Will It Be Sous Vide? Cream Cheesecake Edition
Hello everyone, and welcome back to yet another seething Will It Sous Vide? , a column where you can tell me what to do with my exact Anova slab . (If you need a quick guide to sous vide cooking, check out our guide here .)
The most popular topic for Monday’s proposals was cheesecake , which received a whopping sixteen stars:
As PhilMills_Forgot_His_Burner_Key pointed out the week before, the tender, moist character of sous vide cooking works well for this kind of dessert:
I was actually pretty optimistic about this little experiment. I had seen several cheesecake recipes on the Anova website , so I popped in to find out more. Unfortunately, there was no recipe for a simple cheesecake. There was pumpkin cheesecake, chocolate cheesecake, and ricotta cheesecake, but I wanted to make a simple damn simple cheesecake. (Though perhaps pumpkin cheesecake would have been the more “basic” of the two.) Instead of using any of the Anova recipes, I borrowed their methods and applied them to the Kitchn cheesecake recipe I made earlier (using the oven ) and thoroughly enjoyed it.
From what is on the Internet (both on Anova’s website and some other blogs), there are three main methods of making sous-video cheesecake:
- Just put a whole cheesecake in there . Yes, you read that correctly. In this pumpkin cheesecake recipe, chef Barbara Freda suggests wrapping a 10-inch cheesecake mold in foil, placing it in a two-gallon bag, and submerging it all in a water bath. I was worried it would work, but I tried it anyway, because that’s the whole point of this column.
- Divide into jars . Instead of wrestling with plastic bags, you press the crust mixture to the bottom of the jar, pour the dough over the top, seal tightly and cook at 80 degrees Celsius for two hours, then chilled in the refrigerator for at least four hours. So I baked two small cheesecakes.
- Sous vide then bake . In this recipe, you make the filling in a bag, then place it in a baking dish and then bake it. It wasn’t sous-video intensive enough for my taste, so I skipped it. (It’s all about not using the oven.)
Let’s talk about this “toss cheesecake in a bag” method. It all starts out simple enough. You make a crust, you bake that crust. Make the filling, pour the filling over the crust. All of this is quite doable. But there is one more thing:
Cover the pot with foil. Place the skillet in a very large (2 gallon) zippered plastic bag. Submerge it gently in water to create a vacuum seal in the zippered bag.
Problems arose immediately. First of all, the cheesecake needs to be inserted into the bag from the side, which makes it difficult to dip as the part of the bag with the zipper is now parallel to the cake instead of perpendicular as is the case with most sous vide applications. Trying to submerge the pan without tilting it into 80-degree water without letting lightning strike said water was nearly impossible (and painful), so I filled the sink with cool water and submerged it there. Miraculously, I was able to release almost all the air without getting into the bag. Then I put the cake in hot water, where it floated on top.
I wanted to submerge as much of it under the water as possible, so I put my largest metal spatula on it, weighing it just enough to push it under the surface.
I was very happy with my little tweak and started to feel like things could turn out well. (Narration by Ron Howard: But it didn’t work.) Then I turned my attention to the cans. I put two tablespoons of Graham’s cracker crust mixture in two stone jars and tamped it down. I put one in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for five minutes to see if the crust was affected by the pre-baking. I then filled the jars 3/4 full with cheesecake dough, leaving some room for expansion. They were thrown into the bathtub using a spring-formed pan and everything seemed to be going smoothly.
Less than five minutes later, I noticed that the aluminum covering the top of the spring mold was bulging, causing the whole thing to tilt to one side.
I tried to play with the trowel, pushing it to the side, trying to correct the tilt. During all this fuss, the bag broke and a whole cheesecake splashed into my water bath. The ensuing panic was serious and, to an outside observer, probably funny. I miss what kids call “chills,” so I plunged my hands into the tub, yanked out the (very hot) pot, and spilled (very hot, cheesecake added) water on myself, my countertops, and my floor. Then, and only then, it occurred to me that I should turn off my Anova to prevent clogging and general roughness of the equipment.
I now had 12 cloudy liters of cheesecake water, two very wet socks, and one very rough cheesecake. Although, apparently, the cake was starting to freeze, and perhaps everything would have worked out well if the bag had held it together.
Can this be prevented? Maybe. If I were to use a real vacuum bag that is stiffer and thicker than zip bags, it probably wouldn’t rip, and I would probably eat a whole cheesecake. ANYWAY. The recipe specifically instructed me to use the zipper bag and specifically provided for the immersion seal method, so I basically had to do it that way. Also, I don’t have a vacuum sealant and never needed one as the immersion method has always worked well for me.
Luckily, I still had the cheesecake cans and transferred them to a cleaner, smaller water bath.
They were cooked for a total of two hours at 80 degrees Celsius, after which they were taken out of the bath and set at room temperature for half an hour, and then placed in the refrigerator for 4 hours. In short, they were damn delicious.
Both cans had one of the most delicious, creamy and silky cheesecakes I have ever eaten. In fact, I have no criticism here. However, I recommend briefly pre-baking the crusts as this will prevent the crumbs from floating into the dough like they did in the bottom jar (which I didn’t bake beforehand).
Returning to the main question: Will there be a sous vide cheesecake?
The answer is yes. Yes, it will, and pretty pretty, but I (obviously) strongly recommend the can method, not the bag-pan method. Even if the bag didn’t break, the canned cheesecakes were easier to pick up and cook faster than their bagged ones, and they were pretty darn delicious.