How to: prevent cracks and other cheesecake problems

Do your cheesecakes crack? A cracked top is probably the most common cheesecake problem and might be the genesis for the fruit toppings some use: hide the evidence. It’s easy to prevent. Before you give up on making cheesecake, try these tips to avoid problems altogether and learn how to make a better cheesecake.

Why did my cheesecake crack? Usually because it baked too long. Often because it was beaten too much. Sometimes both. And then there’s contraction. Let’s take those individually.

• Baking – Like custard pies, its close relative, a cheesecake should be pulled from the oven before it looks done and indeed before it is done. Cheesecakes finish and become firm only after they’ve cooled and have chilled for several hours. The jiggly center I discussed for custard pies in 2007 also applies to cheesecakes, but moreso. While I look for a jiggly center of about one inch for custard pies, I remove cheesecakes when the center three inches look uncooked and wet. As food scientist Shirley Corriher says in Bakewise, “Cheesecakes are the most deceptive dish in cooking…You know that it can’t possibly be done. You have to have faith and place it in the refrigerator.”

• Beating – I dislike that word in cheesecake recipes because it implies more beating than sound technique requires. Beating beats air into the batter, so like a souffle, an overbeaten cheesecake can and probably will rise then fall. If it doesn’t lead to cracks (think pumpkin pie) it almost surely means a cratered top. Get the fruit topping and fill it in! Not any longer. The solution is to have everything at room temperature so the ingredients blend quickly. The cream cheese should not just be softened, it should be soft. I leave mine on the counter overnight if I plan to bake in the morning or from morning on if baking that evening. In the photos below that illustrate these points, the center might appear slightly sunken but that is an effect of the lighting and shadows. The final shows the top is fine. And I apologize for the photos, taken under three very different lighting conditions.

• Contraction – When a cheesecake comes out of the oven, I do as Nick Malgieri instructs and pick up a thin knife immediately and run it along the edges, pressing the knife against the pan, to loosen the top. Cheesecake contracts as it cools and if the top edge remains stuck to the pan when it shrinks, guess what happens? Cracking.

Do I need to use a water bath (bain marie) to make cheesecake? Not always. If the batter has starch, usually in the form of corn starch or flour, no you do not. As Corriher, a chemist, explained in her first book, Cookwise, the texture of custardy egg-thickened dishes changes slightly when starch is introduced. but it changes enough in terms of firming that no water bath is required. She elaborates on this chemistry in Bakewise but the takeaway is: a little starch, skip the bath.

Should I cool cheesecake in the oven? No! I don’t know where the misconception began that cheesecakes should be cooled in a turned-off oven, with or without the door partly open, to prevent cracks purportedly caused by the cake leaving the heat of the oven. There is no scientific basis for this; it’s not as if it’s going suddenly from 800° to the freezer. If you employ this “trick” and believe it’s the reason you have crack-free cheesecakes, know that the real reason is you did something very right when making it. Continue doing it if you wish, but I’d rather have my cheesecake cooling and chilling and on its way to being done and served.

Some recipes are written to complete the cooking of the cheesecake in a turned-off oven and then it’s promptly removed. That’s very different and those recipes nearly always make that clear. Julia said it best: Ovens are for cooking, not cooling.

Cheesecakes are not delicate flowers; they’re dense, especially New York-style cheesecakes like the one here, and when properly made, baked and chilled they are sturdy enough to remove from the bottom of a springform pan by inverting onto a plate and re-inverting onto a serving plate.

Probably only pie crusts cause more angst in a home kitchen than cheesecakes, but it doesn’t have to be that way, not when science and good technique are on your side.

Related post on From Scratch: Chill. And Other Pie Crust Tips The recipe for this cheesecake, with a brief history of New York-style cheesecakes, is at Real New York Cheesecake.

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Tagged as: cheesecake, desserts, food science