Roasted Tomato Pasta

If I could live off two foods in life, it would be chocolate (which might be evident already) and pasta. My tendency goes towards cooking desserts, but every now and then, my sweet tooth feels quenched and my carb tooth (if that exists) starts itching. This is when I turn towards pasta, which I could eat everyday and be happy. I might be fat, but I’d be happy.

What I love about pasta is it’s so good, but can also be simple. Every now and then I like to make my own homemade pasta, or follow some recipe for an elaborate sauce, but most of the time, I love just throwing random, simple ingredients together. I used to lean towards heavy, creamy sauces, but lately, I’ve been experimenting a lot with tomato or olive oil based sauces and I’m loving them.

My old favorite used to be simple garlic, olive oil, then tomatoes and sometimes a bit of cream and some parmesan. I’ve recently discovered roasted tomatoes, and I’m waiting for it to get cold outside (blasphemy, I know, I actually hate cold weather, but warm food is my consolation), and I can start roasting up warm, tasty tomatoes, which happen to be a part of my new favorite pasta.

Another love of mine is basil, so it was only natural that I put it into the mix. Again, it’s very simple because it’s only a few easy ingredients, but they mix so well together, and it’s prepared in a way I haven’t had or made before. So, I give you my Roasted Tomato Pasta, more a guide than a recipe.

Roasted Tomato Pasta

250 g pasta (enough for two people)
Extra virgin olive oil
about 5 medium red, ripe, juicy tomatoes
thyme (if you have it)
one whole head of garlic
a very generous handful of basil
freshly grated parmesan
dried chili peppers
salt
pepper

First I cut the tomatoes into wedges and then put into a large glass oven-safe dish and drizzled with a good amount of olive oil. Then I three the time leaves in there, crushed a couple red peppers and threw them in along with lots of salt and pepper. Then I mixed everything together so the tomatoes were well coated.
Next, I took the whole head of garlic and trimmed off the top with a knife, taking one slice through while I laid it on it’s side so that most of the cloves were barely exposed. Then I wrapped in foil, and drizzled with olive oil, trying to get some oil covering each clove. Twist the top around, and then along with the tomatoes, they’re ready to put in the oven, a very hot oven, around 400-450F (200-230C) and let them roast. I just wait until the tomatoes are turning black around the edge of the pan and at the tips. The garlic might take a bit longer, but it’s ready when it’s soft and squishy. This might take around 35-45 minutes, it usually does for me.
While the tomatoes and garlic are roasting, put water on to boil for your pasta. While waiting for that to boil, you can grate the cheese and tear up the basil (I don’t like to cut it because I’ve heard it bruises very easily and after you chop basil, it leaves so much of the good juices on the cutting board).

Now you’re all ready to go. Put the pasta in when the water boils (and salt as well). Take out when to your liking and strain. Hopefully your tomatoes and garlic are finished now. The one annoying thing is handling the garlic when it’s hot, but it’s not too bad. I took the garlic, and sometimes you can get a whole clove out, the peel cracks and it’s easy to remove, or just take a knife and pop it out into the bowl of tomatoes. After you’ve gotten it all, pour in some more olive oil, mush up the garlic and stir around with the tomatoes. Put the pasta in, mix again, and then sprinkle on the cheese and basil, maybe with a few cracks of pepper and a bit of salt. Enjoy. Preferably with a glass of wine.

Last Berlin Kuchen

Alright, about a month after the fact, let’s see what I remember: I love hazelnuts. I love trying new desserts. I think that about sums it up. But really, I was looking in some Bon Appetit or Gourmet a couple months ago and found a cake called Gateau Breton, a regular, buttery, sugary cake with the added bonus. I like cake enough, but hazelnut cake caught my eye. That’s one thing that I will miss when I’m back in America, the lack of hazelnuts because they’re everywhere in Europe and it’s great. They're Europe's peanuts.

I wanted to try out the Gateau Breton earlier, but for some reason you can find hazelnuts everywhere in Spain, but ground hazelnuts are a different story. I searched high and low (the Boqueria Market and Pakistani shops) and no beans. So I shelved the idea of Gateau Breton until I could get a hold of a food processor or already ground hazelnuts. Enter Berlin.

