Yuzu and yoghurt cheesecake

Yuzu, a fruit which you may well have tasted but rarely seen, is a popular Asian citrus variety with a beguiling and exotic flavour – somewhere between a sweet mandarin and a fragrant grapefruit. Until recently I had only ever tasted it in Japanese restaurants, usually combined with savoury flavours – it is excellent with fish – or in salad dressings. I am now delighted to discover you can buy hand squeezed fresh yuzu from thewasabicompany.com, along with other more mainstream suppliers, like Waitrose. At this time of year, The Wasabi Company also sells the whole fruit, a small and deeply wrinkled orb shaped citrus indigenous to Japan and Korea, which is in season now. The zest is prized for its strong flavour and is often used instead of the juice. The benefit of the juice over the whole fruit is that a whole bottle can serve several recipes, is less expensive and keeps for longer.

So for this recipe, I’ve substituted the yuzu zest with bergamot. Another exotic fruit, but one which is grown in Europe and therefore much more available and also in season this time of year. It has a slightly sweeter, more fragrant flavour than lemons, the zest is highly perfumed (traditionally used as the scenting oil in Earl Grey tea). Bergamot zest adds a delightful flavour to the cheesecake mixture and the sweeter yuzu juice adds a good balance with both flavours contributing exotic and unusual elements.

If you end up buying more than one bergamot and need other ideas of ways to use it, Patricia Michelson of La Fromagerie, one of a few retail stockists of bergamot, recommends making bergamot syrup to add to prosecco or sparkling water. She also likes to slip slices of bergamot into a cup of Earl Grey and single- estate Ceylon tea. Or recently I ate a beautiful pudding of poached quinces with whipped bergamot-infused cream at Sally Clarke’s restaurant, Clarkes.

With Thanksgiving this week, I looked to America for pudding inspiration. A cheesecake is not a dessert I grew up with and one which took me some time to come to like, probably because I’d never had a really good one. Challenged by this, I thought I’d introduce these new flavours to something classic and try to give it a lift. I’m a fan or Mascarpone but it can create too heavy a filling, so I’ve used half yoghurt to balance it out. The yoghurt also gives a subtle sourness to temper the richness of the cream cheese. More importantly, it’s light, delicious and really simple to make – with an impressive outcome, if nothing else, that’s worth giving Thanks for.