Celebrating National Cheesecake Day With a Famous Slice

— -- Cheesecakes are finicky creatures. Bake them for not long enough, and you’re stuck with unset cake. Too long and you’re bound to have cracks.

Good thing we were able to catch third-generation Junior’s cheesecake maker Alan Rosen just in time for National Cheesecake Day. He shared his top tips for the perfect cheesecake, plus the famous Junior’s original recipe so you can recreate the cake at home. (Or, if you’re feeling a little lazy, just order one off their website with discount code CHEESECAKEDAY14 for a $5 discount.)

“My grandfather opened Junior’s in 1950 in downtown Brooklyn with my father and my uncle, and he said, ‘If we’re going to be a great restaurant in New York, we have to have great cheesecake,’” Rosen told ABC News. “So he went around tasting and testing different cheesecakes and experimented with his baker, Eigle Peterson. Finally they hit upon a formula that they were happy with, and that’s the same recipe we use today.”

Read on for Rosen’s baking advice, plus a few other deals to sweeten your cheesecake celebration.

• Start with the best ingredients. “We use Philadelphia cream cheese. There are different types of heavy cream; we use 40 percent, while some people use 36 percent or don’t use it all because it’s expensive.”
• Don’t skimp on the blend. “Use a paddle attachment on slow speed so you don’t incorporate a lot of air.”
• The water bath is key. “We bake all of our cheesecakes with a water bath so each pan is surrounding by about ¾ -inch of water, and that adds moisture to the oven and gives us the ability to bake them without burning them.”
• Don’t be afraid of a nice golden brown. “A lot of people take it out too soon because they think it should look white, but it should not. It should be golden brown about the edges.”
• Let it rest. “When cheesecake’s baked, it rises out of the pan like a soufflé, and if you start to mess with it right after, it’ll crack. So we let it settle down. We let it cool on the counter and we refrigerate it overnight in the pan. Most people are so anxious when they bake a cheesecake at home they want to get into it right away, but that’s not a good idea.”

Click here for the Junior’s Original New York Cheesecake Recipe.

If you’re a huge Cheesecake Factory fan, you can also head there for half off all slices, or order an entire cake from Harry and David using the code CAKES for a flat shipping rate.