The Italian Cheesecake (from Mission I) that I made last time was not that big a success. Bah — let’s call it was it was — a failure. It looked real good on the outside, but it didn’t have much going on inside (sort of like the Saturn Sky sports coupe). However, I don’t like being defeated, so I had to return to the scene of the (culinary) crime and take this challenge on again in order to secure some respect. This time, however, I’m jumping over to a NY style cheesecake. Besides, my wife is a fan of the NY cheesecake and I need to maintain at least some modicum of harmony in my castle. So I get to kill two birds with one stone with this one.
Of course, there’s a third reason too. A budding Goombah has to have a successful cheesecake recipe up his sleeve. It’s the baking version of a sauce, so it’s a fundamental part of a Goombah’s repertoire (at some point, you need to add Italian bread too, but first things first). So until you get the basics down, there’s just no sense moving on to anything else. So back to the cheesecake we go.
UPDATED RESULTS: Presentation: 7, Goombaliciousness: 9.5
So this time around I decided to kick Artuso’s to the curb (sorry guys, love your stuff otherwise) and go with Raina’s recipe from the comments in the Italian Cheesecake post. Raina’s Italian and she lives in New York, so that makes her a full Goombette. That also means that the recipe is authorized for the Goombah Gourmet to use without losing any points from his rep (look, a New York Italian can’t take a recipe for a New York cheesecake from a German living in Utah). Besides, if the cake doesn’t taste any good, I can just blame her. Fuggetaboutit. That’s a Goombah rule: always remember to cover your ass when you are cooking and baking. If someone else can take the fall, make it happen.
Don’t Be a Crust Hata
An essential element to being a Goombah is being persistent in pointing out why other people aren’t Italian, or why they couldn’t cut it as Italians. Of course, if they really aren’t Italian, that’s easy. But if they happen to have the right birth certificate with Italian parents on it, you have to look for other things to rule them out as inauthentic. So you need a list of things that allow you to say “no real Italian does that.“ One of those things is not eating the crust on a pizza. Did you ever know someone who ate pizza and then didn’t eat the crust? I mean come on. The crust is one of the best parts. No real Italian leaves a pile of folded up crusts on the plate a the end.
Real Italians take the crust seriously. That includes the cake crust. Since I’m not screwing around this time, I’m not messing with the pasta frole from the Italian Cheesecake. I’m not stunad — I get burned once, I move on. It was too plain and I didn’t like it. So this time we’re going rogue, er… graham. We’re leaving the reservation. No worries, Goombahs. A graham crust is about as easy to put together as your morning expresso. It’s fun too.
Crust Ingredients, with a Mighty Impressive Wooden Weapon and Baking Implement
1 ½ cups of mashed up graham crackers (typically, requires 1 ½ packages of graham crackers)
¼ cup of sugar
6 tablespoons of butter
Let’s get started. Believe me – once you make this crust, you’ll scoff at the idea of buying that ready made crap in the store. Who needs it? Real Goombahs go scratch. That’s another Goombah rule.
First, put the graham crackers (as many as you can) into a zipped up sandwich bag. Most recipes say to put them into a food processor and mash them up, but geez — don’t do that. Instead, use a rolling pin and beat the hell out of the crackers in the bag. Look, it’s a great way to relieve a little of that pent up stress or anger that you know every Goombah has deep inside (growing up in New York, I knew a lot of Goombahs — they all have anger management problems). So if you’re like me and you want to stay on the right side of the law, you can just take your frustrations out on the bag. Afterward I know I felt better, anyway. A little therapy with your baking.
After you have that done, add the mashed up crackers to a medium bowl and add the sugar and mix it up. Then melt the butter in a sauce pan and add it to the crackers/sugar mix.
Adding the Hot Butter Action
Once that gooey warm butter is in there, use your hands and really mix it up good (wash your hands first, Goombah). I liked this part even better than smashing up the graham. Those mashed up graham crackers feel good in your hands when they are mixed up with the warm melted butter. I took my time on this stage to savor the tactile experience. It reminded me a little of that sculpting scene in Ghost. If you wind up liking this part too, keep it to yourself and don’t tell anyone. It sounds weird.
