Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

This is a great New York–style cheesecake, full stop. It boasts a tall, fluffy custard with notes of vanilla and that distinctive cream cheese tang, set on top of a cookie-crumb base. The catch? It’s completely vegan! We didn’t want to come up with a vegan cheesecake that relied on store-bought vegan substitutes for the eggs, cream cheese, sour cream, and butter in our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/new-york-cheesecake">New York cheesecake recipe</a>. That would have felt lazy, and if there’s one thing we’re not, it’s lazy. More importantly, those vegan alternatives have brand-specific formulations that cause them to perform differently in recipes, which would have meant developing a recipe tailored to work with specific products. No thanks. So, we started from scratch and formulated the perfect plant-based cheesecake. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Cheesecake! We did it.

Vegan New York Cheesecake