Pure, Plain, and Simple: The One that Started It All
“Eli dispelled everything we knew about cheesecake.” —Jolene Worthington
PERFECTING THE CHEESECAKE
When Jolene Worthington first arrived at The Eli’s Cheesecake Company, Eli himself presented her with a cheesecake and charged her with the task of making every cheesecake perfect on a much larger scale and also adding more varieties to the lineup. Jolene, a superb, classically trained pastry chef, was game for the challenge; she approached the project in a very scientific manner. After all, baking is a science. When she experienced that first cheesecake, she was surprised at how beautiful it was, with its golden-brown caramelized top. “It had structure, and yet, it was a quivering custard inside,” said Jolene. In fact, she found that the cheesecake demonstrated so much inner strength that it could survive being tossed like a Frisbee on its journey from oven to cooling rack. Jolene realized then and there that although Eli had broken all the rules when it came to baking this new breed of cheesecake—no water bath, bake hot and fast—he had managed to unlock the secret of how to soufflé a rich, dense custard into a perfect cheesecake. That’s Chicago-style cheesecake.
Jolene created a standard of identity for The Eli’s Cheesecake Company by figuring out how to replicate Eli’s idea of a perfect cheesecake every time—what ingredients worked best, what temperatures achieved the signature golden color and caramelized top, and what baking times provided the best lift and structure.
The first few years of her work were characterized by trial and error. As Jolene switched from fifty-cake batches to batches of a few hundred at a time, new issues occasionally arose: some of the cakes cracked, collapsed, or exhibited other imperfections. To combat these variations, Jolene, Diana, and the rest of the cheesecake “whisperers” set out on a mission to figure out why, despite the fact that they were performing every step—tempering the ingredients, maintaining the same mixing times, baking times, and temperatures—in the same way each time, these problems kept occurring.
A 50-pound block of Eli’s custom cream cheese.
Diana takes the internal temperature of a cheesecake.
They discovered that not all ingredients are created equal. Different brands of cream cheese, sugar, sour cream, and even eggs all performed differently in the various batters. And even within the same brands, they occasionally found inconsistencies. The answer: Ordering ingredients in quantities large enough that the suppliers were willing to customize them in order to ensure consistency on all fronts. But at home, you don’t have to worry about baking hundreds of identical cakes at a time. Store-bought ingredients may vary, but rest assured that we have carefully tested these recipes in home kitchens, one cheesecake at a time, over the course of several months using ingredients from a variety of brands. These recipes are tried and true, and take ingredient variances into consideration.
Anyone reading this cookbook is the lucky beneficiary of more than 35 years of cheesecake know-how. Our scientific testing of ingredients and techniques will help you solve any cheesecake problems that may arise. This cookbook is divided into sections for Batters, Crusts, and Finishing Touches, and you’ll find some of our favorite combinations in Putting It All Together. This system offers so much flexibility and opportunity for creativity that if you combined one option from each section, you could bake 2,860 different cheesecakes! The Eli’s Cheesecake Cookbook doesn’t just give you delicious recipes; it empowers you, the home cook, with the knowledge and science behind baking the perfect cheesecake.
WHAT IS A CHICAGO-STYLE ELI’S ORIGINAL PLAIN?
Our cheesecake is simple—and that’s why it’s so good. We start with the cornerstone custard ingredients: sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Our recipe involves using a heavy mixer paddle to blend sugar, flour, and salt into thick slabs of cream cheese until the mixture becomes emulsified, or embedded with small air pockets. The small quantity of flour is there to improve the cheesecake’s mouth feel, helping transfer all those creamy fats to the tongue. Later on, we slowly mix in whole eggs and egg yolks. The mixture doubles in volume and becomes thick, yet vulnerable, like a soufflé. Last, we fold in cultured sour cream; its high fat content lends the cheesecake its luxurious taste.
The Ingredients
CULTURED CREAM CHEESE has been the structural backbone of American cheesecakes since Kraft first began to produce it in 1912. By the 1930s, when cheesecake recipes began appearing in cookbooks, cultured cream cheese became a convenient replacement for more traditional cheese. European immigrants traditionally churned separated, semi-solid, soured cream to make simple soft pot cheeses like cottage cheese, quark, and ricotta, as well as thick yogurts. Cultured cream cheese has a unique sweet and tangy flavor that comes from lactic acid, a by-product of the bacteria Lactococcus. This beneficial bacterium is necessary to produce the fermentation required to make crème fraîche, yogurt, and cheese.