Once you’re done, add the mix to your 9 inch springform pan. Use your hands to press it down so that you’ve got about a ¼ inch crust all the way around, and press it good against the sides. At this point I departed a little from Raina’s recipe, and I baked the crust in the oven at 375 for 10 minutes (she didn’t say to cook the crust). This sets the crust nice, and it browns up the edges a little. Not a big departure, and besides you need to personalize a recipe a little. I know Goombahs can be a little conformist in nature, but I have to shake things up once in a while. You know, get wild.
Once you’ve done that, cool it on the baking rack while you get the filling ready, which is next up.
The Crust
Get Your Filling Straight: Piling on the Calories
Look, this is a cheesecake. So you’re gonna have to just accept a few things. Like that it’s going to have a lot of calories in it. There’s no getting around it. So don’t mess around with all that low-fat cream cheese nonsense. Just eat less cake, or eat more and embrace getting fat. Look, both of my Italian grandmothers were fat. They didn’t care. Maybe my grandfathers did, but they never complained about the food so I guess they were okay with the trade-off.
The Caloric Explosion: Filling Ingredients
3 Philadelphia Cream Cheeses (8 oz packages each)
1 ½ cups of sugar
3 eggs
It’s an easy set of ingredients to remember – for each cream cheese, add 1 egg and ½ cup of sugar. Nice and simple!
To start, remember that it’s important to make sure that your cheese and the eggs are at room temperature when you get ready to mix them together. Why? I don’t know. Something about how the components of each mixing better with one another when they are at room temperature. I don’t get that stuff because I’m not a chemist (you know any Goombah chemists?). But that’s what “they” say, so that’s what I’m doing. If you want to be a maverick, don’t do it. If you do, don’t blame me when your cake turns out like shit.
Once those bad boys are at room temperature, it’s time to mix. This was an exciting moment for me, because it meant I got to finally test drive my new baby. So I polished her up for the maiden voyage and she was ready to roll.
Once the three cheeses are in there, use low power mix (setting 1) and let it cream up those cheeses nice and good. You’ll have to spatula the stuff off the beater implement a few times until it gets soft and creamy. Switch up from setting from 1 to 2 and back again. No higher than 2, though. You don’t want any air in the mix, or you’ll get more cracks in the cake later and then your cake will suffer on presentation.
Vroom!
After a few minutes, when you’ve got a decent cream texture worked up, add the sugar, slowly, allowing it to be mixed thoroughly. Once that’s done, add one egg at a time, letting it get thoroughly mixed in before adding the next one.
Let it mix for a minute or two and then add the filling to the springform pan with the graham crust bottom.
Virtuous Cake Baking Requires Resisting Temptation
You’re ready to bake. Preheat the oven to 375.
Before putting the cake in, place a pan of water under the rack you are putting the cake on. This will function as a water bath, which prevents the cake from drying out too much.
Every Cheesecake Loves a Good Sauna
Okay, cut it out. Stop looking at the inside of my stove trying to see whether it needs to be cleaned out better than it is. Stay on task and pay attention to the instructions: place the cake in so that it is centered in the oven above the water bath.
Now go do something else. Don’t hover over your cake. Go make some collections from the store owners in need of ‘insurance’, or hang out on the corner for a bit with the boys. Wax the Z-28, whatever. Just don’t open the oven door! If you open the door, you’ll let a draft in and then – BAM!! – the cake will collapse. Cheesecakes are like Italian women — they are very sensitive to small changes in their environments and don’t react well as a consequence. I know you’ll want to open that door and touch it, or get a better view of it. Don’t. If you give in, you’ll doom the cake.
Bake the cake until the top starts to get brownish elements to it. Raina said 35 minutes, but there was no brown to be seen at this point (ovens vary). So I left dropped the temp to 360 and then left it in for a total of 1 hr (don’t leave it in at 375 for an hour). You know, ovens vary. I need an oven thermometer so I can figure out what’s up inside that thing.
