la.foodblogging

Others: How pretty! What is this? A cheesecake?
Sarah: A ricotta cheesecake. (They taste.)
Others: It doesn’t taste like a cheesecake. It’s kinda grainy.
Sarah: Well, it’s made with ricotta, not cream cheese, so it’s different.
Others: Oh. Cheesecake Factory tastes better.

So if your friends and family are happy with that texture-less, dense, *ickie* thick, overly sugared stuff that they call cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, you shouldn’t make this cheesecake like I did. It’s made with ricotta cheese, so though it looks the same, it tastes very very different. It’s grainier, drier, lighter (not necessarily healthier, but that doesn’t matter anyway) all due to the ricotta cheese. But that’s exactly what is so delicious about this ricotta cheesecake. Plus, it’s such a nice palette for produce from the farmers markets. I like strawberries.

The recipe is a hybrid of two recipes for ricotta cheesecake from epicurious and Gale Gand over at the FoodNetwork. Yes, hybridizing recipes for baking is usually pretty dangerous for an amateur like me since baking is a fairly exact science. But cheesecakes are rather forgiving, since there’s not a whole lot of chemical leavening involved. *phew* I hate measuring. And I definitely love opening the oven door at least five times during baking.

Just type “ricotta cheesecake” in the search box on either site and the results are manageable.

And if you still want to make it and feed it to Cheesecake Factory fans, just don’t call it a cheesecake in the first place. If you call it a…ricotta tart, then they’ll think it’s the best (only) one they’ve ever tasted.

By sarah (see more of her posts). You can find more of sarah's writing at her own website The Delicious Life