular variants of this cake is the New York Cheesecake, the most basic version, cooked in the oven. There is also a non baking version of this cake, but the classic version, the New York one, remains the one and the only, for me.Interestingly, even Japan and Africa have their own version of this cake, but I will talk about them in my future posts.

Now let’s see the basic recipe to make a classic New York cheesecake (adaoted recipe from joyofbaking.com)

Ingredients

For the biscuits base:

200 grams of Digestive cookies (or similar) finely crumbled
50 grams of brown sugar
120 grams of melted butter

For the filling (all ingredients should be at room temperature):

850 grams of cream cheese
200grams of caster sugar
35 grams of flour
5 whole eggs
80 ml of double cream
1 tablespoon of lemon zest
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 180 degrees.

In a food processor, place the ingredients for the cake base and blend them until you get a wet and sandy mixture. Take a baking pan of 20 cm diameter and grease it with a little bit of butter, even on the sides. Put the mixture into the cake tin and flatten well on the bottom of the pan and even on the sides. Put in the fridge to rest.

For the filling:

Put the cream cheese, sugar and flour in a bowl of a stand mixer.

Processthe mixture until it reaches a creamy consistency. Remember to stop the mixer and pull down the mixture from the sides, to incorporate it to the rest of the dough.

Add the eggs one at a time, do not put any other egg in the mixture until the previous is completely absorbed. Now add the cream, lemon zest, vanilla extract and mix the dough for a couple more minutes. Now remove the biscuit base from the fridge and pour in the cheese filling, levelling the surface a little bit with the back of a spoon.

Put the pan above a baking sheet and bake in the central part of the oven for 15 minutes at 180 degrees. After this time, lower the temperature to 120 degrees and let it cook for about an hour, hour and a half. The cooking time varies depending on the oven you used, but you will understand that the cake is ready when slightly moving the pan, you will see the centre of the cake that is still slightly bubbly, it doesn’t need to be perfectly still as once outside the oven it will continue to cook a bit.

Let it rest outside the oven until completely cool and put in the fridge overnight to rest.

@Angelinaincucin