NY Cheesecake: How a Turf War Became an Institution

Everybody knows New York cheesecake when they see it: tall, rich, pale, deeply creamy, and substantial enough that one slice feels like a commitment. Ask exactly what makes it “New York,” though, and the clean definition starts falling apart. There is no protected formula, no single agreed-upon crust, and no historical recipe everyone can point to and call the original.

That is actually useful, because it means we can stop chasing some mythical “correct” cheesecake and pay attention to the stuff that matters. New York cheesecake is a style built through choices: cream cheese in the lead, enough structure to stand up cleanly on the plate, a smooth interior instead of an airy one, restrained browning, and a bake controlled well enough that the outside does not get wrecked waiting for the center to catch up. It’s iconic, straightforward goodness, and only tricky to make if you don’t know what you’re doing. So let’s figure it out.

HISTORY

HOW CHEESECAKE STARTED A WAR

About 100 years ago, the New York restaurateur Arnold Reuben laid claim to New York cheesecake. Around the same time, Leo Lindemann, owner of Lindy’s, poached Reuben’s pastry chef and had him recreate the popular dessert at his restaurant. Nothing about this conflict was a friendly competition: Reuben accused Lindemann of stealing his recipe, Lindemann more or less ignored him and went on selling it. Lindy’s became famous. Reuben was sad, more-or-less forgotten, and the entire time, cheesecake’s story kept getting weirder.

While Lindy and Reuben were fighting it out, New York restaurants, delis, and bakeries were making cheesecake too, and everybody kept tinkering with the details. Change the cheese. Change the crust. Make it richer. Make it taller. Add something. Take something out. New York had cooks bringing different cheesecake traditions with them from all over the culinary world, and now they had American cream cheese to play with too. New York cheesecake stopped being a single thing. It evolved into a recognizable style, not a recognizable recipe.

THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY EFFECT

For a huge number of Americans, The Cheesecake Factory is cheesecake. Tall slices, cream-cheese-heavy filling, graham-style crusts, and enough flavors and toppings to make choosing one require a committee meeting. Whatever cheesecake looked like in somebody’s grandmother’s New York kitchen, this is the version millions of modern diners learned to recognize.

And here’s a little bubble worth bursting: the restaurants don’t bake those cheesecakes in the restaurant kitchen. The company operates two large bakery production facilities—one in California and one in North Carolina—that produce roughly 60 varieties of cheesecakes and other desserts for its restaurants.

That doesn’t make their cheesecake somehow fake. It means something else entirely: Cheesecake Factory’s chain became so influential that it defined what an entire country expects cheesecake to be.

THEN JUNIOR’S SHOWED UP

A handful of decades after Reuben and Lindemann launched Cheesecake WWI, Harry Rosen opened Junior’s in Brooklyn. Rosen and baker Eigel Peterson set out to make a new cheesecake, one they hoped would become a classic. They worked through recipes and tastings until they landed on the cheesecake that became Junior’s signature dessert. Seventy-five years later, you can buy that cheesecake in the frozen-food aisle of your local grocery store. Junior’s has become the go-to cheesecake, the standard by which a whole lot of people measure every other version.

SAVE THE CHEESECAKE!

In 1981, Junior’s cheesecake was so important to the good people of Brooklyn that when a fire broke out at the restaurant, people gathered on the sidewalk chanting “Save the cheesecake!” Not the building. Not the tables. The cheesecake. At that point, I think you’re allowed to call yourself a New York institution.

SO WHAT ACTUALLY MAKES IT NEW YORK?

After all that fighting, we still don’t have one sacred recipe. We don’t have one required crust. We don’t even have one cheese that every old New York version used. What we do have is a recognizable style.

The New York cheesecake I want you to make is tall, rich, cream-cheese-forward, smooth instead of fluffy, dense without being dry, and firm enough to stand up in a serious slice. The top stays relatively pale. The inside stays creamy. Getting all of those things into the same cheesecake is where this stops being a history problem and starts becoming a cooking problem.