The Eli’s Cheesecake Company only uses cultured fresh cream cheese and cultured sour cream. Adding fillers, stabilizers, or artificial ingredients ruins the simple custard taste and can lead to a dry and flavorless cake. Whether you bake it or set it with gelatin, cheesecake derives its body; its unique sweet, tangy flavor; and its perfect mouth feel from the 33 percent milk fat of the cream and milk in the cream cheese. The cultures added to the milk and cream ferment the mixture, generating the naturally occurring metabolic lactic acids. The acids quickly flourish and give body and sweetness to the culture. We only use real cream cheese—never “cream cheese blends” that aren’t all dairy. Because different brands of cream cheese have their own characteristic flavors, you should try several in order to select the one that tastes best to you. Pick one with a clean, sweet cheese flavor.
Armando guides Original Plain cheesecakes from the oven to the cooling tower.
The late Francis Cardinal George visiting Eli’s bakery production floor. Marc’s first assistant, Rita Tierny, arranged for Eli’s to send cheesecakes to Rome for the Cardinal’s induction. Eli’s is very near where the Cardinal grew up and attended St. Pascal’s Parish.
SOUR CREAM is also cultured. Just as with the cream cheese, the process produces a sweet taste that rounds out the natural lactic acid flavor notes in the batter. Diana Moles, vice president of research and development at The Eli’s Cheesecake Company, remarked, “We are so picky about our ingredients that we went to the dairy supplier and tested the sour cream every hour for 18 hours to achieve the perfect flavor and pH for our cheesecakes.” We don’t recommend acidified, noncultured, or “light” sour creams for any of our recipes, but crème fraîche is a tangy cousin to cultured sour cream that can replace the sour cream in our recipes. Sour cream will lighten the density of the cheesecake’s body as it whips faster and denser than whipped cream.
SUGAR adds sweetness and aids in the browning process. The sugar also allows these high-fat cheesecakes to be frozen and thawed without suffering any structural damage, as it helps produce small ice crystals like those found in ice cream.
EGGS govern the lightness, density, and structure of a cheesecake more than any other ingredient. A whole range of cheesecake textures can be achieved simply by manipulating the quantity of eggs in the batter. The egg’s yolk and white are both key ingredients that help emulsify, stabilize, and add body and flavor to a wide variety of desserts. With each bite of cheesecake you can feel the richness the yolks add to the batter and see the delicate amber color it adds to the finished dessert. The egg white, the other half of the miracle ingredient, adds protein and when whipped makes meringue to create a delicate texture.
FLOUR does not play an important structural role in cheesecake formulation. It is responsible for helping deliver flavorful caramelization of the crust and the desirable mouth feel one looks for in cheesecake.
VANILLA is a crucial flavor component of all Eli’s cheesecakes. We use only pure Madagascar Bourbon vanilla extract and vanilla beans from Nielsen-Massey Vanilla, a Certified Fair Trade company headquartered in Waukegan, Illinois. There, the very finest, handpicked vanilla beans undergo an exclusive cold extraction process that creates one of the finest vanilla extracts in the world. Like Eli’s, Nielsen-Massey is a family-owned business committed to quality and high standards.
After doing a project with the world-renowned architect Helmut Jahn to benefit the Chicago Children’s Museum, Marc and Maureen asked him to sketch the perfect cheesecake.
DEMYSTIFYING THE CHEESECAKE
TEMPERING AND MIXING: One of the most critical secrets at Eli’s involves tempering all the dairy ingredients used in our cakes’ batters. The cream cheese, eggs, and sour cream—so essential to the perfect Eli’s cheesecake—must reach room temperature prior to mixing. Cold cream cheese is very hard and difficult to aerate during the mixing process. All the little air cells needed to hold the rich fats together aren’t present if the cream cheese doesn’t have an opportunity to warm and soften.
