- But back to the cheesecake.
(laughing)
We're talking about cheesecake today, Chelsea!
Jesus. Stop distracting me.
(beep)
What's going on, y'all?
It's Justin.
And today on Copycat Kitchen,
we are dealing with one of the biggest names
in fast casual food.
And by biggest, I don't just mean famous.
I also mean like size of the restaurant,
size of the menu, size of the desserts.
That's right, it's Cheesecake Factory, y'all.
(upbeat music)
We are going to be making their original cheesecake
with glazed strawberries.
This is a touchstone for almost everybody I know.
Entering into that weird, like Grecian, faux Egyptian,
medieval restaurant, having a dinner that's the size of a,
like, I don't know, like a frisbee and then
digging into an enormous, like, thousand calorie dessert
that is cheesecake.
It's iconic.
And we're going to recreate it.
I am psyched! Let's get into it.
I straight up don't know how to close this box.
(laughing)
This is so hard.
I feel like a five-year old.
- [Chelsea] You could try doing.
- Oh wait, no.
(beep)
The three things we need to recreate Cheesecake Factory's
iconic cheesecake is first, sour cream.
That's not only gonna add moisture,
but it's also gonna mirror that distinctive
slightly tangy taste in the cake.
Secondly, we're not going to use too much sugar.
This is not a cloyingly sweet dessert.
We are going to be focusing on rich, luscious creaminess.
So, only a cup of sugar.
And then third, we want those glazed strawberries.
They're going to add a beautiful pop of bright red color and
also some fruity acidity
that's going to balance out the dessert really, really well.
Let's get started.
Any half decent self-respecting cheesecake
is going to have a graham cracker crust.
I've seen people do crazy things with like
a short bread crust or an Oreo crust, but this cake,
as well as the classic Cheesecake Factory cheesecake crust,
is going to be made with graham crackers, butter and sugar.
It's really easy,
especially when you use a food processor.
In case you don't have a food processor,
you can just put these in a big, strong plastic bag
and crush them with either a meat tenderizer
or a rolling pin, but I think that the food processor
helps to get the uniform crumb
that you would see in the restaurant.
So the crust on a Cheesecake Factory cheesecake
comes up pretty high, almost like three quarters
in some of the cases all the way to the top of the cake.
So, we're going to use two entire sleeves
of graham crackers.
That's nine graham crackers total.
Not the halvesy little guys, whole 18 graham crackers.
Then we're going to use 12 tablespoons of melted butter and
six tablespoons of sugar to add a little bit more of a
sweetness and to give body and structure to our crust.
You want to process until we get a texture
that kind of resembles like wet sand,
something that can be sculpted like sand castle,
or in our case, into our spring form pan.
The only piece of maybe like niche baking equipment,
though if you don't have one you should probably buy one
because they're really useful,
that you're going to need for this cheesecake recipe
is a spring form pan.
You will not be able to dig your cheesecake
out of a regular cake pan.
I promise.
For this recipe req, we recommended eight inch pan
for a taller cake and nine inch for a little bit shorter.
We're going to give this a quick spray with cooking spray,
just to really make sure that we can release the spring form
and get the cake out when it's done.
And we're going to then press our crust into the sides and
the bottom of our cake pan.
It's going to come up pretty high,
maybe like two, three inches on the sides,
but we're split, we want to do that because that's how
the cake looks in the display case at Cheesecake Factory.
It came together super quickly and now it's
pressed into our pan.
Nice and pressed evenly.
Spend the extra two, three minutes to make sure
it's evenly distributed and it's all the same height,
it'll really make a difference
in the final presentation of the cake.
Half of what I love about Cheesecake Factory is how
beautiful all those cakes look.
So I'm going to set this aside and
we're going to get started on our filling.
What's amazing about this part of the cheesecake recipe is
just like we were able to do the crust
in the food processor all at once, no extra bowls,
we're going to be able to build the entire filling
in this mixer.
You can do it in a big bowl with a hand mixer,
but this is going to be a lot easier.
Before we do anything, before we even start mixing,
before we make the crust,
before you even start thinking about making a cheesecake,
you're gonna want to take out all of the ingredients
for this filling.
We want the eggs, sour cream and cream cheese
to be at room temperature.
That's going to make the mixing of this batter way easier.
And it's going to ensure that we have a smooth batter
that's pourable and won't have any lumps or
any clumpage in the cake when it's done.
First, we're going to go in with our very soft cream cheese,
and we're going to whip that two to three minutes
until it's nice and airy and totally flexible and
moveable with a spatula.
Then we're going to add our sugar.
We're going to cream that together
until there's one combined mixture.
Then we're going to go in one egg at a time,
making sure each egg is totally mixed in
before we go in with our next.
Then in with the sour cream,
adds some moisture, some body, a little bit of that tang.