SO WHERE DID THE GRAHAM CRACKER CRUST COME FROM?

After all this, you might be wondering how graham cracker crusts got associated with cheesecake. I wondered the same thing. Turns out that about 100 years ago, Monroe Boston Strause, better known as the Pie King, got a good bit of advice from his mom: Why don’t you try using crushed graham crackers as a pie crust? He did. Other bakers picked up the idea, cheesecake tinkerers did too, and it spread.

Which brings us to the graham cracker crust we’re actually going to make.

BUILD A CRUST THAT STAYS TOGETHER

A graham cracker crust looks almost too easy: crumbs, butter, sugar, done. But there is still a little technique hiding in there. The crumbs need to be fine and consistent, because big chunks leave gaps and weak spots. The butter has to coat those crumbs thoroughly, and there needs to be enough of it to bind everything together once the crust is packed and baked.

Before it ever goes into the pan, grab a handful and squeeze it. It should hold together. If it immediately falls back into dry sand, putting it in a springform pan and hoping for the best isn’t going to improve the situation.

Then pack it firmly and evenly. You want pressure, not violence. A flat-bottomed measuring cup works beautifully for this because it compresses the crumbs without digging trenches through them. Pay particular attention to the edge where the bottom meets the side of the pan; loose crumbs hiding there become the first piece of crust to fall apart when you slice the cheesecake.

Prebaking sets the crust before several pounds of wet filling land on top of it. You’re not trying to turn it into a graham cracker paving stone. You’re giving the butter, sugar, and crumbs enough heat to become one crust instead of three ingredients occupying the same pan.

AND WHILE WE’RE TALKING ABOUT GRAHAM CRACKERS…

And while we’re talking about crust, I think we should pause for a brief second and talk about graham crackers. We got these delicious, cinnamon-sweet sheets of goodness thanks to the ideas of Sylvester Graham, a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister. Sylvester really believed pretty much everything interesting was bad for you and probably sinful. Alcohol, tobacco, rich foods, highly refined flour, sexual excesses—Sylvester had concerns.

Which makes what we’re about to do with his whole-grain health food—crush it up with sugar and butter and bury it underneath several pounds of cream cheese—feel just a little bit wrong and vaguely satisfying.

I suspect Sylvester would have had deep, deep concerns.

MAKE AND BAKE

THE FILLING IS DOING ITS OWN BALANCING ACT

Cream cheese supplies the mass, richness, tang, and body that define the style. Eggs provide the structure that turns all of that dairy into a sliceable custard. Sugar does more than sweeten; it affects how that custard sets. Sour cream or heavy cream shift the richness, moisture, and acidity, while starch provides some additional structural insurance.

The goal is enough structure to hold the cheesecake together without losing the creaminess that made us want cheesecake in the first place.

And pay attention to this: When I say we want to make a dense cheesecake, that doesn’t mean heavy or dry. We’re deliberately keeping air out, but we’re also trying to stop the eggs before they squeeze the creaminess out of the cheesecake. New York cheesecake should be substantial and creamy.

LUMPS ARE YOUR ENEMY

If you want a smooth cheesecake, start with cream cheese that is actually soft enough to mix. Cold cream cheese is stubborn. It leaves lumps, those lumps make you panic, and then you keep running the mixer trying to beat them out until you have solved one problem by creating another.

Use the paddle, not the whisk, and get the cream cheese and sugar completely smooth before the eggs go in. Then scrape the bowl like you mean it: sides, bottom, paddle. A batter can look beautiful from the top while a lump of cold cream cheese is hiding underneath it waiting to ruin your day.

Once the eggs go in, slow down. Add them gradually, mix only until they disappear into the batter, and then leave the damn thing alone. More mixing at that point is not making the cheesecake smoother. It’s just adding tiny air bubbles to the batter that are going to make your cheesecake cry when you put it in the oven (and make you cry when you pull it out).

And don’t get the cream cheese beautifully soft just to dump refrigerator-cold eggs and dairy into it. Let the refrigerated ingredients lose their chill too.

