The Perfect *Ricotta* Cheesecake

Okay, so I've perfected my summer cheesecake: light and fluffy, AND I get to use Uncle Roland's zester, AND it helps to have access to my 9" springform pan (and to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods for the ginger snap cookies -- though I imagine any cookies would do).

In short:

Lemon Ricotta Cheesecake with Ginger Snap Crust

Take about 2 cups of crushed ginger snaps and pulse them in a Cuisinart with about 6 T. melted butter. Press into a greased 9" springform pan and preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

5 eggs, separated
2 8 oz. pkgs of cream cheese
1 15 oz. container of ricotta
grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
2/3 cup sugar
1 T. flour.

Beat the egg yolks until light with a mixer or in the Kitchenaid mixer; add cheeses, lemon zest juice, and 2/3 c. sugar and beat until smooth. Pour out into another bowl and stir the flour in with a spoon. Wash the bowl and whisk up the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold them into the cheese mixture (with a rubber spatula). Turn the batter into the pan and place pan in a baking dish large enough to hold it comfortably. Add as much warm water as you can to the larger pan; you're baking the cheesecake in a water bath. Transfer carefully to the preheated oven and bak until the cake is just set and very lightly browned, about an hour.

NOTE: This summer I have used my cast iron frying pan for the water bath, which has worked brilliantly.

Turn the oven off, take the cheesecake out of the water bath, and return to the oven to cool for 30 minutes to an hour. Then cool on a rack and refrigerate until well-chilled before slicing and serving. (Unless your family is too impatient. Then explain to them as they are eating how much better it will taste on the next day.)

No huge innovations here -- I am happy with the ricotta substitution and increasing the eggs to 5, which makes the cake light and high, and I've adjusted the crust to get the right proportions. This might be yummy with ginger instead of lemon in the cheesecake -- I'll try that this autumn.

For Tucker and Kayty -- enjoy!

Cheesecake in July

It is almost impossible to bake in the summertime. We don't have whole house air conditioning, and besides, I refuse to heat the house from the inside while it's heating from the outside!

But this summer (so far) has been fairly lovely, and so on Saturday I ventured to bake a cheesecake. Anyone following this blog knows that I have declared the "perfect cheesecake" not once, but twice in recent months. And yet...

Lemon Cheesecake with Ricotta
(on the right is my personal recipe file project, still ongoing!)

Apparently, I need to fiddle with perfection. This weekend I made Mark Bittman's Lemon Cheesecake, but with twists. For the crust, I used Trader Joe's Triple Ginger Cookies (yum!). This was brilliant, a nice change from a straight graham cracker crust. The other innovation was to substitute ricotta for some of the cream cheese -- I used 15 oz. of whole milk ricotta with two 8 oz. packages of cream cheese. I didn't adjust the eggs, and perhaps I might have, but the happy noises coming out of my family's mouths last night confirmed that the ricotta added a certain lightness to the cheesecake. Again, yum.

The best part about cooking and baking, though, beyond the taste sensations exploding in the mouth, is the effort that goes into it. The same day I made a Quinoa Corn Feta salad (adapted from Rachel Ray) and a peach salsa for the bluefish we were grilling, and all that chopping and stirring was positively therapeutic.

Most importantly, for the cheesecake I needed lemon juice AND lemon rind. I walked down to the corner to buy the lemons at our bodega (a nice feature of city life), and then I rifled the drawers looking for my lemon zester.

I don't have a lemon zester in my other kitchen, so only in summer can I replay in my head that scene in the Brooklyn apartment of one of our favorite relatives. "A zester!" I exclaim. "I've always wanted a zester!" "Here, take it," says Uncle Roland. "No, really, I couldn't!" I retort, embarrassed. "Seriously, I've only used it once or twice myself. Take it, and you'll think of me when you use it."

How great is that for a dessert in mid-July? This recipe brought together creativity, fresh ingredients, the convenience of life in the city, the fun and precision of separating eggs, measuring and mixing, plus a chance to use my lemon zester and think about its provenance. Not bad for an experience -- and at the end there was cheesecake.

Thanks, Roland.

Cheesecake Heaven

Almost twenty years ago, I baked a pumpkin cheesecake for a friend of mine. I followed it up with lemon cheesecake, plain cheesecake, chocolate cheesecake. I'm afraid I was a bit of a cheesecake tease.

He married me -- he says for my cheesecake. And then it all went bad.

