I watch a youtube channel filmed by a couple of Japanese guys who try restaurants, food, and snacks in front of the camera and tell you what they think. Recently, they showed “Japanese cheesecake”, which looked like a nice fluffy yellow cake.
Curious, I did a search and found another youtube channel where a Japanese-American girl baked a “Jiggly Japanese cheesecake” and was even more intrigued.
Apparently, it’s a fluffy sponge cake, but one of the ingredients (mixed into the egg yolks and butter) is cream cheese. The final product looks like a cross between angel food cake and a souffle.
Today I bought a snack-size cheesecake at a Japanese market. It’s a lovely, fluffy, feathery cake with a pleasing background taste of cream cheese. As an addict of sponge cakes and angel food cakes, I can’t believe I never heard of this treat before last night.
I am like you. Looks and sounds good. It probably is. I tried to make it, it didn’t work out so good. Your oven temp. needs to be on point. My isn’t. I have tried the pkg. stuff it is pretty good. I can make Angel food cake, so I will stick with that. Dang, Now I want cake.
There’s a chain called “Uncle Tetsu’s Cheesecake” that opened a branch in Toronto a couple of years ago; it was all the rage at the time, with long lineups, media frenzy, etc.
Once the novelty wore off, we bought one. It’s very fluffy and creamy, but it doesn’t have an especially strong flavour; it’s more about the texture, I think.
There are many kinds of cheescakes in Japan. Most of them have a slightly milder cheese taste than what I was used to back in Australia. Also, none of them (that I’ve had) have a hard crust.
This is what I call “milk cake”, I forget what the Japanese name is on the label. It’s a very dense, moist, yet light cake. It has a very clean taste. US cheesecake is much heavier and cream-cheesier and richer. I get it at the Sun Moulin bakery on the top floor of Isetan in BKK.
Yes, I should have pointed out that even though it’s named “cheesecake”, it is not at all what we Americans think of as cheesecake.
Watching the video of the Japanese cheesecake recipe again, I see an important point: almost half of the flour in the recipe has been replaced by cornstarch. This is a big difference from American cakes. I’m betting that that pillowy, fine foam texture owes a lot to the cornstarch. If I were a more ambitious baker, I’d attempt this cake at home.
However, I might apply the cornstarch idea to a plain yellow spongecake and see how it turns out. It’s worth the experiment.
Since starting this thread, I visited a couple of Japanese bakeries in Silicon Valley to see if they didn’t sell this cake. They all knew what I was talking about, but nobody made it.