For years, the best cheesecake I had ever had was the one my mother baked.
After I moved to the US, I would pine for cheesecake. Then a friend introduced me to the Cook's Illustrated master recipe for the perfect cheesecake (in three forms). I baked the "dense" version, and it was excellent. I compared this recipe to my mother's, and I found they were almost exactly the same. The only real difference lay in the baking details, and Cook's Illustrated explained that their weird approach was designed only to avoid cracking as the cake cooled. Sure enough, a little cracking was the only problem my mother's cheesecake ever had.
The following is the "dense" version of the Cook's Illustrated recipe (but don't use the suggestion from the person posting the recipe to use the water bath - such an approach is more useful for a creamier cheesecake, and Cook's Illustrated recommends this with a more traditional baking method that involved no messing with wildly different temperatures).
http://www.grouprecipes.com/20528/cooks-illustrated-cheesecake.htmlChad
