Cheesecake

I was flipping through my cookbooks last week looking for some recipes for the week when I came across a recipe for cheesecake. This tangy and slightly sweet dessert sounded really good and luckily I had no ice cream in the freezer, so I got to work experimenting with this flavor.

Rating: 5 scoops

This recipe was delicious and well worth the extra effort I had to put into it to make a cheesecake (minus the crust) only to briefly admire it before blitzing it into the ice cream base. The tang of the cream cheese really came through and there was a slight sourness that was contributed by the crème fraîche in the cheesecake.

This was also one of the creamiest and smoothest ice creams I've ever had! The stabilizers contributed by the cream cheese helped capture air in the base and keep large ice crystals from forming. I was a bit delayed in writing this post and found that the ice cream was still very smooth even after a few days in a home freezer, which shows the power of stabilizers to contain the free water in the ice cream.

I started with making the crust-less cheesecake. Because I was ultimately going to blend it, the final appearance didn't matter too much and so it was baked in a round cake pan to easily scoop out later. A pound of the the namesake ingredient - cream cheese - went in along with some crème fraîche to provide some additional tangy complexity as well as to lighten the flavor a bit.

Once the cheesecake cooled, I scooped it into the food processor to be pureed. I misunderstood the recipe and ended up freezing the entire cheesecake first before blending it, which put a little bit of stress on the food processor to break up the firm chunks. It would have been easier to just puree the room temperature cheesecake, but on the plus side I discovered that frozen cheesecake pieces are delicious and would make a great mix-in for ice cream.

The base itself was simple. Because the cheesecake contained a significant amount of fat and protein, only milk (no cream) was used in this recipe.

Once the sugars had been dissolved in the milk and cooled, everything was blended together to make a cheesecake smoothie. It was tempting to drink this mixture, but I let it cure overnight to be churned the next day.

While this was a classic vanilla cheesecake, this recipe could be extended to flavored cheesecakes. Alternatively, the use of mix-ins or ripples would add additional flavor. An Oreo cheesecake sounds good, so I may need to make that in the future!