My cheesecake-making abilities have ebbed and flowed over the years -- and mostly ebbed. Somehow I have not been able to achieve the height, the lightness, the ecstasy that I aim for. My best rendition in recent years has been the Goat Cheese Mascarpone Cheesecake with Rosemary Rhubarb Sauce (from Grid magazine in Philadelphia), which is totally awesome. (I've even made it with a gluten-free crust for my celiac friend.)

But mostly my cheesecakes have fallen flat. I've taken to cutting them into squares and calling them "cheesecake bars." It's humiliating.

One answer is simply more cream cheese. But that doesn't achieve the lightness I'm looking for. Another is to use a smaller pan -- I've even gotten extreme with a 7" springform pan for ultra-mini-cheesecakes. Which disappear quickly, of course (who can knock the ingredients?), but leave my husband looking around for another cheesecake muse.

And finally -- though I have cursed some of his recipes in recent years -- Mark Bittman came to the rescue yesterday.

A classic recipe -- and it worked!

Lemon Cheesecake with Graham Cracker Crust

About 3 cups of crushed graham crackers
Pulse in Cuisinart with about 10 T. melted butter
(Skip Bittman's 3 T. sugar)

Press into a greased 9" springform pan and preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

4 eggs, separated
3 8 oz. pkgs. of cream cheese
Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
2/3 c. sugar (reduced from Bittman's 1 cup)
1 T. flour

Beat the egg yolks until light with a mixer or in the Kitchenaid mixer; add cheese, lemon zest and juice, and 2/3 c. sugar and beat until smooth. Pour out into another bowl (if you're using the Kitchenaid) and stir the flour in with a spoon. Wash the bowl and whisk up the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold them into the cheese mixture (with a rubber spatula). Turn the batter into the pan and place pan in a baking pan large enough to hold it comfortably.

(This can be tricky -- I used a large flat Lodge enameled cast iron covered casserole. See above.)

Add as much warm water as you can to the larger pan -- you're baking the cheesecake in a water bath. (So your springform pan had better not leak -- I have a new one that locks very tightly.) Transfer carefully to the preheated oven and bake until the cake is just set and very lightly browned, about an hour.

Ideally (unless your daughter is baking lemon bars, which mine was), turn the oven off, take the cheesecake out of the water bath and return to the oven for at least 30 minutes to cool in the cooling oven. Then cool on a rack, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until well-chilled before slicing and serving.

I had planned the cake for a meeting I was having at my house, but my clever daughter made me a deal -- she baked lemon bars for the meeting (we never eat them at our house -- too much sugar!) and we kept the cheesecake for the family. It was truly fantastic -- light and creamy and lemony and a little bit tart. Perfect crust -- not too hard to cut into, as they sometimes are after an hour in the oven, not too sweet, since I omitted the extra sugar. Everyone was delighted -- and couldn't wait for breakfast this morning.

Marriage saved. For now.

Avoca Cafe Cheesecake ... in Ohio

My friend is Irish, and she swears by the Avoca Cafe Cookbook. One evening last fall she went on and on about the recipes, about how this was such a great place to go in Ireland, about how this is the only cookbook she uses. So I bought a copy and gave it to my sister for Christmas.

(My sister's husband's family comes from Ireland originally, though their roots in Ohio run pretty deep. Plus they eat meat -- and this is not a vegetarian cookbook. She has tried the Beef and Guiness stew and found it delicious, if extremely rich.)

Then last week, my friend stopped by to invite us to a dinner party and dropped by some cookbooks for me to peruse. (She must have heard of my "guilty habit" of reading cookbooks.) Two Avoca Cafe Cookbooks, and a cake cookbook called Miette. (That one is fantastic. But so far I've only drooled over it -- haven't tried anything yet.) The Avoca cookbook really is wonderful, As most cookbooks do, it starts with the soup section, and I want to try every single recipe. Just my luck that the weather is finally turning to spring...

But then my daughter requested a cheesecake for her birthday. And this presented a certain challenge. Even though my husband swears he married me for my cheesecake, I've been having dubious success over the last few years. Generally when I bake one, I just call it a "cheesecake tart," or I cut it up into "cheesecake squares." In other words, my cheesecakes in recent years have been seriously lacking in height.

And I've tried. I've tried the very slow baking -- 1 1/2 hours at 200 degrees. I've tried leaving the cake in the oven for several hours after it is done, door lightly propped open with a wooden spoon to keep it from falling. But these techniques have failed me ... so far.