Oh Kaiser’s, how I love thee. Just a big old grocery store in Berlin but it’s cheap and it's got loads of stuff. I can ponder over the multiple Ritter Sport candy flavors (pfefferminz, cappuccino, praline, etc.) and they have little, almost powder-like hazelnuts in a handy package, Gateau Breton-ready. So I figured it was my perfect opportunity.

The good thing about Bon Appetit and Gourmet is that it’s all online, so I had only to search on epicurious.com and found the recipe immediately. Most of the reviews that I read said it was very dense and rich, it was like shortbread, it was buttery, all promises which were delivered upon making it. Some said to serve with fruit like strawberries, others said flavored whipped cream, or simply crème fraiche. I threw some Kahlua into a container of crème fraiche and I got a few pleased tasters who asked ‘did you make the cream? It’s delicious.’ No, no. That’s the store-bought part. But the cake was well-received too. The cool, smooth cream is a good livener to the dense, buttery gateau.

My one change? Put in more hazelnuts. The recipe only called for a ½ cup, which wasn’t nearly enough. I think the cake was perfect if you’re in the mood for something rich but simple, but the hazelnut didn’t come out enough. Next time I’d at least double it, putting in a cup or more, and taking away some flour. Other than that, perfect.

I’m posting the recipe straight from epicurious.com because the only change I made at the time was using regular sugar because I didn’t have vanilla sugar on hand.

Gateau Breton

1 1/4 cups sugar, divided
1/2 cup hazelnuts, lightly toasted, husked
6 large egg yolks (preferably organic)
1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter, melted
2 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1 large egg yolk beaten with 2 teaspoons water (for glaze)
crème fraiche flavored with liquor (Kahlua, Frangelico, etc)

Position rack in center of oven and preheat to 325°F (170 C). Butter and flour 9-inch-diameter springform pan. Combine 2 tablespoons sugar and hazelnuts in processor; blend until nuts are finely ground but not pasty (or if you have already ground, just mix with a fork). Combine 6 egg yolks and remaining 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar in large bowl; whisk until well blended and slightly thicker, about 2 minutes (do not use electric mixer). Whisk in hazelnut mixture. Gradually whisk in melted butter. Sift flour over batter; stir just until blended (batter will be thick; do not overmix or cake may be tough).Transfer batter to prepared pan; smooth top with offset spatula (layer will be thin). Brush top generously with egg glaze.

Using back of tines of fork, deeply mark crisscross pattern atop cake, marking 3 times across in 1 direction and 3 times in opposite direction (I’m guessing this was just for decoration, I did it lightly and it didn’t really matter. I served it with a big blob of crème fraiche on top anyways). Bake cake until deep golden on top and tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 1 hour. Cool in pan on rack 15 minutes, then remove pan sides and cool cake completely.

Berlin Kuchen: take two

For my second dessert experience in the land of abnormally-numbered ovens, I went back to my ever evolving cheesecake recipe (as I sit here writing this I’m making cheesecake: Chocolate Coffee…I’ll tell you how it goes soon enough). After some mulling over and consulting my principal taste-tester, we came up with orange and goat cheese with a rosemary crust.

Now rosemary is hard to come by in Berlin. At least in supermarkets and food stores, so the next best thing? A nursery. But I didn’t want to buy the whole plant, so I know confess I browsed some plant shops and hovered around the rosemary pots and took a sprig or two. The rest of the ingredients were easy enough.

I thought I had the ovens all figured out, and would not have any problems. And I didn’t at first. I made my crust (I had transported my springform pan from Spain. In a land with degree-less ovens, don’t expect a springform pan in your standard kitchen). I pulled the rosemary crust out of the oven and it was beautiful and I thought to myself this is gonna be good.

Then I mixed my cheesecake, looked good, tasted good, and stuck it in the oven. I know some people and recipes say do NOT open the oven during cooking, but I’m a curious, impatient type and I like to watch my stuff and see what it’s doing. Well about fifteen minutes through cooking, the top was already browning. A lot. I put tin foil on it and it was done in record time at about 25 minutes. Unfortunately what I couldn’t see was that the bottom was browning also. Too much. So I ended up with a superquick-bake cheesecake done in less than half the time of most cheesecakes, and a slightly burnt crust. It was like it separated into layers, and the part touching the pan was burned, but the part touching the cheesecake was fine. The cheesecake came out fine though, tasted of orange, not too much goat cheese flavor.

