Strawberry Cheesecake (Low Fat without cream cheese)

Strawberry Cheesecake


After my first baked cheesecake attempt, I felt more confident that I could experiment with a bit complicated baked dishes. I was fancying the mango cheesecake and thought I should make some soon. I remembered to stock mango pulp but had not bought enough cream cheese to make cheese cake. Well, it is not a part of my shopping list usually but that particular week I had ordered some thinking I will make cream cheese frosting for an important cake I was going to make. I then tried buying flavoured yogurt and thought that will be a good experiment, also keeping the fat content low. However, call it my luck, I could not find any flavoured luck in the local shops. I did manage to buy just a four pint bottle of semi-skimmed milk. I later read online that some people struggle to buy cream cheese in many parts of India as it is not very popular. As paneer is far more popular and also can be made at home, I went for a paneer based cheesecake. I somehow have reservations about using agar agar etc. in dishes, may be I just need to get over the mental block, but that’s something for later. I stuck to baking the cheesecake and prepared the paneer by curdling the semi skimmed milk using lime juice. I drained and refrigerated the paneer overnight as I did not have time to make the cake the same evening. I used couple of spoons of greek yogurt to add some texture, you could use hung curd instead or skip it. The final colour was not as lovely as the strawberry pulp itself but who cares, it tasted divine. I did not have butter on hand so used low fat spread to make the base too. This time, my wee one loved it too! Do check out the mango cheesecake post for more tips on making cheesecakes. I checked the calorie difference between the cream cheesecake (low fat) and this version made with paneer, the latter is about 60cal lower than former and almost only half the saturated fat is present.
275g paneer
2 tablespoon greek yogurt
2 ½ tablespoons all purpose flour
¾ cup sugar
1 cup strawberry pulp
For base
12 digestive biscuits
2 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon sugar

Crush the biscuits in a Ziploc cover or food processor. Add melted butter and a tablespoon sugar and mix well so you can pat it on the base on a lined springform cake tin

Bake this in a preheated oven at 180degC for 8 minutes

In a food processor or mixer combine the paneer and sugar and mix well

Add the strawberry pulp and mix until combined

Add the flour and mix until just combined

Add yogurt and mix until just combined

Pour this mixture over the baked biscuit base and bake in the oven for about 40 minutes. You know it is done when the edges brown and the centre is still wobbly/jiggly when tapped on the side

Leave it in the oven (with oven turned off) to cool for about two hours and wrap in a cling film and refrigerate for atleast a night