Ricotta Cheesecake

Welcome back!

Today, we have another cheesecake recipe, this time putting a little spin on the main attraction of the dish: the cream cheese, in which we incorporated some ricotta cheese. Another variation we implemented was the Ritz cracker crust. Of course, any other crust would work just fine with this cheesecake, but we wanted to try something a little different - the flavor of the crackers certainly makes for an interesting combination.

Ricotta Cheesecake

Makes a 9" cheesecake

Ingredients:

Crust:

2 sleeves of Ritz crackers
5 tablespoons melted butter

Filling:

2 8-ounce boxes of cream cheese, room temperature
15 ounces ricotta cheese
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons flour
12-16 ounces cranberry or other fruit preserves (optional)

Directions:

Prepare the crust:

Crush the Ritz crackers.
Mix the melted butter into the crushed crackers until even.
Press the crust down into the bottom of the cheesecake pan.
Bake in the oven at 350°F for 10 minutes.

Prepare the filling:

In a food processor, place the cream cheese, ricotta cheese, lemon juice, and sugar. Pulse until this mixture is even.
One at a time, add the eggs and pulse to mix.
Add the vanilla and flour and mix.

Optionally, on top of the crust, spread a layer of the preserves.
Pour the filling into the cheesecake pan.
Bake in the oven at 325°F in a hot water bath for about 80 minutes.

The addition of ricotta cheese does change the texture of the cheesecake quite a bit - it gets that sort of granular feeling that is characteristic of this ingredient. However, it still tastes great, and honestly, the flavor of the ricotta cheese blends in perfectly with the rest of the ingredients. The cranberry preserves was just a fun addition to spice things up even more, and it adds a little bit of flavor variety to the dish.

-Chefpo

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