new york-style cheesecake

This week is a special edition of a boy bakes in brooklyn: on the road. After the rather disappointing experience with chocolate chip cookies, I travelled upstate to my parents’ house in Millbrook for a weekend away from the city. Knowing that I’d be there for a baking day, I decided to make something that required some of the baking tools in my parents’ kitchen that I don’t have access to in my own – for example, a spring-form pan and a big food processor.

Cheesecake is a dessert that I remember we made quite a bit when I was younger, especially since it’s my brother’s favorite dessert. It always seemed so complicated, necessitating techniques that you only come up against while doing complicated baking, like separating egg whites from egg yolks, baking in a water bath, and lots of precision. Also, cheesecake required me to make a crust, something I really want to practice as I learn how to bake, so that I can eventually make my own pie crusts.

I chose the cheesecake recipe for this week from Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. In preparation for starting this blog, this was a book that I consulted to brush up on a few baking techniques, review basic baking tools, and pick a few aspirational recipes, this cheesecake being one of them. Since I had to return the book to the library a few weeks ago, I pulled the recipe from her website (http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/new-york-style-cheesecake) where I found there was also a video of her putting together the cheesecake on her TV show, so I was excited to have an additional resource to look to for guidance while tackling this difficult baking project. Luckily, this particular cheesecake didn’t require egg separating, so I dodged that bullet. But it did suggest baking with a water bath, so I was eager to meet that challenge.

The crust was really easy to do, though it required the use of my Mom’s big food processor, something I don’t have in Brooklyn. I have a smaller one, but breaking up the wafer cookies in mine would have taken a few different batches. After the cookies were sufficiently pulverized, I mixed them with a couple tablespoons of sugar and some melted butter. Then I pressed the crumbs down into the bottom of the greased spring-form pan and a little bit onto the sides. Getting the crumbs pressed onto the sides was a little difficult, but with some elbow grease, it eventually worked out. I baked the crust for about ten minutes and set it aside to cool.

While it was cooling, I started in on the cake. The recipe called for three pounds of cream cheese to be beaten together until it was light and fluffy, then have flour and sugar slowly beaten in later. Unfortunately, I read the recipe incorrectly and started beating the cream cheese at first with all the sugar in the bowl, thinking it was like creaming butter. Oops. It really didn’t cause too much of an issue, but it was pretty difficult to get the cream cheese light and fluffy at first. It got there eventually – thank God for electric mixers.

I added the flour a little at a time, and then beat in the vanilla extract and sour cream. Once those were fully incorporated, I added in the eggs one at a time. Instead of worrying about breaking each egg separately into the cake mixture – all the while stressing over possible shell shards making their way into and trying to fish them out of the perfectly white batter – I put all of the eggs into a darker-colored bowl. This way, if any shell shards got away from me I’d see them as I was cracking open the eggs. Also, the bowl made it easy to pour the eggs into the cake mixture one by one.

After the eggs were all mixed into the batter, I poured the mixture into the now-cooled crust and covered the bottom and sides of the spring-form pan with a double-layer of aluminum foil. Then I placed the cake into a big roasting pan so that we could surround the cake with some boiling water. One of the hallmarks of a successful cheesecake is whether the top of your cake is free of cracks. Martha’s suggestion for preventing cracks from forming is to bake the cake in a hot water bath. Once the hot water was poured into the roasting pan, it took all three of us to get the flimsy pan into the oven. We managed with only minimal water spillage.

 

Once the cake went into the oven, it had to bake for forty-five minutes at 350, another thirty minutes at 325, and then sit in the warm oven with the door cracked for an hour. I pulled the cake out of this last step at around the fifty-minute mark so that we could use the oven to start preparing dinner. The recipe instructions told me to let the cake cool completely on a wire rack and then refrigerate the cake for six to twenty-four hours. Despite getting up and shopping early, by the time I refrigerated the cheesecake for six hours, we’d be having dessert at almost midnight. We made and ate dinner and I pulled the cake out after only four hours. Wherever Martha Stewart’s secret lair is, I’m sure that an alarm was going off, telling her that someone was deliberately disobeying her recipe instructions. But the cake looked perfect – see for yourself.

What happened when we cut into the cheesecake? Tune in tomorrow for the results of the taste test.

Thanks for reading!

- Jon