In any case, when it starts to slightly brown, shut off the heat and leave it in the oven to slow cool for another 1 hr (which is typical for cheesecakes). In hindsight, I probably over did it (I think mine came out slightly overcooked).
Houston, We Have a (Crack) Problem
Right after I turned off the heat, I looked through the oven window to check the progress of my little princess. As I peered in, all I could think was – as my mother would say –afongool! A crack! (if you are a non-Goombah, go look it up). Bah! A big ass crack right running right down the center of my cake. Just like the Grand Canyon. It was massive.
Just Say No to Crack
I mean, come on…WTF?? I didn’t mix things for too long. I used a water bath. I even sang to the mix before I put it in the oven. I was a good boy. Bah. It is what it is. What are you gonna do? I can see that I’m going to take a hit on presentation here (though of course I could always hide it with fruit), but the more important thing is the final rating for goombaliciousness. As long as we’re okay on that, I think I’ll consider this mission a “W.”
Once you’ve had it in the oven cooling for an hour, take it out and put it on a baking rack for an hour or so to let it come to room temperature. Once that’s accomplished, put it in the fridge and let it sit overnight at least. Cheesecake is better once it’s properly chilled.
Presentation Time…the Catwalk
The cake has been cooling for hours in the fridge, so now it’s time to take it out, pull off the springform sides and put a little powdered sugar on it. Posing for final shots, here it is:
I am Cake, Hear Me Roar
And posing with proud papa,
If you look to the left in the picture, there’s a Chinese scroll. You can only see the bottom half. In English it says “to know the self is enlightenment.” (It’s from the Tao Te Ching). In this case, it’s true: I have found my inner Goombah, and I am enlightened.
Final Results:
We need the final taste test. This came after the homemade gnocchi meal (next post to come out tomorrow), so we were good and full by the time we cut the cake up, but with still a bit of room left over for a slice. It was well worth the wait. As a matter of fact, it was amazing.
A Slice of Love
Each of the food testers in this situation (including Iron Chef Rolla) took one bite and said that it quite honestly might be the best cheesecake they’d ever had. I was amazed, given that my Goombah Gourmet skills are not at that level, and the last cake (the Italian cheesecake) didn’t come out so well (although — for those of you interested, Iron Chef Rolla liked the Italian cheesecake, so it might be that the wife and I just don’t care for this type of cake much). The results:
UPDATED RESULTS: Presentation: 7, Goombaliciousness: 9.5
But back to this cake. The presentation suffered for reasons pointing to the baker (me) not the recipe maker. Two problems: (a) the huge crack down the middle and (b) the edges were a bit overdone, giving it a slightly burnt appearance. These are easy fixes, but it hurt presentation.
But what about Goombahliciousness? Fuggetaboutit. 9.5. This cake flew in from cake heaven. Just the right level of moist and a perfect texture and perfect taste. I can nitpick the product to give it a 9.5 instead of a 10, but what I find is again an error I made, not an error in the ingredients. Since I overcooked, the graham top edges were a little overdone. As well, I should have not departed from the instructions and baked the graham crust first. It was good, but could have been more crumbly, and that requires just letting the graham crust bake for the only time when the filling is baking. But these two are easy fixes, and it didn’t detract much at all from the cake, which is pretty much perfect. These are nitpicks.
I had to stop myself from eating a second piece, and I can assure you the thought of hitting this cake with a fork later on in the refrigerator did occur to me on numerous occasions!
In fact, my wife was playing with the idea (before trying the cake) of having a “bake off” — her family’s famous cheesecake recipe against this one. After trying the cake, she admits that she’s a bit intimidated about having that bake-off. She doesn’t seem too confident that her recipe will be able to stand up (and the story is that whoever eats her family’s cheesecake walks away converted to that recipe forever). It’s the power of the Goombah recipe.
All props to Raina on this one, as it’s her recipe. Amazing! This recipe is a serious keeper. You (that’s YOU Goombah) would be a fool not to whip this thing up for yourself.
NEXT UP: Next Sunday’s challenge — Ciabatta (Italian Bread). I’ll have my post up tomorrow detailing the dinner that preceded this cheesecake — homemade gnocchi. It was a success.
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