How to Make the Best Cheesecake Recipe

Hey everyone, Sam here from Sugar Spun Run and today I'm showing you how to make my favorite creamy homemade cheesecake. I am so excited to be sharing my all-time favorite homemade cheesecake recipe with you today. This recipe only calls for a few simple ingredients. It's made entirely from scratch and there is no water bath required. To get started you'll want to preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Next we're going to make our graham cracker crust. Now this is really simple. We're going to start with one and a half cups of graham cracker crumbs and stir in two tablespoons of granulated sugar and one tablespoon of packed light brown sugar. Just use your spoon to break up that sugar a little bit. Brown sugar might try to clump so we just want that to be evenly distributed. Now we'll add seven tablespoons of melted butter. Get all of that in there. And we'll just stir this together until the butter is evenly incorporated into that graham cracker mixture. It should have a kind of wet sandy texture when you're finished. This looks pretty good so we're going to add this to a nine inch springform pan. Now I'm just going to use a clean measuring cup and use this to evenly tamp down the bottom of the crust and also to just pack in the sides so that they're nice and compact and they're not just going to crumble when you go to cut into your cheesecake after you've baked it. I also like to go around the side of the graham cracker crust just with my fingers just to kind of pack that down a little bit and again make it less likely that this crust is just going to crumble when you go to cut into the cheesecake. So our cheesecake crust is prepped at this point. We're just going to set it aside. You don't need to pre-bake it or anything. Just put it to the side and now I'm going to move over to my stand mixer to make the cheesecake filling. If you don't have a stand mixer you can just use an electric hand mixer. So we are going to start with 32 ounces or four eight ounce bricks of cream cheese and you do want this to be bricks of cream cheese. Don't buy the spreadable kind that's in the tub. I also really recommend that you use all room temperature ingredients. This is one of the things that can really help keep your cheesecake from cracking while it bakes. So I like to set up my cream cheese and my eggs. I put them out at room temperature a couple hours before I begin baking. So I'm going to add this to the bowl of my stand mixer. Now we're just going to stir this cream cheese on a low speed just until it's nice and creamy. This is going to help get rid of any lumps that could form but you do not want to do this on high speed. You don't want to whip this together. One of the biggest things when making cheesecake is you don't want to over mix the batter. If you do you'll incorporate a lot of air and you'll end up with a cheesecake full of cracks. So just keep it nice and slow. Since our cream cheese was already softened to room temperature it doesn't take much to get that nice and smooth. So now we are going to add one cup of granulated sugar. I like to add this gradually while I have the mixer on low speed. And we'll just stop about halfway so we can scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl because we want that sugar and cream cheese to be nicely combined. We'll also add two-thirds cup of sour cream which is going to give this cheesecake such a great rich flavor. At this point we'll also add one and a half teaspoons of pure vanilla extract and just an eighth teaspoon of salt. Now stir these together until just combined. You want the sour cream to be nicely incorporated but again don't overdo it. Look at the sides and bottom of the bowl again. So you want to make sure your mixture is smooth at this point and there are no lumps. Make sure you work out any lumps in your batter before we add our eggs which we're going to do in just a minute. Our cheesecake batter is looking pretty good now so we can add our eggs. You will need four large room temperature eggs for this cheesecake recipe and the big thing here is you do not want to over beat the mixture as you're adding your eggs. We are going to stir them in gradually with a mixer on low speed and to help incorporate them into batter I'm just going to lightly scramble each one with a fork before I stir it into the batter. Got that stirred up. We'll add this in and stir on low speed until this is just combined. And then we'll repeat that with our three remaining eggs. So again I can't overstate the importance of scraping the sides and bottom of your bowl while you're mixing everything together. This is just about done. I'm going to stir it just a couple more seconds on low speed and then we'll be ready to pour it into our prepared springform pan. I'm just going to use my spatula to gently smooth over the top. Now I have a pretty good springform pan. Mine never leaks but I know not everybody is so lucky. So one thing I like to do just to safeguard yourself against having a mess in your oven is to just line a baking sheet like a cookie sheet with a piece of foil and then I will put my cheesecake on top of that. That way if any spills happen you're not going to have a big mess to clean up. You can just roll up the foil and throw it away. Now we are going to bake our cheesecake in our 325 degree fahrenheit preheated oven for about 65 to 75 minutes. What we're looking for when it's finished baking is the center will still be jiggly if you touch it but if you touch the top with your finger it should be set and the edges may be beginning to turn a light golden brown. They may have even puffed up a little bit. When your cheesecake is finished baking you're going to want to let that sit on top of your oven. The reason I like to set it on top of my oven is because that's usually the warmest place in the house. It's going to make that process of cooling a lot more gradual. It's not going to all of a sudden be shocked by cold air. It's going to help prevent any cracks. Now let this sit for 10 minutes and once 10 minutes has passed you'll want to use a knife to separate the crust from the side the inside of the springform pan. What this is going to do is it's going to help keep that crust from sticking because your cheesecake is going to shrink a little bit as it cools and that can actually cause cracks in your cheesecake and deep crevices if the crust is stuck to the pan. So just use your knife to separate those two. Now you'll continue to let your cheesecake cool for another hour or two hours or until it reaches room temperature. You don't want to put it in the fridge until it's reached room temperature. Once it has it'll go in the fridge and let it sit there overnight or at least for six hours until it cools completely. Once your cheesecake has finished cooling now we can dig in and serve. So and that is how you make my favorite homemade cheesecake. I really hope you guys love this recipe as much as I do. If you try it out please leave me a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you next time. Hey if you guys enjoyed today's video I really hope you will subscribe, give me a thumbs up, and please hit that notification bell. Also if you enjoyed this cheesecake recipe here are a few others you might like as well.