How to Make Basque Cheesecake the Right Way (Don’t Burn It!)

How to Make Basque Cheesecake the Right Way (Don’t Burn It!)

[Music] Tangy, sweet, rich, and ultra creamy. The burnish top that’s almost burnt. This is bass [Music] cheesecake. Bass cheesecake has taken the world by storm. The unique characteristics of this cake are completely in opposition. This beautiful burnish top takes a high temperature bake. This molten, barely set, creamy center takes a low temperature bake. Seemingly simple, just a few ingredients. It is a challenge to get it just right. I’m going to show you how to get there. Going to blend the custard, minimizing the amount of air incorporated to make sure it’s super creamy. We’re going to cast it, bake it with a two temperature cook, high temperature to set the top, get this beautiful burnish, and then we’re going to drop the temp to make sure it’s cooked perfectly in the center. All along the way, I’m going to show you some techniques and tips for making the best bass cheesecake. So, we’re going to blend up the cheesecake base. Looking at the ingredients we have here, obviously eggs, vanilla for seasoning. We got heavy cream as a nice foundation for the texture, lots of sugar, bit of salt, and flour. Flour is going to help give a little bit of stability. Also, it’s going to help prevent any weepage in the cake. First off, we have the cream cheese. Cream cheese is easiest to work with, especially when blending when it has been tempered. Um, but if it’s cold out, it’ll be still pretty firm. So, easy workaround for that is just popping in the microwave. 30 second intervals, 50% power until when we get in there with a spatula, it’s nice and smooth. So, probably doesn’t look different, but it’s a lot softer now. So, this is a nice texture for blending. Pretty much any cheesecake you’ve seen, whether it’s New York or other types of variations, they’re going to be mixed up in a stand mixer by hand. The reason why we’re not doing that here is because we want to incorporate as little amount of air as possible. Solution for that, I found, is using a stick blender. So, I like to start off with a tall narrow vessel. This little Camro is great for me. I like it because it’s more stable. I can rest the immersion blender on the side. We’re going to start with all the ingredients. We got our eggs, our vanilla extract, got heavy cream. Then we have our dry ingredients over here. We have our sugar, salt, flour. I like to combine these ingredients first. This is important here cuz the name of the game is to not incorporate air. So, you want to make sure the head of the blender is fully submerged at all times, just below the top. that’s going to be pulling the ingredients in. It’s going to be blending it. If you’re blending close to the surface, this blender is going to be pulling so much air into it. So, I’m going to go right to the bottom. Here we go. It’s looking nice and smooth. Now, we’re going to add the cream cheese. If you’re in the States, you’re probably buying original Philadelphia at the grocery store. And a lot of these cream cheeses have stabilizers in them. That’s going to trap a lot of air that’s incorporated. I would say this stage of blending when the cream cheese is added, it’s paramount that you want to avoid adding the air. I’m going to put the head of the immersion blender in fully submerged. And I’m going to start blending. For this one, cuz there’s a lot more volume, I’m just raising and lowering it. And the mistake you’ll make at the beginning is you get a little excited because you see a huge clump of cream cheese and while you’re blending you want to go up and grab it. Just be sure you stop blending. Put the head of the immersion blender on it. Get back to [Music] it. So, we’re nowhere near done yet, but most of the clumps are started to be broken up. just about anything you’re blending or a batter for example, you’re going to want to start with blending on lower speed. Once all the ingredients are pretty incorporated, that’s when you can increase the speed of the blender. So, at this point, it’s a little hard to tell what’s going on in here. Like, have I incorporated all the cream cheese? What I’m watching is the corner. I’m creating a little vortex as it kind of cascades over if there are still some small chunks left in the batter. It’s very faint, but I can see how the light reflects off it. Just like right there, you’ll hit a pocket. So, the texture, if I was to describe it, it’s pretty much like a can of paint. Very smooth. Now, there’s two things we need to do. One is we just blended a little bit of air in there. You can see some of the air on the corners. There’s some kind of trapped in there that you can’t even see yet. What we’re going to do is we’re going to allow this to rest and that’s going to allow the air to rise up out of our beautiful base. Second thing while resting is we want to chill it. We want to transfer this to the fridge. We like to chill this for about 2 hours. Target temperature we’re looking for is 40° F. If you don’t want to wait those 2 hours and you want to get this going a little bit faster, you can put this on a bowl over ice, mix it for about 30 minutes at room temperature to just kind of jump start the chilling process and then transfer it to the fridge. Okay, time to prepare the pan and cast our cake. The pan we are using is spring form. That’s pretty important because it’s going to be easy to release and super easy to cut into awesome portions showcasing the interior. And to line the pan, I am using foil and parchment. Foil might be a little uncommon with these, but I use it for two reasons. Parchment, when you line the pan, as you crinkle it up to help line and get into all the nooks and crannies in there, it can easily rip. That’s going to be weak points where the batter can come through. Um, the foil is going to be beneath that lining the pan. Also, foil is a great conductor, so it might help us get a little bit of browning on all the edges. So, first thing I like to spray the pan with non-stick spray cuz I feel like it helps foil adhere to it really, really well. So, with your large piece of foil, we are going to kind of crinkle it up a little bit, making like a quasi dome type thing like this. That’s going to allow it to fit into the base of the pan. One thing I’m going to be doing throughout this whole process of lighting the pan is I am not pushing the foil down in the middle with my fingertips. I’m actually doing a lot of work on the sides, pressing it in. So, starting on one side here is my fingers kind of gently holding on to the foil with my left hand. And then with my right hand here, I’m pushing the foil down. my left hand when I feel that it hits the corner, I know that I’m all the way down to where I need to and then I press it against the side. It is important that on all sides, the lip here, there’s a little bit of foil exposed, just about an inch or so. All right, so now the foil’s flush to all the sides, packed into the corner. Dry towel just like to smooth it out. So, lining the pan with parchment. I found the easiest way to do this is to wad this up into a ball a couple times. Wading it up to the ball, it’s going to create a ton of little creases all over this going to make it a little bit more flexible. Just pretty similar to tissue paper. So, what I like to do is just spray this off a little bit and that’ll just help kind of release later on. The dry paper towel, spread it out. Super easy to work with. Yeah. What’s important here is making sure that your parchment is actually centered. Be aware of these two edges at the center. So, looking at both of these, I got like just over a/2 inch here. Got about a/2 inch there. And you really want to make sure that the parchment is overhanging the edge cuz you don’t want the batter to go over it and flow down into the foil. To me, this looks pretty center. Fine mesh sibs are great at removing large pockets of air. Also too, the batter seemed very, very, very smooth, but there’s always an off chance there’s a little bit of egg white or a little chunk of cream cheese. Straining it out just alleviate any of those issues. So, I stopped here. There’s a little bit of batter left. This is at the very top of the pan where it’s starting to cascade over. My goal here is to have the tallest cheesecake possible