Claire Saffitz

JZ

Your two cookbooks have come out with Clarkson Potter. What has that editorial process been like? Do you find it collaborative?

CS

I have an editor I work well with, and she knows that I’m an author who likes to do my own thing and ask for support only when I need it. She’s great about being there when I need her, and checking in. But I like to get a lot done before I let someone else see it. The art process is very collaborative. There’s an angle toward commercial viability for all the books, so they want to make sure that the end product is going to look a certain way, but I like to work in a way that’s very solitary.

JZ

Do you take some of your own photographs for these books?

CS

I was coming from a background in food media, so I got my education in photography at a magazine where it was always a large-scale shoot in the studio with the photographer, their assistant, a prop stylist or prop stylist’s assistant, and editors on site. That was the model that I followed when I did my first two books. The challenge there is that it’s very expensive, and the way that cookbook deals work, you pay from your own advance to produce photography. I was simultaneously happy to follow that model, because it meant I could make decisions and have oversight myself, but it’s also a lot of pressure, and it’s hard to be your own creative director. So it’s stressful and it’s expensive. [Laughs.] For the next book, I’m trying to really change the model, because I don’t like working that way. You have a certain amount of time, and you’re paying by the day to use the studio space, so you’re there to get maybe 10 to 12 shots a day—and I like my books to be fully illustrated. If a recipe doesn’t have a photo, it’s like, “I don’t know what it looks like. I’m not really going to make it.” I’m trying to think, what can we do differently? I produced the first two books in a small apartment in New York, so I didn’t feel like I had a choice. But people do rent houses to do these shoots. Now I have this space in the Hudson Valley that’s not too far from the city—it’s great, but it’s not huge. It’s about twice the size of my still small apartment, and now even that still feels small, but it would be possible to produce photography there with the right photographer. So many books strive for that look of “at home with the author,” right? They’re trying to create that in a studio. But we actually can do that. I have a kitchen with big windows, so the lighting creates studio conditions. I’ve been collecting props over time, vintage pieces and things that I see when I’m out to incorporate into the shoots. So my goal is to produce on a more humane scale for the photography in the next book.

JZ

Right, and maybe mitigate that feeling of pressure a bit.

CS

Exactly, not “we’re behind for one day,” and then we scramble. In a photography setting I like to be able to riff; let’s style this recipe. Let’s see what it looks like on a platter. Let’s see what it looks like if we plate it individually. Let’s add or take away. And when you have such a strict schedule, you end up compromising.

JZ

You’re working on a third book now?

CS

I’m working on a third book. I knew, after producing two books, two years apart, with about two years for each one, that I never wanted to do that again. [Laughs.] It was brutal. I love the books, and I give so much credit to my editor and my publisher who really let me write the books that I wanted to write, but it was an intense production schedule, and I took so long to write them that the editing felt condensed and pressurized. There were days where it was like, if you don’t get this to the publisher today, it won’t get made! So the next book will be out in fall 2026, which sounds really far away, but I’m trying to work on it in a steady way, as an experiment to see if I am capable of producing work of the quality that I want without the time pressure and the stress.

JZ

[Laughs.] Which can be amazing motivators.

CS

The right amount of stress can be good for me, but I definitely crossed over into territory that wasn’t manageable. So I’m trying to see, can I work on something without going a little crazy to do it?

JZ

Can I study for the test a few days before?

CS

Can I not pull that all-nighter? [Laughs.]

JZ

I just finished watching the amazing Martha Stewart docuseries, The Many Lives of Martha Stewart, which you’re featured in. I loved hearing you speak a bit about her. How did Martha first come into your vernacular? What kind of effect did she have on your culinary imagination?

CS

As a child of the 1990s, she was this icon of aspirational domesticity. My mom subscribed to Martha Stewart Living in this era when we got a million magazines, and as I got older, I subscribed to a lot of magazines, all kinds of lifestyle and fashion, but I read Martha Stewart Living every month when it came. I would dog-ear recipes and little craft projects, because I was always a child who liked to make things, and I also liked to be by myself. My mom also was a great baker and cook, and a family friend had given her a copy of a book that was called Martha Stewart’s Pies and Tarts—I think there are several books that are called “Martha Stewart’s Pies and Tarts”—but this was one I tracked down an old vintage copy of, so I still have it. I was so obsessed with this cookbook. It’s so well shot and cropped—it’s perfectly rustic, and she has all of her own tableware in it. I loved picking out recipes that I would make, or that my mom would make, and trying to replicate her style a little bit. It just became something I absorbed intensely as a kid.