The real answer, it seems to me, is to get a 9" or even a 7" cheesecake pan. Or I suppose I could double the recipe. In preparation for the birthday cake, I went to several kitchen shops on Monday and found them all closed; I checked the Macy's on the way home from work, but no luck. No 7" pan was in my (near) future. (I admit it -- I have one on order.)

So I decided to wing it -- from the Avoca Cafe cookbook.

The recipe is unusual, AND it's Irish. So our standard quantities and ingredients don't map onto it perfectly. Since I was determined to have a cheesecake that was higher than an inch, I figured I'd just guess -- substituting ingredients and fudging quantities -- and hope for the best.

Baked cheesecake with lemon topping (modified)

Filling:
1 container small curd cottage cheese (do they come in 15 1/2 oz. containers?)
4 eggs
~2/3 c. white sugar (who has "caster sugar"?!)
16 oz. cream cheese
3 T. corn starch (almost forgot this and added it last -- in Ireland it's called "cornflour")
juice and grated peel of 1 lemon
juice and grated peel of 1 lime
4 oz. melted unsalted butter
2 small containers of heavy whipping cream (no creme fraiche at our country grocery store, and only after I poured the cream in did I look it up on the web, which suggests half as much whipping cream as creme fraiche if you're substituting... oops...)

Crust:
~1 1/2 c. flour
~2/3 c. sugar (this may have been too much -- remember, I was experimenting, and not actually doing the math...)
1 egg
5 oz. soft unsalted butter (okay, maybe it wasn't all that soft...)

Mix all crust ingredients in a food processor. Press half into a greased and lined 10" springform pan (that's all I have at present!) and bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Let cool slightly and press the remaining crust dough on the sides of the pan. In the meantime, lower the oven temperature to 300 degrees.

For the filling, whiz the cottage cheese in the food processor for 20 seconds. I also used my kitchen aid mixer with the whisk attachment, whisking eggs and sugar together for 5 minutes. At this point I think I should have changed to the beater, but I didn't, and just added the cottage cheese and cream cheese. After a bit (and I'm sure the cream cheese was not mixed in properly, but oh well) I added the lemon and lime juices and rind (the recipe calls for zest, but my zester is in my PA kitchen, so I simply grated the rinds). Stir in the melted butter and whipping cream (better 1/2 pint than a whole pint, but I thought of that later, so it was pretty liquid-y!). Which is why when I remembered about the corn starch, I added 3 T. With only 1/2 pint of cream, I would have used 1 T.

Pour the mixture into the pan and bake in a 300 degree oven ... for two hours? When I read that, I reduced my oven a little part of the way through, to about 275. My oven runs a bit hot anyway. The top was definitely browned when I took it out! Leave to cool and chill overnight.

Then the fun part -- today I made the lemon curd after work. Delicious!!

Homemade Lemon Curd

Juice and grated rind of 3 lemons
4 oz. unsalted butter, diced
2/3 c. sugar (who has caster sugar?!)
5 eggs

Put the lemon juice and rind, butter and sugar in a large bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water, making sure the water does not touch the base of the bowl. Leave until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved, stirring occasionally.

Lightly whisk the eggs, then pour them onto the mixture through a sieve (that was fun!). My glass bowl and Ikea small pasta pot combo worked perfectly, and eventually most of that egg did get through the sieve and into the lemon mixture.

Leave for 40 minutes to 1 hour, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon. The curd is ready when it's thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. Remove from the heat. (I was making a half recipe; if you did the whole recipe it would probably make 2 pint jars and you could can it.)

This recipe was super easy -- I could essentially do all kinds of other things (like make the birthday dinner of Pad Thai) while it cooked. And it is so tasty! I can't believe I never tried to make it before. I let the lemon curd cool a bit and then spooned it on top of the cheesecake. Which was plenty high -- probably because I doubled all the cheese quantities!

I am happy I have somehow convinced my daughter that cheesecake is the best birthday cake. Tonight reminded me of how fun her birthday was two years ago when we had a bonfire in the backyard and girls running all over -- jumping on the trampoline, zipping across the yard on the zipline, and everyone eating cheesecake. But tonight's cheesecake deserved the name and made the birthday really special. Light and yet dense -- how can that be? And not too sweet -- especially the lemon curd. Yum.