because I want to showcase how creamy it is in the center. If you’re uncomfortable with this, this is your first time doing some cheesecakes at this height, I would say stop here. But if you want to take it one step further like I do every single time, this is another reason for the foil. You can actually raise the foil up on the sides and then take your parchment and roll it over. This is going to create extra support. I don’t think I’ve seen a cheesecake taller than this. It’s great. So, we’re putting paper in the oven. You just want to make sure that the parchment paper isn’t like 3 in higher than the cake itself. We have all this extra paper on all the sides. So, with some scissors, we’re just going to trim it down. As this bakes, the parchment’s not going to move or anything. So, pretty much where you trim it and where it’s at now is just where it’s going to stay. With the first phase cook in the oven at the high temperature, you’re really pushing the top of this cake through the ringer while it’s getting that really toasty burnish top. Um, it’s setting the top as well as it’s going to begin to rise in some parts. So, to prevent any weak spots where there’s like large formations of bubbles, what I like to do with a skewer, you could use a fork or a knife, you’re just going to swirl it around just to break them up a little bit. Once we have those distributed, give a little tamp. Pop any large bubbles. Last but not least, I like to use a little heat shield in the oven. We’re going to take our cheesecake, pop it onto a sheetpan, cookie sheet, pie pan, something like this. With a bass cheesecake, you don’t have a crust. A crust is going to really protect the inside of your cheesecake, preventing it from overcooking from the bottom up. adding this heat shield. Whether it’s a sheet pan or cookie sheet, it’s going to help protect that bottom, act like our pie crust or graham crust, insulating a little bit. From here, we’re just going to go into the oven and start cooking. Time to bake the cheesecake. So, it’s going to be two phases to the bake. First bake phase is all about setting the top and getting our beautiful burnish color all the way across. So, we have it fully preheated to 420° F with convection. If your oven doesn’t have convection, all you need to do is raise the temperature of your oven up to 440. Inside the oven, we have it on a lower rack right here. In a conventional oven, you’re going to be doing lower middle. You’re just wanting about 3 in of clearance from the top of the cake and the elements. So, we’re going to transfer it to the oven. This is baking for 30 minutes. Every 10 minutes, we’re going to check on it. Rotate at 180. We should see the edges starting to sule up. They’ll be coming really dark on the edges. And you probably will see some burnish kind of spots forming in the very middle. But the end of this bake at 30 minutes, it will not have souled up, but it should be very dark in color. So the end of the first phase of the cook, we’ve locked in our beautiful burnish top, edge to edge, brown all the way across with no burnt spots. This is just what you’re looking for. It’s not a burnt cake. This is like smells super toasty at this point. Now we’re going to drop the temperature of the oven all the way down to 300 for the next phase of the cook for about 40 minutes. It’s about setting the perfectly creamy, barely set custard in the middle, cooking to an internal temperature of 115°. This should take about 40 minutes or so. For this round of the cook, we’re going to be rotating it 90° every 10 minutes. We want to keep it moving because if it sits in one spot for too long, it could still actually burn in certain areas. All right, so that’s the end of the second bake phase. So at this point, you want to temp it. You’re kind of looking to be within the window of 115 to nowhere above 125. All right. So when temping your cake, you just want to insert your instant read thermometer to the very center of the cake. What’s really important here is you don’t want to pull your cake out of the oven if it’s below 115°. So, at this point, the baking’s all done. We just got to let this sit at room temperature. Cooling is a very, very important step. You usually don’t think of carryover cooking with desserts. Usually, you’re thinking of a steak or a large hunk of meat that you pull from the oven and it carries over. Exactly the same concept here. We cook this in an oven at 420 degrees, then 300, and the heat is going to continue to transfer through the middle, warming it up. If you pulled this from the oven at our target temperature of 150, it would shoot way up that you would have a curdled cheesecake at that point. So, pulling it a little bit lower, it’s going to continue to climb to the perfect 150 for a really barely set, creamy cheesecake. From all the best cheesecakes I’ve made, everyone is a little bit different. Looking at this one, we have a really nice edgetoedge burnish. Looking around here, you can start to see spots that are a little bit darker. That’s nice. We caught it before it burnt. That’s generally my biggest concern is burning it. So, the color is just what we want. Some minor fissures, little cracks beginning to form. That’s one thing you can see with any bass cheesecake right on the edges, even the small ones like this. And you can see as you work around to this side, there’s a pretty substantial crack there. That doesn’t worry me at all. As this cools, that crack is going to seal itself up and it’s going to be great. Anytime when you’re cooking a custard above 400°, there’s going to be imperfections like that that might surface. So, if I was looking at this, probably a nine out of 10. This is pretty good. I’m happy with this. We’re just gonna let this sit at room temperature till it drops to about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a good temperature to transfer to the fridge. It’s going to chill in the fridge for I would recommend about 8 hours to chill all the way through, but then it’s going to be ready to serve. All right, slice and serve. With the bass cheesecake, there are some nuances to slicing it. I like to be set up with a large spatula. You’re just looking to be able to lift off the cheesecake. Another thing, when it comes time to remove the parchment, there’s almost like a crust that’s formed here. So, if you pull too hard, it might just rip off a piece of the cheesecake. So, just slowly work your way around. So, at this point, this cake is completely chilled. This came right out of the fridge, unmolded it. So, this is the best time to cut it when it’s fully set and chilled. And I do recommend using hot water for that. Having this warm knife will help cut through all that rich fattiness and get a perfectly clean slice. So, these portions are huge. I cut them this big to really show it off here on camera. But if you want to serve it more traditionally where this dish comes from in San Sebastian restaurant called a vignia, it’s about this big of a portion cut in half, two slices per plate to really showcase how this bass cheesecake is special. Just what we set out for. You look at this creamy inside. It’s like molten. It’s barely set. It’s beginning to ooze. It’s creamy. There’s no pockets of air. The top is a really, really thin, dare I say, like crust to it. Beautiful burnish top. Brown. No specks of black. Comes out clean slice. You know, it almost looks like a giant piece of triple crumb. This is just a glorious looking piece. Just what we’re looking for in a bass cheesecake. Now, let’s just see the texture of it. So, it’s like as you eat down, the texture changes at the very tip. It’s like super creamy. Doesn’t get any more velvety than that. It’s beautiful. It has all the flavors that you love about like a New York cheesecake. It’s It’s tangy. It’s sweet. It’s very indulgent, but it has this like denseness to it where it’s so creamy that as it kind of coats your palette, you get more of the cream cheese flavor. It’s less of this air, maybe crumbliness that’s really, really good in some cheesecakes. This is like silky smooth and just coats the palette and brings out more of the tanginess in the cream cheese. That is bass cheesecake done right. Subscribe to our channel and visit chefsteps.com for more tips, recipes, guides, and tools to help you level up in the kitchen. [Music]

