Not Your Mother’s Cheesecake

This week on design*sponge we featured a recipe for “Cheese fries”.  It reminded me of a lot of things, not least the time I was in Paris with Baby Alice and we were given cheese skewers in a Sushi bar, to Baby Alice’s dismay.  “CHEESE IN A JAPANESE RESTAURANT!”…When I did the cheese fries post, ironically enough, the recipe belonged to a Japanese person…  Baby Alice and I had a good laugh.

When I think of cheese though, living in Italy, I think of…Cheese.  The Slow Food event which alternates with Salone del Gusto every other year (and to which I will go in September).  I think of Neal’s Yard Dairy, which can be found in London at Borough Market.  I think of huge textured wheels with  rinds in various whites or yellows or covered in soaked wine leaves or chestnut leaves.  I think creamy, sharp, crumbly, mild.  I think of savory cheesecake.  Nobody in my family ever made a sweet cheesecake, or any cheesecake for that matter, so I have no idea why I craved this, but every so often when I do crave some sort of food out of the blue, I follow that craving to a cookbook.  I found a recipe for a savory cheesecake, Dry Jack Cheesecake, in Marcel Desaulnier’s Trellis Cookbook and made it for a party because I could start it a day or two ahead and get it out of the way.  I ran around like a turkey with my head cut off during the party and had no time to taste anything I had prepared, but heard from the living room that the cheesecake was mindnumbing and the first thing to go.  Let me admit here, I had to taste a tiny sliver that my friend left on her plate.  That was all that was left of it. Even that tiny sliver was enough to send me to the moon and back.

The cheesecake is made of cream cheese, egg, a sharper cheese and a milder Swiss family cheese, chives, and cracked black peppercorns, and parmesan.  The crust is made from crackercrumbs binded with butter and parmesan.  It is cooked in three stages at three temperatures, and like a sweet cheesecake, left in a cooling oven to set up properly and prevent cracking.  I only turn one out every so often without the crack, but I don’t worry.  There is no flavor leakage.   I’ve just recently perfected the crust.  It is recommended served room temperature, but I think any temperature is the right temperature, and just heated in the frying pan is probably sin on sin (the first sin being eating a slice of cheese and egg baked in a buttery cheesy crust).

I used to make the full recipe, a 9″ cheesecake, but since my sidekick was quite good at eating it all by himself, I have resorted to making a half recipe, which he incidentally learned to savor slowly.  When I made this one in the photo, I made my sidekick a plate with roasted red pepper chutney (the result of a Jamie Oliver Welsh Rarebit recipe craving) on a bed of arugula.  It sounds incredibly pretentious, and if I read someone else writing this, I’d think they were an idiot.   But if you ate it, you would love me, just like my sidekick’s friends who come here to see me.  I mean, only for the food I’m sure…

So, I’m leaving you on the edge of your seat.  What’s the recipe??  What are the proportions??   Maybe if you’re my friend on facebook, I can tell you…

Oh, and if you don’t like chives or onions, please don’t write me to tell me…