Can I Use Soft Liquorice For The Basque Burnt Cheesecake Liquorice Sauce?

Our answer

Nigella's Burnt Basque Cheesecake With Liquorice Sauce (from COOK, EAT, REPEAT) uses pure liquorice pellets in the sauce. These are small, hard pellets that are unsweetened and give a good liquorice flavour. Soft liquorice is a candy that contains sugar and other sweeteners, some form of starch (such as corn or rice starch) and other stabilising ingredients. Unfortunately this mixture of ingredients is designed to make the candy chewy and means that it does not dissolve very well. So it is not really a good replacement for the liquorice pellets. In addition, you would need to adjust the quantities of liquorice and sugar in the recipe.

You could try chopping up the liquorice candy into small pieces and see if it will dissolve in the water, but we suspect that it will not dissolve fully. If it does, then add sugar to taste before boiling the mixture. Pure liquorice pellets can be bought on line and there are several brands. If you are having difficulty then there are alternative sauces that you could serve with the cheesecake and we would suggest looking at the post Can I Serve A Different Sauce With The Basque Burnt Cheesecake in ASK Nigella.com.