Go to the Recipe: Ultra-Fluffy Japanese Cheesecake
Made this 2 or 3 times back when it was part of the Valentine's Day special menu with the truffle JouleReady sauce. Excellent!
Love the mortar and pestle. Who makes it?
can steam injection be used instead of the water bath?
Can this cake be made gluten free?
I would say yes. Mochiko flour (glutenous rice flour) is great substitute when making items like soufflé's. Although we had not tested this, I would bet that and equal substitute of the Mochiko for the flour will deliver success, with or without the optional xanthan gum.
I'd like to make these as mini-cakes (2.5" in diameter); can you recommend baking times for these, please?
If you would like to add a little steam during baking I would still follow the recommendation below and bake at lower temperatures. You may need to increase the baking time a touch to ensure cake is fully baked.
If you wish to omit the water bath you may drop the Baking temperatures by 25°F on both stages of baking and have similar results.
If you would like to use full steam you would need to be aware that the Maillard reaction to the top crust to set golden will not happen. You also risk the top becoming sticky or water pooling in the pan. A cover while steaming would help but you would need ample room for the cake to rise without touching the cover. This is for a full steam process. You can very well steam this cake in a bamboo steamer using the bamboo lid as a covering of sorts.
This a version of the mortar and pestle we used on camera. It is more of a showpiece than really efficient to grind. https://www.bzaar.com/products/Hand-Carved-Marble-Mortar-and-Pastel-with-Wooden-Handle-AC30-By-amoliconcepts/insk-ufiq-lycq
We would recommend a coarse grit to be more efficient like this one. https://www.crateandbarrel.com/cole-and-mason-granite-mortar-and-pestle/s183874
I would start by shaving the time in half. My answer for all baking times is bake it until its done. Every oven is different so, either use a thermometer and go for 185°F internal or go with the jiggle test. You can also test by pressing the center of a little cake and when it springs back you are good to go. As always, just keep an eye on your baked good through the glass door of the oven if you have a glass window.
Thank you!
a bit of confusion in "Step 7: Bake" After the 45 minutes at reduced temp, turn off the oven and remove steam tray but keep the cake inside to rest in the oven..
so... does the cake come out of the bain marie and put back in the turned off oven -or- is the cake left in the bain marie to finish outside the oven
Taken out of he bain-marie and put back in the turned off oven.
Hello toby, We understand the confusion. After discussing this with the kitchen team we updated the step above to reflect the concern. Really no need to remove the water bath during the "cooling:" phase. The cooling phase is very important to reduce any deflating that may happen from cooling too rapidly.
I find bleached flour hard to find in the UK, would unbleached flour with similar protein levels work?
Hello Michael, Unbleached low protein flour will work great.
Can you freeze this cake?
Does cake come out of the pan easily?
Do you think I would need the specialty 2.5” height cake pan to achieve the best results, or would a more standard 3” serve?
Yes, it should freeze well.
As long as you spray well and line the bottom with parchment paper.
Any height will work and even a loaf pan.
This reminds me a lot of the original Chefsteps videos. Great film work! Will definitely be trying this recipe too.
In step 4, should the Sugar/xanthan gum be added after heating? Following the recipe as written made my wet ingredients gum up and become impossible to incorporate. I should have followed the video but figured the written recipe would be more accurate.
I had the same thing happen to my wet ingredients. They did not resemble the consistency shown in the video and my final cake didn't cook/rise properly.
Now only need the reciepe for a good cream cheese foam in sifon :]
It would be could to have also the ability to scale the recipe based on common pan sizes. This way ingredients and ( ideally ) cooking time would be update.
Just an idea.
I'm about to put a 2x recipe in a 22cm cake pan... really worried about cooking time
If you default to taking the temp of the cake the time won't waiver much. Make sure you get to 190°f
I have a steam oven. Could that be used instead of water bath?
Yes, low steam setting so the moisture does not pool.
How do you keep the cream cheese from being lumpy?
Hi Matthew. My steam oven has the following steam settings: 80%, 60%, 30%. 30% moisture would be the most suitable I'm guessing? In that case, should I use the recommended temperatures? Or should I adapt them? If so, how? Thanks in advance
Corn Syrup can be almost impossible to find in European countries. What would be the best substitute? I was thinking glucose syrup, but I don't know if the sweetness and the moisture levels are comparable and how that would affect the recipe. Thanks
Glucose will have the same properties as light corn syrup and here in the states some corn syrup is labeled as glucose. For this recipe any liquid sugar will work as a substitute, from golden syrup to honey.
You can bake/steam this a dozen ways. If you want some golden brown on the top go with 30% steam and probably get away with baking fully at 275°F. If not you can crank steam up to 80% and bake until set. Once you bake one you will know what to do next time since every oven is different.
Thanks a lot Matthew!
Thank you for this dish.
Can this dish be prepared well in advance? If so, what is the best way to store it?
Greetings from Germany
Thanks for including the original recipe. I made it several times for Valentine's Day with the tea-infused whipped cream.
If one were to do this in a combi oven, what temp/steam would you use?
I would like to make this recipe in a steam oven, any suggestions how to adjust for temp and steam? I assume we can safely remove the water bath if so.