The mixing process causes the fats to cream together, which is known as emulsification. In the case of a cheesecake, the emulsification process combines the cream cheese, eggs, and sour cream with the sugar, flour, and vanilla. Our cheesecake batters are mixed slowly and for a long period of time, which causes a chemical exchange of molecules that adds air to the batter. In a cheesecake, this air leavens the batter and enhances its tenderness and flavor.
Another critical step is using an upright stand mixer or hand mixer instead of a food processor to emulsify the batter. It takes 15 minutes to properly mix an Eli’s cheesecake, adding one ingredient at a time and scraping down the bowl after adding each ingredient. The high-speed blades of food processors can shear the proteins in the batter, which ultimately may collapse the cake.
If after the mixing process, you find that your batter is extremely runny instead of fluffy and thick, your dairy ingredients may have been too cold. You also may have overmixed the batter, which collapses the emulsification process and may cause the baked cake to crack or to fail to soufflé.
THE PAN: Our baking pans have flat, removable bottoms for easy removal of the cakes. They’re metal, which is essential for good heat transfer. Before the crusts are firmly packed in and the batters are poured, the pans are lightly greased and floured.
THE METHOD: A key technique to baking an Eli’s cheesecake is to start at a very high temperature and then reduce the temperature as the baking process continues. Many cheesecake recipes require a water bath (also known as a bain-marie), but ours do not. At Eli’s, we find that a very hot, dry oven helps evaporate the cheesecake’s excess moisture, allowing the cake’s surface to become lightly browned and mottled, like a well-caramelized custard. The high heat caramelizes the top, which traps steam underneath and actually cooks the cake.
Eli’s dream team, shown left to right: Juanita Chajon, Tara Lane, Aurelio Ayala, Laurel Boger, and Diana Moles.
PHOTO BY VITO PALMISANO.
Eli’s first mixer, 1980.
Decorators swirl raspberry coulis into cheesecake batter.
Another benefit of baking at a high temperature: Rapidly vaporizing the moisture in the batter helps inflate its air pockets, just like a soufflé. Sure enough, Eli’s cheesecakes rise out of the pan like soufflés. Once an Eli’s cheesecake comes out of the oven and rests, it continues to bake and release more steam until it slightly deflates into a firm, custard center.
How do we know when our cheesecakes are done? Here’s another secret: Eli’s expert bakers always remove the cheesecakes from the oven while they’re still very soft, jiggle a bit in the center, and appear not quite yet done. We know that the cake’s internal temperature will continue to rise another 5 to 10 degrees after it comes out of the oven, and thus it will continue to cook.
TRANSFERRING FROM OVEN, COOLING, AND CUTTING: We don’t disturb a cheesecake fresh out of the oven until its proteins have had a chance to coagulate and become firm, which takes at least 45 minutes to an hour. Too much handling can crack the cake’s surface. After a cheesecake sits for an hour at room temperature, we immediately release it from the sides of the pan and leave it sitting on the pan’s metal bottom. At that point, you can refrigerate your cheesecake overnight or even wrap it carefully and freeze it for 3 to 6 months before enjoying it.
Yet another secret: Everyone knows that cheesecakes are difficult to cut. At Eli’s, we freeze cheesecakes before we cut them, which leaves every slice with smooth, even sides.
DON’T FORGET THE SIX CRITICAL STEPS:
1. Make sure your eggs, cream cheese, and sour cream are warmed to room temperature.
2. During the mixing process, scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl after you add each ingredient.
3. Always mix the sugar and flour together before adding it to the cream cheese mixture.
4. You may be used to using just butter or cooking spray to coat your pan. At Eli’s, our trade secret is blending flour and vegetable oil to ensure an easy pan release. The addition of flour also creates a caramelization and golden color on the sides of your cheesecake. Simply whisk three tablespoons vegetable oil to one tablespoon all-purpose flour and generously brush the sides of the pan with a pastry brush or a paper towel.
5. Start baking at a very high temperature and then reduce the temperature as the baking process continues. Eli’s expert bakers always remove cheesecakes while they’re still very soft, jiggle a bit in the center, and appear not quite yet done.
6. Allow the cheesecake to sit undisturbed in its pan for about an hour after it comes out of the oven.