Food, Photography and Bon Mots
Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. These recipes are our “Oldies But Goodies.”Here is a recipe for a tasty Macaroni Salad that appeared on Blue Cayenne in 2015: Macaroni Salad. You don’t want to miss this great…
Need some recipes for dinner dishes that you can make right from the pantry? There are nights when I sure do! Here is a cookbook for you to consider. It is Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Shelf Love. The premise of the book is just that—recipes…
I usually march to the beat of my own drummer, but the crush of interest in recipes for Burnt Basque Cheesecake has piqued my interest.
It turns out that Burnt Basque Cheesecake originated in the 1990s as a Tarta de Queso at La Vina Restaurant in San Sebastian, Spain. The quirky cheesecake eventually caught the attention of several top chefs in the United States and The New York Times’ Kim Severson named the cheesecake “the taste of the year” in 2020. Interest in the cheesecake exploded.
So, what’s so special?
A Basque Cheesecake is a crustless cheesecake baked at a high temperature (400 degrees F.!). The high temperature bake produces a tall cheesecake with a deeply caramelized exterior that appears burnt but tastes divine.
I decided to give it a go. It is a really easy recipe. The reviews for the cake were effusive. And, who passes up an opportunity to enjoy a cheesecake? (Not moi.)
You’ll find a lot of recipes for Burnt Basque Cheesecake on the Internet. The recipe I used was from Bon Appetit here. Bon Appetit suggests you enjoy this cheesecake with a glass of sherry. Why not?
If this Basque Cheesecake intrigues you, you might want to compare it to a traditional American cheesecake. Blue Cayenne has a recipe for an extraordinary (not a word I use often) cheesecake here.
This is a beauty of a galette–redolent with lightly-caramelized onions, loaded with tender potatoes and sitting atop a layer of Boursin cheese and a generous crisp crust. There is a lot of love here. A galette, by the way, is a rustic free-form tart from…
Raisin Bread, you ask? Who invented Raisin Bread? Lest we look too deeply, the answer would seem to be Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s biographer, Walter Harding, credited him with the recipe, after all. But…alas… Harding later retracted that colorful claim when he learned that the…