Hey Dennis this cake is also great made in advance. Make sure it's in an airtight container or tightly wrapped with plastic and can be refrigerated for up to 1 week.
hi! I'm trying to make the new recipe, but once it's in the oven in the first 10 minutes it souffle well, but in the second phase of cooking it collapses completely, does anyone else have this problem?
Hi!
I’m testing your brownie recipe in a convection oven and I’m running into two things
After adding the wheat flour, my batter becomes significantly thicker than what’s shown in the video, even though all ingredients are weighed exactly. I’m using European all-purpose wheat flour.
-Could this be due to flour type (protein/gluten content)? Would you recommend using a different flour or a blend (for example mixing wheat flour with some potato starch or cornstarch) to get a looser, more fluid batter like in the video?
-Do you have recommended baking settings specifically for convection ovens?
At 155°C for 45 minutes, my brownie reached 98°C internal temperature, which felt too high for a fudgy texture.
Thanks a lot! the flavor is amazing, I’m just trying to dial in the texture in a pro oven setup
This new recipe seems to be a complete failure for me. I've made the old recipe successfully several times in a small cake pan, per CS's old Valentine's Day menu. Although I always found it denser than I expected, at least it never collapsed. I've never had a cloud cake in a restaurant, so nothing to compare it to, but it looked like CS's pictures although maybe more dense.
I did change things up here by skipping the water bath and doing this in my Anova combi steam oven set to the specified temperatures and 80% steam in non-sous vide mode. A common technique to replace a bain-marie in the oven that I've used many times for things like cheesecakes and pates.
Here, I found that the cake souffléd very rapidly and the core temperature shot up to ~200°F very quickly during the initial 385°F stage (monitored real time with a Combustion Predictive Thermometer attached to the side of the springform pan and angled towards the center of the cake). I decided to ignore that and moved to the 225°F stage for 15 min. At which point, a Thermapen showed the core was 208°F and the top had large cracks in it. I then took it out of the oven, at which point the cake collapsed like a soufflé.
It should have worked. No idea what went wrong.
BTW, in anticipation, I'm not looking for "you should have followed the recipe" comments. I'm a fairly experienced cook, and I always change recipes on the fly based on my knowledge and experience. When something goes wrong, I'm actually interested in understanding the underlying science for why it didn't work. If you don't understand that, you don't learn anything that you can apply in the future.
Heading out to buy a birthday cake, lol...
Yes, see above, although mine only collapsed after removing from the oven.
Interestingly, I pasted the above into chatGPT and it provided a very cogent answer. Apparently, thanks to the steam, I cooked it much too fast, setting the structure before it could stabilize.
"Its success depends on:
Slow protein coagulation
Gentle expansion of trapped air bubbles
Gradual setting of egg foam + starch
Minimal thermal gradients
The cake must rise slowly while still fluid internally.
A water bath’s real job is not moisture — it’s temperature throttling."
It does say that I could cook it in a steam oven without a water bath if I did this:
Stage 1
Target core: 155–165°F
Stage 2
Finish at 175–180°F core MAX
👉 Pull immediately.
I may just follow the recipe next time lol.
Sorry you went through the work and still need to run out for a birthday cake......
Getting down to brass tacks, I have experienced this too during development. This fluff puck can be VERY finicky to bake. Full transparency I hate cooking in oven bain-marie setups with every fiber of my being. But I have found that it's critical for success with this style of cake. That being said I'm sure the bake temp in step 6 could be lowered as a work around but would take some trial and error. I might suggest cooking at 225 - 250 °F all the way and switch to broil setting near the end for top color.
The benefit of the water bath is that it's acting as a heat shield. The water is never going to exceed 212 °F. This helps slow the lift/rise of the batter as it heats up, we're essentially making a souffle. If it heats too fast the bubble structure will become irregular but worse the egg proteins coagulate causing the nasty collapse.
So lets compare this method to a combi oven. Sure, they both create a humid environment which is great for rise and reduces case hardening/cracks on the top but the combi oven is still dumping a TON of heat (380 °F) on all sides. I think combi ovens are incredible don't get me wrong but I think it's easy to forget that though they are producing steam it doesn't mean it's always cooking in a gentle heating environment. It's actually cooking with with a ton more get up and go due to the steam on all sides transfers heat far more efficiently.
I only say this because you're Boston Best Eats (a legend within the community) the interesting question I suggest you ask yourself is, how much do you value the pretty brown top on the cake? I ask this because getting the color on the top and a very gentle rise are two things in opposition here. I found it easy during early development to get lost chasing the perfect top and overcooked my cake time and time again. If you wanna give another crack or two with a combi oven turn the oven way down, keep the cook gentle and don't worry about the color. It's not really bringing much to the table anyways.
I hope this is a little helpful!
LOL, I ended up with a hockey puck thick, dense thing that was technically edible, but I'm not going to serve it to anyone except myself!
I do have the tendency to cook everything in a combi oven (if you have a hammer...), but this seems to be a case where I should have just stuck with your recipe, which I'm sure would have worked.
Probably could optimize the recipe for a combi, but probably not worth the effort for something I might only make once or twice a year.
Thanks for your feedback!
Fair enough!