I don’t know if there wasn’t enough rosemary or the extra cooking of the crust caused it to lose its flavor, but we couldn’t really taste the rosemary. Next time will experiment with more.



Orange and Goat Cheese Cheesecake with Rosemary Crust

crust
200 g digestive cookies (graham crackers, Maria galletas, whatever you have)
150 g butter
a few sprigs of rosemary

First pull the rosemary off the branch and finely chop. Then put the butter in a saucepan and add the rosemary, melting the butter and stirring. While the butter melts, crush up your cookies finely, my favorite method in the absence of a food processor is jumping up and down on them after they have been properly tied into many bags. Mix well with the butter and rosemary and then press into the bottom and up the sides of a springform pan. Bake at 170 C for 10 minutes, or until the edges start to darken.

cheesecake
400 g cream cheese
300 g goat cheese
50 g butter
150 g sugar
juice from half an orange and zest of whole orange
3 eggs
pinch of salt

Make sure your cheeses and butter are room temperature and easily whipped. Either with a whisk or electric mixer whip the cheeses together and then mix in the butter until smooth. Now mix in the sugar, and then juice the orange and grate it directly into the batter.
I still am undecided on if it makes a difference beating the egg whites or not. Dan thinks it does, so this time, the egg whites were beaten. First add the yolk to the batter and stir them in, then beat the whites until soft peaks form and fold them in until just mixed. Lastly put a touch of salt in. Pour into the springform pan and bake at 180 about 35 minutes, maybe longer depending on your oven, until the top is beginning to brown and a knife comes out almost clean. This means it will be perfectly creamy; I think if you take it out when the knife is clean then the cake is overdone. It firms up a bit in the fridge and turns out the perfect consistency. Let cool until about room temperature and the chill, best if overnight.

German Kuchen

It’s been a while. I was on a short “hiatus” in Berlin, but only from writing, not from cooking. It was a bit harder than here in Spain, although I didn’t expect the oven knob to have a number system from 1 to 8, or no visible numbers at all. This didn’t get me down, only a little burned (or a lot burned) at one point. But my first attempt at baking with the specially-numbered German ovens turned out as a success. Another problem to overcome was the fact that I didn’t have a scale, so it was fun throwing in what I guessed was the right amount and seeing how it ended up.

First on the list was a plum cake I used to make when I was in middle school. I remember it as being more like a cheesecake made with flour that had plums on the top. The recipe came from a Southern Living, and lately I’d been thinking about that cake, so my mom emailed me the recipe.

In Berlin there were plums everywhere, and even many pflaumen torten, at bakeries, at market stalls, more than I’m used to here in Spain. Getting my ingredients wasn’t so hard, the only thing I had a bit of a problem with was cognac. I got some cheap, tiny, airplane sized bottle of some not-so-good cognac because it was all I could find without buying a whole bottle.

The interesting thing about this cake was it turned out totally different than I had remembered it. Like I said, I remember a dense, cheesecake-like concoction with plums lining the top, and when I pulled this out of the oven and served it, it was a bit like a soufflé with plums that had sunk to the bottom (as you can see below).

And I’m not quite sure which is right…I only now started to wonder. Either way, make sure you use enough sugar, because if you don’t then the cream cheese is a very subdued flavor and you won’t taste much except a bite with plum. So, let me know how yours turns out: heavy, cheesecake topped with plums, or light, airy soufflé with a base of plums…


Plum Cake

½ (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened
1 ½ cup sifted cake flour
½ cup sour cream
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 large eggs, separated
1 pound small plums, cut into thin wedges
¾ cup powdered sugar, divided
2 tablespoons brandy
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

