Easy Basque Cheesecake

Overcoming tragic personal baking history

Homemade Basque cheesecake

This blog rarely features desserts because I am not much of a baker. Baking requires neatness, precision, and patience, none of which come naturally to me. Below are just a few tragic desserts out of my kitchen. I wish I could say these disasters occurred many years ago when I was young and foolish, but in truth I have many condiments in the fridge older than these pictures.

Ill-fated “Oreo”cake. When dumped in a bowl with ice cream, not half bad.

Lemon cake iced too hot, or just a cry for help?

Attempt at dinner en croute. As they say in the Talmud, learn from this.

It’s been a steep learning curve.

In the past few months I have turned to YouTube and tried my hand at pie crust with encouraging results. Cheesecake seemed a reasonable thing to attempt, since it is after all not actual cake.

Cheesecake has however never been a particular favorite. The word cheesecake always brought to mind something rotating in a diner display case, or frozen Sara Lee abominations. Readers of a certain age know what I am talking about. Graham cracker crusts the taste and consistency of beach sand. Toppings of unnaturally red, gelatinous sludge, all corn syrup and cancer-causing food dye. It took some radical rethinking of cheesecake for me to to overcome my longstanding distaste of this dessert, and that came in the form of the very popular Basque cheesecake.

Cheesecake dates back to the Bronze Age. Archeological evidence of cheesecake has been discovered on the Greek island of Samos. It is surprising to learn that a large proportion of surviving texts of the ancient world are in fact cookbooks. This is very tantalizing and unfair. The Loeb Classical Library keeps churning out the same plays, histories, and philosophical dialogues, when all I really want to know is whether Plato folded his pizza when eating it.

Here is the first surviving cheesecake recipe, courtesy of 3rd-century Greco-Egyptian author Athenaeus of Naucratis, in his cookbook The Dinner Experts:

“Take cheese and pound it until a smooth paste; put cheese in a brass sieve; add honey and spring wheat flour. Heat in one mass, cool, and serve.”

Heat in one mass. This sounds less like a cheesecake and more like a homeowner recipe for mixing concrete. Maybe we should all stick with Homer after all.

Basque cheesecake is however a very recent invention. It was not some folkloric recipe rediscovered, but was developed in the 1990s in San Sebastian by brothers Eladio and Antonio Rivera, and their wives Carmen and Conchi. The genius of the Rivera family was to do away with the graham cracker crust, which never did anything for anybody.

There are a lot of recipes for Basque cheesecake online. Bon Appetit has a good one from Molly Baz. The easiest one I found comes from Nagi Maehashi at Recipetineats, from which the below was adapted.

Basque Cheesecake

Ingredients:

3 8 oz blocks of Philadelphia cream cheese, at room temperature (do not use low-fat)
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 cups heavy or whipping cream
1/4 cup all-purpose flour (you could probably make this gluten free with gf flour)
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 large eggs

parchment paper
springform pan

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425°F.

Press 2 large sheets of baking/parchment paper arranged crosswise into an 8" springform pan. Scrunch paper around the rim, which will create the delightfully craggy crust.

Beat cream cheese in a large bowl on medium speed until smooth. Add sugar and beat on low speed until just mixed.

Mix 1/4 of the cream with flour and salt in a small bowl. Whisk until a smooth paste. Whisk in the remaining cream and vanilla. The result should be a thick smooth cream.

Slowly incorporate the cream into the cream cheese and mix on low until just combined. Then slowly incorporate eggs into the cream and cream cheese mixture, one by one. Stop mixing soon as the eggs are incorporated.

Pour batter into the prepared pan lined with parchment. Drop the pan on the counter (from a low height- a few inches off the countertop) so that any excess air rises to the top of the batter in bubbles. Burst any bubbles on the surface of the batter. This can take repeated dropping and bursting if you have whipped a lot of air into the batter. I have done this a dozen times.

Put the pan on a rimmed baking sheet and bake inthe middle rack of the oven for 40 minutes at 425°F. After the 40 minute mark, start watching it. The cake should not get too burnt on the surface but should be set. It should still be a bit jiggly in the center. This should take about an hour depending on your oven, but it’s important to keep an eye on it.

Remove from the oven and let cool in the cake pan for an hour or two before refrigerating (it will deflate and sink a bit). Then refrigerate still in the cake pan for several more hours.

One of the things I love about this cake is that it is hard to mess up when it comes time to serve. You can simply release the spring form pan and lift the cake out of the pan by the parchment. The paper can be carefully peeled away - it shouldn’t stick.

I couldn’t believe how truly easy this was to make.