Important cheesecake tip

[soc_puppet]

You can really beat the shit out of your cream cheese for pretty much as long as you want as long as you do it before you add any other ingredients.

(I imagine this works for butter and the standard creaming method as well, but I haven't tried it yet.)

Also, Philadelphia cream cheese is legit worth the extra money when it comes to making cheesecake.

Brought to you by me remembering that making cheesecake is a thing that people do sometimes outside of a professional setting.

Comments

[gwydion]

My late ex Skye made restaurant level cheesecake. Philadelphi cream cheese is definitely worth it.

[soc_puppet]

Current professional hotel baker has to occasionally make cheesecake; the switch to Philadelphia cream cheese some five-and-a-half years ago or so was one of the only good suggestions by my then-boss.

[primsong]

What makes it better? Does it have a higher cream content, or less salt or....? I know there's a big difference in cheap butter vs nice butter, so perhaps it is just straight up a better quality cream in the first place?

[soc_puppet]

SO it's been some five-and-a-half years since we made the switch, but IIRC it's got less tendency to leave unmixed lumps in the batter than other brands. I don't know why this is, but unmixed lumps are enough of a bane that I'm not too worried about finding out why. (I had a good number of unmixed lumps in my first cheesecake for my official baking classes. I ended up working all of my batter through a strainer by hand to keep from over-mixing it. It was not pleasant.)

[dinoblob]

Do you have a go-to recipe? I love cheesecake, but never attempted making my own. :o

[soc_puppet]

We've got a really good one at work! I'll have to ask my boss, see if I can get a copy of the individual-size recipe to share or link. (Making ten-plus cheesecakes at once can be a pain even if you do have the right equipment!)

[redsixwing]

Mmmmm.

Experiments with making butter at home have shown me that you can work butter, once it IS butter, until you're very tired of working it, and it will happily continue to be butter.

(This is important if you're, say, working all the buttermilk out of your butter.)

[soc_puppet]

This is true! Come to think of it, there's both whipped butter and whipped cream cheese available, which may support this theory. I'll probably want to wait to try it out on my own time rather than at work, but still.