First beat the cream cheese with a whisk until fluffy, then add the sour cream and mix in well. Now beat yolks and ½ cup sugar in a separate bowl at medium speed until thick. Then add the cream cheese mixture and brandy, beating until blended.
Beat the egg whites and cream of tartar at high speed until foamy (or if you don’t have an electric mixer, find a male and hand him a whisk). Add remaining ¼ cup sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, beating until stiff peaks form and sugar dissolves. Combine flour and baking powder; fold into cream cheese mixture. Fold in egg white mixture. Pour batter into a greased and floured 9-inch springform pan, and arrange plum wedges on top (I always remember them resting on top and staying there, however, this most recent time they sunk to the bottom as I took my time placing them in a nice pattern. Maybe when I was younger I didn’t understand the concept of “beating egg whites” and this could explain my denser cake…). Now bake at 350 F (or oven knob Low, somewhere around the 2 I think it was) for 45 minutes (or until you open the oven and realize it’s cooking extremely fast, browning on top after 10 minutes). Cool in pan on a wire rack 5 minutes. Remove sides of pan. Sprinkle with powdered sugar; serve warm or at room temperature.

unfortunately my pictures did not come out at all for this....I think the best one I got was on the floor in someone's room, you might be able to see a hint of oriental rug under the clear plate in a few of these...

Tortilla Soup

I’m on a Tex-Mex kick. When you’re out of your home, your state, and you’re surrounded by people who think that queso is just Spanish for cheese, you want to educate. At least I do. And I want to show and teach them as much as I can about real Texas food. In my mind this includes three main food groups, with a few exceptions: 1. Mexican/Tex-Mex, 2. barbeque, 3. southern. It can vary depending who you talk to, and only just recently is there emerging a difference between Tex-Mex and Mexican, with places trying to stand out as being ‘interior Mexican’, but I think this makes them no better or worse than Tex-Mex. Also, if you’re from Austin, you don’t call Mexican food Tex-Mex. I think Tex-Mex is a special name developed by outsiders to describe the difference between Texas Mexican and Mexican Mexican. If I’m with my friends, we definitely don’t say “I feel like Tex-Mex tonight.” With us, it’s straight up “Mexican.”

I’m from Austin, I hold a special place in my heart for Tex-Mex, which is just Mexican, taken down to a few more specific dishes, and given a Texas twist. For those of you who don’t know what real queso is, it is not just cheese, nor is it ‘cheese dip’ as other parts of the United States refer to it. It is yellow cheese, melted with any number of the following: peppers (spiciness depends on where you go and who’s making it), onions, tomatoes, and garlic. Now this is the most basic queso. You can also go to places where they have add-ons, like ground beef and avocados, or if you’re really lucky and you go to El Arroyo, brisket. It is to be eaten with chips (tortilla chips is understood), or occasionally tortillas, and can be poured on most dishes, enchiladas, burritos, take your pick. Queso is Tex-Mex. And I love it.

Before I go on forever about the merits of queso, let me say I’ve never made it here in Barcelona because good yellow cheese is hard to find. Good cheese, not hard. Spain, and the Mediterranean for that matter, has good cheese galore. But it’s not yellow cheese, we’re talking American, Cheddar, Jack, or in extreme cases, Velveeta. Therefore it is not acceptable for queso.

To inform Dan about the great cuisine that is Tex-Mex I have to make other stuff, like tortilla soup. I wouldn’t call this specifically Tex-Mex. I remember the first time I went to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and we stayed in a house with a Mexican cook who made us lunch and dinner everyday. She served fresh tortilla soup and it was great. I don’t even like soup that much, but this stuff is good.

So, in an attempt to bring Mexican to Spain, I made tortilla soup for the first time. I looked at a lot of recipes on the internet from all different sources, wrote down the basics, and then threw in whatever else I thought would make it gooooood.

Tortilla soup

1 package corn tortillas
oil for frying (regular vegetable oil will work)
salt

olive oil or xistorra grease (grease leftover from cooking sausage or meats)
1 medium white onion
1-3 canned chipotle chiles (canned in Adobo sauce)
1 liter chicken broth
1 can of diced tomatoes
2 fresh tomatoes
1 serrano/jalapeño