Some vanilla, and then the dry ingredients,
which is just two tablespoons of flour and a pinch of salt.
We're going to pour our filling into our crust,
then get it into a water bath and into our 325 degree oven
and bake for an hour and a half.
Baking cheesecake can be pretty finicky.
Oftentimes it can be over baked, crumbly or crack
and the best way to avoid that,
if you're not an expert baker, like I'm not an expert baker,
is to use a water bath.
Basically we're going to put our cake in a
bigger baking dish and fill it up about halfway up
the cake tin with boiling water.
The steam created by that water bath is going to help
to keep our cake totally moist, perfectly cooked,
and to ensure that no cracking happens on top.
Technically, this isn't the original
Cheesecake Factory cheesecake.
That one has a sour cream topping, but instead,
we're going to focus on the strawberry cheesecake.
It is the most iconic cheesecake flavor,
not just at the Factory,
but anywhere you can get cheesecake.
The acidity, the fruitiness just perfectly balances out
the creaminess of the cheesecake itself.
And to start, we're going to make a slurry
out of warm water and cornstarch.
The strawberries that they put on their cheesecake
at the Factory are whole.
So we're going to just take off the tops and add that into a
saucepan with our slurry,
about a half a lemon of worth of juice
and a quarter cup of sugar.
We're going to get this over medium heat
and bring it up to a simmer.
And then we're just going to cook for
three to four to five minutes,
kind of just to your desired consistency and texture.
I like to be able to drizzle a little bit
of this sauce over, but some people want that, like,
thick glaze over the strawberries.
So the longer you cook it,
the more the cornstarch will thicken the mixture.
The sugar that we added will help to draw out
the natural juices and the natural sugar
in the strawberries and will create, like,
a hyper concentrated strawberry syrup
that will glaze our strawberries.
Strawberries also have a little bit of natural acidity,
but by adding lemon,
we just bring that out a little bit more and
just add a little bit more tartness to our syrup.
These are perfect.
They look unbelievable.
And it just, it's like a punch of strawberry
just to the nose and even just a little bit of a taste.
A little bit of sugar goes a really long way
and that lemon accentuates the strawberries
really, really well.
I'm going to let these cool to room temperature,
then get them into the fridge
until we're ready to top our cheesecake.
So you can see that we're basically done.
When I juggle the cake,
just that inside center is really jiggling a lot.
It's, the edges are pretty set.
This might go for another like five minutes,
but we're basically done.
To cool the cake, we need to bring it down totally to
room temperature before we even bother
putting it in the fridge and to do that gradually
so that the cake comes down and there's no sinkage,
there's no crackage,
we're going to actually turn off of our oven
and then just crack the door open,
I like to stick a spoon in
just to make sure it's definitely going to be open,
and we're going to let our oven sit like that for at least
an hour until our cake is totally room temp.
To get our cheesecake out, we're just going to take a
butter knife or a spatula and run it along
the edge of our crust, pop open this spring
and we should have a gorgeous uniform cheesecake.
I pushed a little tiny hole in it,
so please, for my benefit, like,
just pretend like it's not there.
Like, don't write a comment that saying that like,
wow, you really put a crack in that cheesecake.
Secret real behind the scenes,
I've made like three trees cakes over the past 24 hours and
I can't handle it.
I burnt one, I cracked two just let me have this.
Ignore it.
Just look, wow! Beautiful.
But just ignore that part, but then whoa!
Oh no. Perfect.
(beep)
So we're not going to top this entire thing with
strawberries because on each individual slice,
they dollop a couple of beautiful plump strawberries,
and then they do some nice swirls of whipped cream
that I made.
It's honestly not that hard of a recipe.
It just takes a little bit of time.
Yeah, you got to let it sit in the oven
for hour to cool perfectly, then you got to let it chill,
but then you get this really, really awesome result
with not a ton of ingredients,
nothing crazy, special or expensive.
That's why like it is, I'm going to say it,
it's the people's cake, baby!
People's cake!
It's honest, this is really, really good.
It's not too sweet.
I'm going to try it with this perfect strawberry on it.
I know that this is a cheesecake video, but that strawberry,
just that little acidity and that little strawberry note
really helps and cooking them in the sugar
helped soften them up.
And the cake itself, I mean, just look at it.
It's, it's perfectly creamy, luscious,
and really awesome crust that's, like,
has a good texture and a good sweetness as well
from the sugar.
All around, I'm pretty psyched about this.
And I think if this was placed in front of anybody at
Cheesecake Factory, they may not be able
to tell the difference.
If you like the copycat videos like this
first thing I'm going to ask you to do is to
like, and subscribe and then you're going to go on over
to delish.com for more copycat recipes just like this.
Until next time y'all.
(upbeat music)