I love Italian Food...but my god do they Ruin a Cheesecake

[MadBadger]

Cheesecake is my favorite dessert...scratch that. Its my favorite food. But a cheesecake with ricotta instead of cream cheese is just Bleh!

[BrklynLiberal]

1. yep

[MrScorpio]

2. Anything other than regular Philly is just plain wrong

Take it from a guy who makes great cheesecakes

[MadBadger]

4. How many eggs do you make your cheesecakes with?

I use two recipes and both taste great. One is a plain cheesecake and the other is a chocolate cheesecake, both with 2 lbs of cream cheese. I cant really tell if one taste better than the other because they are so different. The plain one only calls for 2 eggs while the chocolate one calls for four. I'm trying to develop my own generic recipe for cheesecake but I cant figure out the right amount of eggs to use and what more or less eggs does to a cheesecake.

[MrScorpio]

5. I use Egg Beaters

The stuff is a great time saver

I use the Egg Beater equiv. of 4 eggs.

[unpossibles]

3. I disagree

maybe you've just not had a good one. The cheese needs to be top quality so as not to be gritty.

[Kat45]

6. Ricotta pie is the best!

It's not exactly a cheesecake; it's similar but different. I love it but don't see it around very often. I'm psyched because I found an old fashioned Italian bakery in the next town that makes a delicious ricotta pie. :9

[Amerigo Vespucci]

7. I'm Italian, and I've gotta tell ya...

...I grew up in Massachusetts, surrounded by a lot of Italians, and my grandmother lived in Somerville, a suburb of Boston jam-packed with Italians. As a kid my dad used to drive me there for visits and there was this Italian bakery where we would always stop and get a fresh loaf of bread for her. The bread was killer...fresh daily, sesame seeds on the crust, and they'd put it on one of those foot pedal-operated slicers with the wires. That thing smelled up the car for the remaining five miles to her house and it was wondferful. We'd get her cookies too and after trying a few here and there, I decided they weren't my thing.

I've had all kinds of Italian cookies, Sfogliatelle ("Shfooyadell"), etc, sweets in general, and I don't consider them to be the strong point of Italian cuisine. Most of the stuff had a bland sameness to it...a lot of anise, similar ingredients.