1 avocado
queso fresco (if you can find it) or feta (what I use)
cilantro
limes

Tortilla soup is basically spicy tomato soup, what makes it so much better are the toppings, so you have to make sure they’re good. The first topping is tortilla chips, but store bought ones don’t begin to compare to homemade ones, that’s key to great tortilla soup.
Start off by heating ½ - 1 inch of oil in a medium-sized pan over medium-high heat. This doesn’t have to be super specific on temperature, I just sprinkle water on the grease and when it’s hot, it pops. That’s when you know to add the tortilla. So while your oil is heating, take the corn tortillas and cut them in half and then into strips. Do as many as you like, they’re just garnish on top, but there’s nothing wrong with leftover homemade chips. When a sprinkle of water pops in the oil, add a few strips at a time, not too many crowding the pan, otherwise they’ll stick. If they fall on top of each other, just separate with a fork. They cook pretty quickly, maybe a minute or less on each side, until they’re golden, but not too browned because they seem to cook a little more after you take them out. So after a minute or so, flip to the other side. Then drain on a paper towel, removing them with a fork or slotted spoon and immediately sprinkle with salt, so it sticks. And you have your chips.
Now you can start on the soup itself. Chop the onion into little dices, and heat up the grease. Put in the onion when it’s hot, and let it cook for about 10 minutes on medium heat, until the onion has just begun to soften. Take your can of chipotle chiles. Now these are hot, so depending on how much heat you can handle, throw in a few, along with some spoonfuls of the adobo sauce.

I put in maybe one and a half chiles, and strangely, I could’ve handled a little more spice, but it still burned a bit going down. As you stir these around with the onions, break them up just with the tip of a wooden spoon. After a minute or two, you can begin to add the chicken broth, just about an inch or two up the sides of the pot each time, letting it cook down with the flavors.

After the first addition of chicken broth cooks down, add the can of tomatoes and stir. Salt and pepper.
A good thing about this soup is it doesn’t have to be exact. Just pour in a bit of broth every 5 minutes or so, give it a stir, and you should end up with some good soup.
To give it a fresh, slightly spicy flavor, I like to add a serrano pepper. Cut in half and then de-vein and de-seed (or save those for those more spicy-tolerant). After, cut into strips and then chop finely. Throw this in along with one of the batches of broths.

Also while you wait for the soup to cook down, prepare the toppings. Tortilla strips: done. Now chop the two fresh tomatoes. Then the avocado into long slices. Roll some limes under your palm and cut in half. Chop the cilantro. Crumble the cheese.
When you’ve added all the chicken broth, your soup is a nice balance of liquid and solids, and the last bit of broth has cooked down for about five minutes, turn the heat off. Throw in the fresh tomatoes and give it one last, good stir. Salt and pepper if needed.
To serve, spoon the soup into a bowl. Put on the toppings: tortilla strips, cheese, avocado, cilantro, and a generous squirt of lime all around. Preferably, it should be eaten with a margarita, but it’s not necessary.

La Cova Fumada

Something has changed inside me. I’ve undergone a transformation. Before: hated Spanish food. After: like, enjoy, sometimes even crave Spanish food. This of course goes with the assumption it’s good Spanish food, really good. Not from one of the billions of restaurant/bars that have those ice cream signs from one of the three or so main brands with all the pictures of the red foot-shaped popsicles you can get, or with slot machine or other video game-esque machinery right inside the door. Those make me cringe.

It’s really quite depressing really, I don’t know why the whole country feels like it needs to furnish all of its bars in this way. Seriously. I was walking in the Eixample the other day and saw a cheese restaurant, French in influence, with all kinds of fondues and cheese plates, and hey, who could turn that down? We looked at the menu and fondues were starting around 30 euros, so it looked like a nice play…until we walked inside and they had a slot machine in the corner. Bleh.

So continues my search for the best restaurants in Barcelona, because when you do find good, homemade Spanish food, it’s great. I get tired of all the ham and pork based dishes, but there’s more to than that. Let me introduce La Cova Fumada, a little restaurant in the Barceloneta neighborhood right by the port and the beach, historically the old fisherman’s village. The good thing about Barcelona: the fresh seafood. The bad thing: the price.

Cova Fumada has great seafood, some fish you can come by pretty cheaply, and also other dishes that are not as pricey. It’s said to be the home of the bomba (a mixture of potato and ham, rolled into a ball, and then deep fried, usually served with a spicy mayonnaise), and although I do like the bomba, I don’t think theirs is the best. What makes my mouth water there is the bread. They have the usual pan con tomate (bread smothered with the inside of a tomato, sometimes dribbled with olive oil and a little salt, you find it at every restaurant here), but the best is their bread with alioli.

