Here’s the recipe for Cordon Rose Cheesecake, the best recipe I’ve encountered (Americans, use 1 lb. cream cheese). Note that hers is a crust-free cheesecake; Bricker is right that a good crust for a cheesecake consists of graham cracker crumbs, melted butter, and sugar, which you smoosh together and then prebake before pouring in the cheesecake (at least, that’s how I do it). You can also use chocolate wafer crumbs.
Nevertheless, in reviewing the recipe, I’m gonna amend what I said before: I think that my $15-$20 calculation for ingredients must have included add-ons like strawberries, chocolate, etc.
Yup. Also very important (and I speak from bitter experience): wrapping the pan securely and thoroughly in tinfoil. You know what’s sadder than working so hard to make a cheesecake, and then taking it out of the oven and realizing that the water bath haas soaked into the pan and mixed with the cake, ruining it? Me neither.
We may have finally found an issue up which Bricker and I can agree. I like to use Oreo cookies for the crust. Don’t even scrape out the cream. You can cut back or even eliminate the added sugar that way.
I bought a cheesecake from Junior’s (near MSG) in New York when we were in the city last spring. It had to cost about $30 and the damned thing weighed a ton. By the time I schlepped it all the way back to our hotel (in Koreatown) my arms were falling off.
Okay, maybe I was exaggerating a little about that. Actually, I definitely was since I use five bricks of cream cheese and they are a little over a dollar a pack. But it still comes out to under ten dollars. Personally, I don’t know how someone can live with themselves after spending thirty dollars on a cake, “first class” or not. Maybe I don’t know the “pleasure” of a New York cheesecake, but I can look at myself in the mirror.
Yes indeedy, although I don’t use the Oreo crust unless I’m doing a chocolate cheesecake of some variety.
True dat.
Now, if you want to move into the non-springform territory – parchment paper lining and a heavy regular cake pan – you can avoid the heartbreak of seepage. But you have to be somewhat experienced here. The springform pan is much better for beginners and intermediate cheesecake cooks.
Well, I would say your cheesecake palette is not that discriminating.
It’s like fine wine, fine scotch, fine anything. If you can’t taste the difference between a $5 bottle of zinfandel and a $50 bottle of semillion, then there’s no reason to spring for the $50 bottle. No shame in it, but I wouldn’t try to extrapolate your ability to taste to the world at large; there ARE people that can tell the difference, and see the extra dollars as a worthy investment.
I’ve seduced women with my cheesecake. Top flight cheesecake is a worthy prize, and worth a few extra dollars. To me.
Don’t know if this is still a pit worthy thread as I am to fucking lazy to read the whole damn thread. However fuck all of you for talking so much about yummy cheesecake. Fuck all of you for linking to sites with yummy cheesecake. Fuck, I want some cheesecake.
I don’t think $30 is too outrageous for a cheesecake, as long as it’s good.
If it were the same Marie Callendar’s cheesecake that used to cost $13.99, that’s one thing. But apparently it’s not. I actually find it hard to imagine that the $13.99 cheesecake could have been all that good, because that’s dirt cheap when you factor in ingredients, labor, storage, shipping, etc.
I bought a large cheesecake at Costco recently for $14.99 and it was pretty darn good but nowhere near as good as The Cheesecake Factory’s or Alden Merrill’s versions. I wouldn’t have minded paying $10 more for something really fantastic. I figure they price it cheap as a loss leader.
The people who are saying they can make, and could or should sell, *excellent *cheesecakes for $3.00 or $10.00 or whatever are grossly underestimating the time-value of your labor.
Neurotik, mascarpone is cream cheese. Substitute freely.
But I don’t see how the ingredients can cost you $20.00 unless you’re adding exotic ingredients like $20/pound chocolate. Cheesecake at base is cream cheese, sugar and eggs. Cream cheese isn’t dirt cheap but it isn’t that expensive, especially if you buy it in blocks rather than 8 ounce packages.
Btw, Oreos for the crust? Second rate. Nabisco Famous Wafers.
And for chocolate cheesecakes I find cocoa to be much better than chocolate. Cocoa helps to set the cheesecake and increase density. Add almonds to the crust and ammaretto and extra vanilla to the filling.
Our Costco carries Cheesecake Factory cheesecake, both plain and in four different varieties. Cost about $10 for one (They are about 8 inch diameter, IIRC). Compare to $4-5 a slice at the Cheesecake Factory.
The one I bought wasn’t a CF-brand cheesecake (kept in the cold section); this was a Costco-made cake in the bakery section. I’ve had the CF type from Costco but since I found a foreign object in it (just paper, nothing too gross) I will never buy one again. (Yes, I know that’s irrational.)
The Costco-made cheesecake was a 10 or 12" with strawberries. It could serve at least 15 people, if not more. So it was a good and to me, cheap, price.
So if your ingredients cost something like eight bucks, the thirty-dollar Marie Callendar’s cheesecake isn’t so far off the mark, especially given that Left Hand of Dorkness said that bakeries charge triple the cost of ingredients.