JZ

And was your grandmother also a cook and a baker? Who did your mom learn from?

CS

My maternal grandmother was not really known as a great cook, but my paternal grandmother was great. My maternal grandmother had five or six things that she made—blintzes, for example. But her father, who immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, allegedly was a baker. This is the family lore. I have no corroborating evidence. [Laughs.] I’ve been told that, and it sort of makes sense, because on that side of the family we have a handful of family baking recipes. We have what we call Aunt Tilly’s Apple Cake, which is my mom’s aunt’s recipe, and then Aunt Rose’s Mondel Bread—these are all siblings of my grandmother.

JZ

Does it help you, when you’re thinking about the next book, to have a few family recipes that you know you want to include as certain staples? Or are you thinking in a more freeform way?

CS

I hadn’t originally thought about including some of the family recipes in the cookbooks, but on a very practical level, it’s nice to have a couple already in the bag. The books are always personal—I never want the book to have recipes that I wouldn’t bake. So I just end up including a few of them because it feels like the right thing to do, and they sort of fit with the structure of the book. They make their way in because they’re a personal reflection of what I like to eat.

JZ

Have you decided on a title for the next book yet?

CS

I have a couple that I am thinking of, which is really a better way to work, because I always had the title “Dessert Person” for the first one.

JZ

I love that title.

CS

It felt so right. And then the second one, I didn’t really have a title for. I thought of it as a simpler version of Dessert Person initially, but in the end, it really became something else. The style was different. I had to name it after the fact, which is a much more difficult exercise for me. I’m glad that I already have a sense of what the third book will be called. It’s an agonizing decision process.

JZ

You’re thinking of Dessert Person as the progenitor for these other books, and then What’s for Dessert as this pared-back version. But it’s true that cooking from those recipes, they feel just as intriguing and complex as in your first book—they’re approachable, but I’m curious what you see as the thesis of each of these projects?

CS

Dessert Person was really a personal reflection of my approach to being in the kitchen, to baking, what I like to eat. It’s very fruit focused. It’s pretty heavily technique based. I don’t shy away from that, and I don’t dumb it down. My thing is not hacks; I want people to learn how to do it. I like to emphasize the idea of practice, and I try to break it down and give a lot of information and make it approachable in that way. But as you probably noticed, there are a lot of words in Dessert Person, and a lot of words in the second book too. There’s a tension between explaining thoroughly and scaring people off with the amount of text on the page. I tend to think it’s better to put the information there and have it for people who want to try something. So Dessert Person is much more personal and also the culmination of so much of my career to that point. What’s for Dessert is a little bit more outward looking and focused on the home baker, rather than my own perspective. It’s there to help with problem solving, to offer recipes that can be made in a variety of kitchen scenarios. There are desserts that don’t require ovens, and none of the recipes require a ton of electric equipment or a stand mixer. It’s a lot more oriented toward the reader and the vibe of the recipes is also more retro. I looked to classic American desserts to find those things that are simple and nostalgic and would be familiar to people. It also represents my own thinking about baking, which is that I’m not someone who reinvents the wheel, and I’m not being super experimental and pushing the envelope to create something new. I like to riff on classic flavors and textures, because that’s what I want to eat. While it’s fun to create a very intellectual dessert, it’s not typically what I want to eat. [Laughs.]

JZ

[Laughs.] You’re not about foam at the end of the meal.

CS

Right. Coming up with unexpected flavor combinations is great, and I love the creativity aspect, but when it comes time to eat it—I would rather have apples and cinnamon, strawberries and cream.

JZ

This is why I love a galette.

CS

Right. I want to keep it rustic. I don’t always achieve this fully, but I always strive for the desserts to make you feel like you’re a better baker than you are, to have that perfectly imperfect look to them. It’s still a very precise thing, yes, but I don’t like things that you have to labor over so much that you don’t even enjoy eating them.

JZ

Right—and making with so many components has just become too much work.

CS

What I try to tell people in the kitchen who are resistant to the idea of baking—because it’s like, yes, it’s measuring and baking and some amount of precision—I say, “Yes, it will always be that.” You can’t change that, right? [Laughs.] There’s always a certain amount of work, but you should be able to present something that at least looks effortless. There’s a little bit of subterfuge.

JZ

I think that’s why I find baking a profoundly relaxing thing, because it comes down to following the recipe. Improvising while cooking is harder for me.

