Dorie Greenspan's Cheesecake

Translated into the surface of the moon, by way of some caramel that I added on the top. I made it for Joanna's baby shower. I have a found a special pleasure in my new baking adventures. People love sugar and there is something satisfying about fixing them with some. I guess I do too. (I popped the Lactaid like it was  1999.) We played the game "Celebrity" but you had to name a famous baby. So then it became you had to name any famous baby at any moment in time. Someone slipped in "Liza Minnelli" but no one owned up to it. Harshad tried to pawn off"micro mouse" as being the spawn of Mickey & Minnie, but as far as we know, they adopted a Laotian hamster.

John made a refreshing watermelon, mint and nectarine salad with a little lemon squeezed on top. At the last minute, Horaci wanted to try to use his Ferrán Adrià foamer that his mother had given him. There was a mad dash to the deli for some gelatin to give it some ammunition but the gelatin needed a few hours, so that was quickly abandoned...for some teeny white baby shoes.

The cheesecake recipe is after the jump.

I got this recipe from this Serious Eats, which I will copy verbatim below. Of course, there is always one instruction that I will always fail to do in a baking recipe, and this time it was the instruction to layer the crumbs for the crust up the sides of the pan. So instead, I got a little thicker crust at the bottom, which was fine. 

Dorie Greenspan's Tall and Creamy Cheesecake: A Basic

- makes 16 servings -
Adapted from Baking From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan

Ingredients

For the crust (omit the crust for Passover or see above):
1 3/4 cups graham cracker crumbs
3 tablespoons sugar
Pinch of salt
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted

For the cheesecake:
2 pounds (four 8-ounce boxes) cream cheese, at room temperature
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 1/3 cups sour cream or heavy cream, or a combination of the two

Procedure

To make the crust:
1. Butter a 9-inch springform pan—choose one that has sides that are 2 3/4 inches high (if the sides are lower, you will have cheesecake batter leftover)—and wrap the bottom of the pan in a double layer of aluminum foil; put the pan on a baking sheet.

2. Stir the crumbs, sugar and salt together in a medium bowl. Pour over the melted butter and stir until all of the dry ingredients are uniformly moist. (I do this with my fingers.) Turn the ingredients into the buttered springform pan and use your fingers to pat an even layer of crumbs along the bottom of the pan and about halfway up the sides. Don't worry if the sides are not perfectly even or if the crumbs reach above or below the midway mark on the sides—this doesn't have to be a precision job. Put the pan in the freezer while you preheat the oven.

3. Center a rack in the oven, preheat the oven to 350°F and place the springform on a baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes. Set the crust aside to cool on a rack while you make the cheesecake.

4. Reduce the oven temperature to 325°F.

To make the cheesecake:
1. Put a kettle of water on to boil.

2. Working in a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the cream cheese at medium speed until it is soft and lives up to the creamy part of its name, about 4 minutes. With the mixer running, add the sugar and salt and continue to beat another 4 minutes or so, until the cream cheese is light. Beat in the vanilla. Add the eggs one by one, beating for a full minute after each addition—you want a well-aerated batter. Reduce the mixer speed to low and stir in the sour cream and/or heavy cream.

3. Put the foil-wrapped springform pan in the roaster pan.

4. Give the batter a few stirs with a rubber spatula, just to make sure that nothing has been left unmixed at the bottom of the bowl, and scrape the batter into the springform pan. The batter will reach the brim of the pan. (If you have a pan with lower sides and have leftover batter, you can bake the batter in a buttered ramekin or small soufflé mold.) Put the roasting pan in the oven and pour enough boiling water into the roaster to come halfway up the sides of the springform pan.

5. Bake the cheesecake for 1 hour and 30 minutes, at which point the top will be browned (and perhaps cracked) and may have risen just a little above the rim of the pan. Turn off the oven's heat and prop the oven door open with a wooden spoon. Allow the cheesecake to luxuriate in its water bath for another hour.

6. After 1 hour, carefully pull the setup out of the oven, lift the springform pan out of the roaster—be careful, there may be some hot water in the aluminum foil—remove the foil. Let the cheesecake come to room temperature on a cooling rack.

7. When the cake is cool, cover the top lightly and chill the cake for at least 4 hours, although overnight would be better.

Serving: Remove the sides of the springform pan—I use a hairdryer to do this (use the dryer to warm the sides of the pan and ever so slightly melt the edges of the cake)—and set the cake, still on the pan's base, on a serving platter. The easiest way to cut cheesecake is to use a long, thin knife that has been run under hot water and lightly wiped. Keep warming the knife as you cut slices of the cake.

Storing: Wrapped well, the cake will keep for up to 1 week in the refrigerator or for up to 2 months in the freezer. It's best to defrost the still-wrapped cheesecake overnight in the refrigerator.

I made about this caramel recipe below which I got from Simply Recipes. Elise has some good pictures on her website of what the caramel color is supposed to look like. David Lebovitz also has some good advice. I added a tiny bit more cream and butter to the recipe, so that it would not harden so much. I didn't let the caramel cool so that  I could pour it into drops into the cheesecake and swirled it around with a knife. Once the caramel hardens it's hard to manipulate.

Caramel Sauce (adapted from Simply Recipes)

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup of sugar
• 4 Tbsp butter
• 1/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons heavy whipping cream

Method

1 First, before you begin, make sure you have everything ready to go - the cream and the butter next to the pan, ready to put in. Making caramel is a fast process that cannot wait for hunting around for ingredients. If you don't work fast, the sugar will burn. Safety first - make sure there are no children under foot and you may want to wear oven mitts; the caramelized sugar will be much hotter than boiling water.

2 Heat sugar on moderately high heat in a heavy-bottomed 2-quart or 3-quart saucepan. As the sugar begins to melt, stir vigorously with a whisk or wooden spoon. As soon as the sugar comes to a boil, stop stirring. You can swirl the pan a bit if you want, from this point on. Note that this recipe works best if you are using a thick-bottomed pan. If you find that you end up burning some of the sugar before the rest of it is melted, the next time you attempt it, add a half cup of water to the sugar at the beginning of the process, this will help the sugar to cook more evenly, though it will take longer as the water will need to evaporate before the sugar will caramelize

3 As soon as all of the sugar crystals have melted (the liquid sugar should be dark amber in color), immediately add the butter to the pan. Whisk until the butter has melted.

4 Once the butter has melted, take the pan off the heat. Count to three, then slowly add the cream to the pan and continue to whisk to incorporate.

5 Whisk until caramel sauce is smooth.

Comments

[kate]

That watermelon salad looks so refreshing! And nectarines...what a great idea!

[Michelle]

Hi Kate! Yeah, that salad was the perfect summer dish.