I hate mayonnaise, but if you find a great restaurant here (as opposed to one with slot machines and generic ice cream), they don’t plop on the jarred, store-bought Hellmann’s-like mayonnaise. Instead you get homemade alioli (garlic mayonnaise). Whenever I make alioli, it doesn’t look anything like Hellmann’s. It’s yellow and tastes of sharp garlic and smooth olive oil, and a bit of sour lemon juice.

Cova Fumada makes their own alioli, and although it’s not like mine, it’s definitely not Hellmann’s. It’s white, transparent, and garlicky (actually doesn’t look like the best thing to eat, but close your eyes, it’s so worth it). After grilling huge slices of bread, they messily spread alioli across and it melts into the light, crispy bread. It’s divine.

The bread might be my favorite part of the meal (I am into my carbohydrates) but they do some other great things, too. Most recently, we got a plate of mushrooms and some chickpeas with blood sausage. This is another thing I’m not a fan of, but after a while in Spain, I’ve kind of become immune to it. Because the chickpeas are so good, I just try and eat around the sausage (although I can’t avoid it all), but they come topped with a few pine nuts; I usually just try and forget that there’s blood sausage in the dish I’m eating and it goes down real easy.

I love mushrooms, I don’t think they’re too hard to mess up, but as simple as they may be, they’re great. And when they’ve all been eaten, there garlicky oil stays behind, to be intelligently applied to other foods that come. I also love shrimp. Being from America, we only have one word for shrimp: shrimp. It’s that simple. But in Spanish it’s not. There are camarones, gambas, and langostinos, all of which, as far as I can tell, are shrimp. The difference is where they come from and the size. I had heard some good reviews of the “prawns” from someone (apparently the Brits do differentiate between kinds of shrimp). So I tried for the gambas, and there were none, but the waiter told me they had langostinos. They came out on a plate, just simple boiled shrimp, heads on and everything. In addition to my immunity to blood sausage, I’ve become immune to food served with heads on it, or at least I’ve gotten accustomed to cutting the heads off my shrimp. This is where the leftover mushroom juices came in handy. Perfectly cooked shrimp, smeared around in some sauce and a smile on my face. They were extremely good, but 12 euros is a bit steep.

Dan went for seafood too, equally as tasty but more economical. I’ve gotten more into my fish here. Always have loved tuna, but now I’m getting into white fish, such as dorada, monkfish, and the caballa (or mackerel) that Dan had. Split down the middle, opened like a book, and served with the tail (no head present though) and covered in good things like garlic, parsley, oil, and nice and browned crispy on the outside, but soft on the inside. Really quite delicious.

They don’t need one of those cheap ice cream signs outside, no one would have room for it. We were stuffed. Cova Fumada doesn’t have a menu they hand you, I’ve come across many places like this in Spain, which can get annoying, but instead have a blackboard with the day’s offerings which is about 70% legible. It’s small, crowded during peak mealtimes, sometimes people wait outside or crowd around at the tiny bar to get their chance at the food. It’s loud, the waiters are running around like crazy, you might wait a bit before getting their attention. The tables are long and family style, you might be rubbing elbows with someone you don’t know, but it’s all part of the experience, the quality Spanish dining experience.

The Long Awaited Second Cheesecake That Didn't Live Up to Expectations

So the week immediately after making my first cheesecake here, I was all excited (and so was Dan) and I was ready to make another. But I wanted to experiment with different flavors, and the next big one on my list was dulce de leche (I’m a huge sucker for the Cheesecake Factory’s dulce de leche cheesecake, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing). So I looked at a few different recipes, just to get a general idea, but as I said in my first cheesecake posting, you have your base ingredients and you can pretty much play around with other flavorings.

This time I also wanted to do a top layer as I hadn’t before so I wanted to do something different that would compliment dulce de leche. I’m kind of obsessed with goat cheese. Dan kept suggesting things like hibiscus or star anise, but I thought maybe a tangy goat cheese would go well with sweet dulce de leche. So I thought.

