Burnt Basque Cheesecake

My Basque cheesecake meet-cute (if you love cheesecake, this one's for you)

Basque burnt cheesecake: left, very soft center, served with blackberries and figs; right, cheesecake is baked a little longer with a slightly more set center but still soft.

I was pondering what recipe to develop to use the late-summer fruit we have now, but then I remembered Basque cheesecake, the perfect foil for fruit any time of the year—right now I’d pair it with plums or late-summer berries like the blackberries and figs in the photo above. In the winter, a citrus salad would be perfect with it.

I’d not had Basque cheesecake until around two years ago when I ran into Charles Chen, our former front-of-the-house manager at Tartine Manufactory. He was in our neighborhood, standing in the door of an empty restaurant and called out to me while I was walking by. He was standing in the entryway, surrounded by stacks of bakery boxes, and told me he was selling Basque cheesecakes.

During the pandemic when all of the restaurants closed, he found himself without a job. With no formal baking training, Charles decided to start a Basque cheesecake business called Basuku Cheesecakes. He makes around 100 at a time out of a shared restaurant kitchen—and they sell out fast. He gave me a couple to take home and try, and they were delicious—firm on the outer edges, golden on top, and the center is soft and spoonable. My new favorite cheesecake.

I’ve been wanting to dive into Basque cheesecake-making ever since having Charleses, and when I took a poll last month it was mentioned by several people so it seemed like perfect timing.

The original recipe was developed in the ‘80s at a restaurant called La Viña in San Sebastián, Spain. The cake is absurdly easy to make, and everything that can make American cheesecake-making a chore, makes this cake so appealingly simple: there’s no crust, no water bath, and you purposely let the top get brown. Because the center of the cake stays a bit liquid, you also don’t have the problem of the top splitting.

Because there’s no water bath, the cake has different degrees of doneness—very firm around the outside, becoming more tender as you get to the center which is almost flan-like and a touch liquid.

You can see in the photos above, one of the cakes is a bit more liquid in the center than the other. I personally prefer the center a touch more done but still very soft, with the batter still clinging to the knife when you cut it. If you like it more liquidy, just bake it a touch less—instructions in the recipe for both ways.