A Brief History of Cheesecake to 1545
Ever since the beginning of time, man has been striving to make the perfect cheesecake. Today, there are literally thousands of cheesecake recipes. Everyone has his or her favorite. But when did this craze really begin? How did we get from the early days of cheesecake to the famous New York Cheesecake that we enjoy today?
Cheesecake was a very popular dish in Ancient Greece. But when the Roman’s conquered Greece, the secret fell into the hands of the Romans and nothing’s been the same since. Actually, the Roman version of cheesecake was much different from the Greek form of the delicious wonder. Roman cheesecake became known as placenta. It was sometimes baked on a pastry base and other times it was enclosed in a pastry case. The Roman cheesecake was actually often used as an offering to the Gods.
In the first century BC, a gentleman by the name of Marcus Porcius Cato came up with a wonderful recipe for cheesecake. He lived from 234 to 139 BC. He was a Roman politician. See, even politicians can have good taste in food. This recipe of his was the only work of his that was ever preserved, which is quite ironic since his main focus was in politics. This recipe that he came up with was often given as a temple offering.
Composition of the New York Cheesecake Recipe
The New York cheesecake recipe is one of the simplest recipes in any dessert cookbook, but it’s one that demands complete attention to detail and use of the highest quality ingredients to get the premium result. If you are the sort of cook who likes to save a few pennies here and there by skimping on the quality of your ingredients, you might not want to venture into the cheesecake world.
Part of the reason for the emphasis on quality ingredients is that there are so few of them. The basic New York cheesecake recipe includes eggs, cream cheese, cream, sugar and a handful of other small additions. The crust is generally a graham cracker crust, which is one of the simplest in the world to make.
When presented with such simple ingredients, the inexperienced cook might think success was in the bag and hit the mega mart to pick up all the goods. And while you would indeed produce something that looked remarkably like a New York cheesecake, when the taste hit your palate, you’d know something had gone terribly wrong.
Crust Options for the 10-inch Cheesecake Recipe
So often, home cooks creating their favorite 10-inch cheesecake recipe devote all their energy to getting the body of the cake just right that they neglect the crust. They tinker and tweak, adding flavors and changing ingredients incessantly to get just the perfect balance of taste and texture.
And, through it all, that generic graham cracker crust sits below. Whatever exotic flavors are poured into it, whatever rave reviews the cheesecake draws, that graham cracker crust gets none of the glory. I’ve even seen people eat the cheesecake out of the crust, leaving it lost and forlorn on the plate.
Strike a blow for fairness and make your crust stand up and be noticed by working with its flavor to either match or set off the flavor of your cheesecake.
Evaluating Free Recipes for Italian Desserts
Lurking beneath the surface of many recipes, however, is disaster more ferocious and inevitable than a hurricane over warm Gulf of Mexico waters. Poorly written or shakily tested recipes can turn a counter full of expensive, high-quality ingredients into a bowl full of meaningless goo unfit for human consumption.
But how can you tell the difference between a great recipe that will earn a spot among your most favorite creations and one that is fit only for the trash heap of culinary failure? How can you justify sinking premium bucks into high quality ingredients when you don’t know if the result will be edible? If you have just a little cooking savvy, it’s not all that hard to do.
Flavoring Your 10-inch Cheesecake Recipe
The 10-inch cheesecake recipe is the most common size found both in cookbooks and on recipe Web sites, and it’s a big canvas on which to write a flavor signature. While the base recipe is a marvel of creamy goodness, it’s natural to want to branch out and add your favorite flavor into the mix.
One of the most popular flavors to add is peanut butter, usually in combination with chocolate chips or a drizzle of chocolate sauce. However, if you are a true peanut butter devotee, you don’t need no stinkin’ chocolate in your peanut butter! In fact, why not go whole-hog with your effort and make it peanutty from top to bottom? Use crushed peanut butter cookies for the crust, peanut butter in the mix (and even some chopped peanuts if you like) and sprinkle chopped dry-roasted peanuts on top right before serving.
Cheesecake and Other Dishes
Cheesecake, do you think that cheesecake is hard to make? Well if you do then you are wrong. Cheesecake is one of the easiest deserts to make as far as I am concerned; it is even easier and less messy than making cookies. Just go to any search site and take a look for yourself, just make a search and you will probably find that it is not hard to make cheesecake.
Individual Vanilla Cheesecake with Lemon Curd and Bailey’s Marbled Cheesecake are just a few really good recipes that have a pastry crust that can also be used instead of a graham cracker crust on most cheesecakes.
History of the New York Cheesecake Recipe
Cheesecake in its present form is a relatively “young” culinary invention, but cheesecake itself goes back for centuries. With the natural sweetness of young cheese, it was natural that it wouldn’t take long before some smart cookie started playing around with it in desserts.
All the way back in Roman times, in the first century A.D., there was a sweet cake often used as a temple offering called libum. See if the ingredients sound a little familiar: cheese, flour, eggs and occasionally honey. Culinarily, that’s not all that terribly far from what we know today, although the libum was designed to be cooked and wrapped in leaves in a fire. These are a few steps removed from a Viking oven with electronic temperature control.
Is the Baked New York Style Cheesecake Recipe Best?
Looking for shortcuts in the kitchen is a time-honored tradition. Almost everyone, whether they are a rookie cook or a lifelong kitchen wizard, wants at some point to find a better, quicker way to get the results they’re looking for. The baked New York style cheesecake recipe draws more than its share of shortcut seekers, for two main reasons.
First off is the inherent simplicity of the New York cheesecake recipe. It consists of a few ingredients held in careful balance and cooked carefully. While the end result is a marvel of smooth deliciousness, getting there can become a bit of a boring trip once you’ve done it 10 or 20 times. The natural human urge to seek variety takes over, and the next thing you know you’re off in the recipe wilderness.
Making New York Style Cheesecake Recipes Your Own
So you’ve done your research on the Web or through cookbooks and finally, after much trial and error, you’ve settled on one recipe that not only produces the results you want, but provides the taste you’ve looked for. You’ve made it a dozen or so times, and are fairly confident you know the ins and outs and all the potential pitfalls.
Don’t be surprised to find yourself getting a little bit bored. It’s hard to believe you could ever grow discontented with the creamy perfection that is the New York style cheesecake, but it is human nature to seek out variety in all things. However, the base structure of the recipe is in such perfect balance that it does not invite much in the way of real change. You can add the occasional chocolate chip, a touch of amaretto or other flavoring, but that’s about it.
Of course, you could spend months exploring the various add-ins, and that’s all well and fine. But why not go outside the structure of the cheesecake and look at some of the sauces you can create? Let’s look at the three main types:
Is the Baked New York Style Cheesecake Recipe Best?
Looking for shortcuts in the kitchen is a time-honored tradition. Almost everyone, whether they are a rookie cook or a lifelong kitchen wizard, wants at some point to find a better, quicker way to get the results they’re looking for. The baked New York style cheesecake recipe draws more than its share of shortcut seekers, for two main reasons.
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