That’s one of the reason’s this post has taken so long, I made this well over a month ago, but as it was not a complete success, I debated even posting it. The cheesecake wasn’t bad, it just tasted like plain cheesecake, but lacking in something. It was an experiment, and I think I learned what to do from it, but I’m going to post the original recipe and go ahead and give my tips for what I would do next time. I think it has potential (I know people out there make really good dulce de leche cheesecakes) but I think my quantities and flavors weren’t right. The one really great part of this was the chocolate crust: most recipes I’ve read call for crushed up Oreo cookies, or similar cookies, but I used my recipe for regular crust and added cocoa powder…turned out really well.

So you win some, you lose some. But I figured I should post my “non-victories” as they’ll be referred to, and maybe someone else can do something better with it. Please let me know! Here’s the recipe, suggestions follow.

Dulce de Leche and Goat Cheese Cheesecake

crust
150 g Mari Lu cookies
100 g butter
cocoa powder

dulce de leche
300 ml milk
200 g sugar

first layer
600 g cream cheese
75 g butter
dulce de leche
150-200 g sugar
3 eggs
salt

second layer
1 log of goat cheese (about 100-150 gr)
100 g crème fraiche
sugar

First crunch up the Mari Lu cookies or graham crackers, and mix with melted butter and then add cocoa, mixing well. Press on the bottom of a springform pan and bake at 170 Celsius for 10 minutes.
Now comes the real experimental part, one of the key ingredients (or the key ingredient) so maybe I should have paid more attention to quantities, cooking time and temperature. So I poured milk and sugar into a pot and cooked, stirring a lot over medium-low heat until it reached a light brown color, about 40 minutes. The problem was, when it cooled, it hardened, so upon reheating it to add to my cheesecake mixture I added more milk and think I lost some of the flavor. I had never made my own dulce de leche before, so I suggest following a recipe, or doing what I’m going to try next time: use a couple cans of sweetened condensed milk and boiling that for about 45 minutes, also something I’ve never done, but will sometimes soon. I also think a problem was not having enough dulce de leche, because the cream cheese will neutralize the flavor, so make sure you have lots of it, you can always find something to do with the extra…put it on ice cream, eat it with a spoon, whatever your fancy.
Next, mix the cream cheese, butter, and dulce de leche together. Next add the sugar and mix, then the eggs and mix, and finally a pinch of salt. Please taste and make sure you don’t need something else, of course, if it’s dulce de leche and you don’t have any more, there’s nothing you can do immediately, but you could add more sugar, or lemon or something and try and spice it up a bit. Otherwise it comes out not tasting like much (mine tasted like sweetened cream cheese…not dulce de leche).
Pour this batter over the crust. Now if you want two completely separate layers of dulce de leche and goat cheese, bake this at 180 for about 40 minutes. I thought I did, but I also wanted the goat cheese layer to be more substantial than just that thin, barely cooked sour cream layer a lot of cheesecakes have. So I decided to cook it along with the dulce de leche layer so it would get browned. Turns out, my dulce de leche layer was not thick enough to stand up to a second layer and instead it sunk through, but made for a nice swirling of two layers.
So, mix the goat cheese, crème fraiche, and sugar to taste and pour over the dulce de leche batter, evenly over the whole top, out to the edges, so that you get a swirl effect throughout the whole cheesecake.
Bake at 180 for 40-45 minutes until it’s browned, or if you’ve already baked the dulce de leche layer, back for another 10 minutes or so.
Now, how would I make this layer better? I need to experiment more (hopefully it will lead to good things), but I’ve been thinking about adding some lime juice, perhaps even some zest because that would bring out the tartness of the goat cheese and if you have a very good, sweet, dulce de leche, I think it might achieve the flavor combination I was looking for. But as I said, I need to try this again and see if I can make it work. I’m dying for some good dulce de leche cheesecake, so next time, I will try with the sweetened condensed milk, at least two cans, probably three. And squirt some lime and maybe a bit of salt into the top/swirled layer. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know, and good luck to you. At least the pictures came out alright, not to mention that chocolate crust.

One last note: this cheesecake was in no way horrible, but it wasn’t great. It could have been, but was lacking in a few ways. It was still consumed in about 24 hours between two people, but it had no personality. It needs someone to give it some personality.