PUT YOUR CHEESECAKE IN THE HOT TUB

Refresh your memory on how thermal gradient affects cheesecake: the outside gets hot before the middle does. That’s an especially big problem with a tall cheesecake. The center has a long way to go, and while we’re waiting for it, the outside keeps cooking.

The water bath – also known as the bain-marie – slows that race down. Instead of the sides of the pan sitting in a screaming-hot dry oven, they’re surrounded by hot water that heats much more gently. The outside slows down and the middle gets time to catch up. Push the outside too far and the custard gets firm, then dry and grainy, and eventually you can get syneresis. The water bath doesn’t make any of that impossible. It gives us a much bigger target to hit.

There’s a little physics helping us out here too. Liquid water can’t get hotter than 212°F before it starts turning to steam. The oven air may be much hotter than that, but the water surrounding the pan creates a protective blanket, a gentle thermal buffer around the cheesecake. It also holds a lot of heat, which helps smooth out temperature swings when you open or close the oven door. That steady, gentle environment is exactly what this kind of custard wants.

Cool, huh?

BUILD THE BATH WITHOUT FLOODING THE CAKE

Springform pans are great because they come apart, which is really helpful to get the cheesecake out . These pans are slightly less charming when you’re going to let them go wading in the shallow end of the pool. Before you do anything else, wrap the outside of the pan with a large, intact sheet of heavy-duty foil, bring it high up the sides. Then do the same thing again and give it a second layer. Keep every seam above the eventual water line and check carefully for tears.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Find a roasting pan wider than your cheesecake pan. You need enough room for water to surround the springform without crowding it.
2. Set the wrapped cheesecake inside the empty roasting pan. If you want a little extra stability underneath, lay a folded kitchen towel in the bottom of the roasting pan first, then set the cheesecake on top.
3. Put the whole assembly onto the center oven rack before you add the water. Moving a roasting pan full of hot water and several pounds of cheesecake across the kitchen is… well, it’s stupid. Don’t do that.
4. Pour very hot water carefully into the roasting pan until it reaches about halfway up the outside of the springform. Pour around the cheesecake, not directly at the foil seams, and take your time.
5. Gently slide the rack back into the oven and leave it alone. The goal is a hot tub, not a swimming lesson. Be careful! Sloshing water into the cheesecake would be a disaster.

KNOW WHEN TO STOP

One of the easiest ways to ruin cheesecake is to keep baking because the middle still moves. Cheesecake is custard; it’s SUPPOSED to still show some movement in the center. The important part is how it moves. A properly set center jiggles together as one soft mass; an undercooked center ripples or sloshes like there’s liquid underneath the surface. If you bake it past the point of soft movement, congratulations, you just baked a giant, expensive Hockey Puck.

Take the temperature. We’re looking for 150–155°F in the center. Don’t stab the thing six times hunting for a number you like. Take a careful reading, look at the edges, watch the center move, and use all three pieces of information.

The time on the recipe only tells you when to start paying attention; it doesn’t tell you when the cheesecake is done. The timer has never met your oven. Cook time is an indicator, not a dictator. And here’s a fun Chef fact: this is a rule regardless of what you’re cooking. Cook times are rarely biblical.

COOL IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT

Lots of online baking sites recommend cooling a cheesecake slowly in a turned-off oven with the door cracked. That’s fine at home, I guess. It doesn’t really work in a commercial kitchen. In the bakery, cheesecakes are cooling on a worktable or speed rack.

That makes the next part pretty simple: leave it in the water bath until the water isn’t hot. Remove the foil, and move it somewhere with good air circulation. Never cover a hot cheesecake and trap all that steam against it, and don’t rush a hot cheesecake straight into the refrigerator. Let it cool for a couple hours at room temperature, then cover it and refrigerate it for at least 6 hours. Overnight is better.

And don’t cut into it warm because you’re impatient. That would be stupid. The filling is still soft, the fat hasn’t completely firmed back up, and nobody wants to eat hot, sweet cream cheese soup. We’re not making a today cheesecake. We’re making a tomorrow cheesecake.

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