For this spin on the traditional holiday dessert, Bailey Tripp, former sous chef at the Garden & Gun Club in Atlanta, drew from a dish on his own family’s Thanksgiving table. “I was thinking of my grandmother’s sweet potato casserole,” he says. “I’ve never been a huge fan of sweet potatoes on their own, but there’s something about them in a casserole or a pie—they just transform.” After tasting a sweet potato cheesecake at a restaurant in New Orleans, Tripp began imagining ways to take it up a notch. “My variation incorporates a lot of citrus zest to give it more of a tangy flavor. I also add some roasted pecans to give each bite a bit of crunch.” The result is a dessert that’s rich, but not overpowering in its sweetness. “Rather than making desserts that are sweet-on-sweet I prefer some complexity in the flavor profile. So that’s why I went for a sour-cream topping.”
As with baking any cheesecake, patience is key. “One of the biggest things to worry about with a cheesecake is it breaking—the top of it cracking,” he says. “The best way to avoid that is by letting it cool to room temperature completely before removing it from the pan and refrigerating it. An abrupt change in temperature is what causes that cracking.”