The Basque cheesecake, created by chef Santiago Rivera at Restaurant La Viña in Donostia-San Sebastian, is one of the most iconic cheesecake innovations thanks to its “burnt” top and its creamy and custardy center. In this video, chef Nicholas Gavin shows you how to execute the preparation flawlessly. By resting the batter, using a two-stage baking process, and pulling the cheesecake out of the oven before it hits the target internal temperature, Nick demonstrates how to get that deeply burnished—not burnt!—top and the perfectly cooked interior, every single time.

For the full recipe and ingredients, sign up for Studio Pass at https://www.chefsteps.com/studiopass.

Or, check out our FREE Cheesecake: A Parametric Analysis: https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/cheesecake-parametric

Recipe:
Basque Cheesecake: https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/basque-cheesecake
Cheesecake: A Parametric Analysis: https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/cheesecake-parametric

Equipment:
Buy a Breville Joule® Oven Air Fryer Pro: https://breville.oie8.net/21W1WG
Buy a 9-inch by 3-inch Springform pan: https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Daddios-PSF-93-Springform-Silver/dp/B001VEI060?tag=chefsteps02-20

[Time Codes]
0:00 – How to make a Basque cheesecake
1:00 – Blend cheesecake base
5:24 – Prepare cake pan and cast the batter
10:36 – Bake the cheesecake
12:45 – Cool cheesecake
14:34 – Slice and serve

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ChefSteps 101: Through science, entertainment, and industry experience, we strive to help every home cook reach their full potential. With more than 1,000 recipes developed in our kitchen, there’s something for everyone. To find out more, visit our website: https://www.chefsteps.com/