Week 41: Italian Ricotta Cheesecake

This cheesecake will KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF. Seriously. I was dying to try a piece after having tasted the batter, but it needed to chill in the fridge overnight in order to set. When I finally sunk my teeth into a slice, I experienced a lot of emotions. I panicked. How would I get through the rest of the day without gobbling up the rest of the cake? What if this 2012 thing was for real? Maybe I should just go for it, right? This cake is so good, it can make you go a little crazy.

I’ve been meaning to make a ricotta cheesecake ALL YEAR LONG. I’m a bit of a cheesecake snob. I’m born and bred in New York, after all. I’ve tasted a lot of cheesecake and while I eat a bite of classic New York cheesecake from time to time, I prefer Italian cheesecake. The main difference between New York and Italian cheesecakes is the cheese. Italian cheesecake contains ricotta while New York cheesecake contains cream cheese. I find Italian cheesecake to be less heavy. Some versions are even crustless. I’m sure it contains just as many calories, but the consistency is less dense than New York cheesecake. I just love it.

I liked this Kraft recipe‘s simple ingredients. I made some tweaks, which I’ve detailed in the recipe below. Here’s my mise en place.

The preparation is quite simple. I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and sprayed my springform pan. I melted the butter and mixed it with the graham cracker crumbs and 2 tablespoons white sugar. I meant to use plain, low fat graham cracker crumbs. But when I got home from the grocery store, I realized I had accidentally purchased cinnamon graham crackers. I hoped it would turn out to be a happy accident and it was.

Anyway, I patted the buttered graham cracker crumbs into the bottom and up the sides of the springform pan and baked it for 10 minutes.

The rest of the preparation was easy. I beat the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl with my handheld mixer. I noticed some people in the original recipes’ reviews complained about a weird texture. I am going to guess those reviewers didn’t mix the batter well enough, because my mixture got rid of the ricotta texture and resulted in a nice, smooth, silky batter.

Something else I’d like to mention is I used part skim ricotta cheese and I didn’t find it to have any negative effect on the finished product.

I baked the cake with a bake even strip around the pan. I didn’t feel like putting a whole water bath together, so that was my compromise. I was using an 8″ pan. The recipe said it was for a 9″ pan, so I had leftover batter. I feared if I didn’t bake it, I might drink the rest, so I made crustless cupcakes!

The cupcakes baked for maybe 30 minutes? I left the cake to bake for an hour. At the 1 hour mark, it looked almost done, so I turned the oven off and left the cake inside. It’s a trick I read about that helps prevent the top of the cake from cracking by slowly reducing the temperature so that cake doesn’t go into shock. It worked!

I left the cake in the fridge to chill and set overnight. The next night I dug in.