I’ve finally learned to love baked cheesecake

I used to be a baked cheesecake sceptic: I didn’t feel they were worth the effort when other cheesecakes required you simply to stir together some ingredients and bung them in the fridge. My thinking was: why waste your time? Was the result really worth the extra effort?

In turns out that yes, it was. It is. I just hadn’t ever eaten a really good cheesecake.

That changed on a visit to San Sebastián. La Viña is a small bar and restaurant serving pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), but it is best known for its ‘burnt’ baked cheesecake. Inside, you feel as though you’re in a cheese shop that has recently suffered a fire: the walls are lined with shelves on which sit rows of cheesecakes, slowly cooling in their charred baking-parchment wrappers. These cheesecakes are crustless, or rather, the baked cheese mixture forms a kind of crust. They are mottled brown on the outside, like Portuguese custard tarts, and slightly sunken in the middle. Not much to look at. But when I bit into a slice, and tasted the silky ivory interior, the caramelised ‘rind’ and the tang of the cheese, I was an instant convert.

Cheesecakes are pretty much as old as cooking itself. In the 5th century BC, they were more rudimentary: fresh cheese was pounded with honey and baked on a griddle. Small cheesecakes were given to competitors during the first Olympic Games in 776 BC. The Romans soon picked up the habit, but added eggs and baked the cakes under hot bricks. When this filling was layered with thin leaves of pastry inside a separately baked crust, it was called placenta – perhaps the first cheesecake that most people today would recognise, although they might mistake it for baklava.