CS

I have two sisters who bake, and they have very different approaches in the kitchen. One likes that more improvisational style—she just wants to do what she wants to do. The other one is an amazing recipe follower and a phenomenal baker. I love when she tests my recipes, because she truly follows the recipe and loves having the roadmap. I always say this, but you 100% learn more from the mistakes and the failures than the successes. My view is that I’ve made all the mistakes in the kitchen. I was baking at a young age and messing up a lot of recipes, usually out of a mix of ignorance and arrogance. [Laughs.] But know that I made mistake so that you don’t have to.

JZ

I think that like a lot of people, I was more aware of your Bon Appetit video presence than the magazine itself initially. You’ve come full circle. You went from recreating these intricate snacks on Bon Appetit’s Gourmet Makes, to recreating snack foods of your choosing years later on your own channel. What has that been like?

CS

The parts that I pushed back against from the original version, I’m now in control of. It’s fun because I’ve written two books since doing Gourmet Makes in the test kitchen, and I’ve learned so much. I feel I’m a better baker because of my problem-solving skills, so it’s cool for me to be able to revisit certain techniques and realize that the parts that once felt challenging at the beginning aren’t anymore. Tempering chocolate was something I had created in my mind as this really difficult task. I’m more confident and better at controlling the variables now. So it’s been nice to go back. There’s that aspect of being able to control and problem solve for things that I felt unable to do before.

JZ

You’re not just being literally thrown an ingredient or a process that you didn’t really know beforehand.

CS

Those circumstances were more challenging, too, being in the test kitchen and doing the original Gourmet Makes, because it was always a finite number of days of filming and working. It felt like, we have to get these funny moments, and we have to wrap it up and have this neat conclusion. I feel a lot more relaxed about how we approach filming now.

JZ

Do you work with your own film crew now?

CS

Yes, I’ve been working with the same crew for YouTube since we launched in 2020, and they’re two very good friends of mine. I worked with Vince Cross doing video at Conde Nast, and Vince’s production partner is this guy Calvin Robertson, and they’ve become great friends. They’re really close with my husband now, to the point where my husband wants to hang out with them while we’re working, and I have to tell him to go away. [Laughs.] We’re working!

JZ

What has the path been like going from culinary school to making videos?

CS

I moved to France for a year to do culinary school, plus an externship. I chose a school in Paris that’s run by the French Chamber of Commerce, so I was part of the early days of an international program that they still run for older students—not to be confused with the actual students at the school, who were all French high schoolers. [Laughs.] It was a school for the kids who wanted to go to trade school rather than continuing at the lycée, so there were other areas—carpentry, furniture making and other programs—but the biggest one was a culinary school, and we were much older than them and not French, so they didn’t really talk to us. They were much better than we were, because they had been training since they were 14, and we were a bunch of ragtag twenty- and thirty-somethings from all over. [Laughs.] It was great, I loved it. I still have notebooks and emails that I sent from culinary school about what we made, it was so fun. The program included an externship, which was for three or four months in a restaurant in Paris.

JZ

Were you at a restaurant, or was it a traditional bakery?

CS

I did my culinary school training in basic cuisine. There was a pastry track that was highly, highly specialized, but I wanted a more general education, because at that point it was before I had discovered food media; I was certain I didn’t want a career in a restaurant. Temperamentally, that wasn’t going to work for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I was in it for the pursuit of knowledge and the experience of living in another country and learning some French. I did a cuisine program, which had one day a week dedicated to pastry. I liked that I could still get experience in other areas. We did very classical training through all the units, starting with cold appetizer, hot appetizer, soups, poultry, sauces, all the categories, and then about once a month we would do a regional menu, cooking classic dishes from a specific French region. I loved it. I’m a big Francophile, I love French cooking, and Paris was wonderful.

JZ

And from there, did you make your way back to the States?

CS

After Paris I had a yearlong interlude in Montreal. I did a master’s program at McGill, which I had already applied to while I was in culinary school. I felt like culinary school would be a fun, limited experience before I went into academia, so I applied to PhD programs. I applied to NYU’s Food Studies program, which accepted like two people, and I didn’t get in. I didn’t get into a lot of the PhD programs I applied to, but I was interested in McGill for this master’s program, mostly because there’s a professor there working on the intellectual history of food. I was trying at that point to really marry an interest in food and cooking with this academic track and being in the humanities. I’m so glad I didn’t get into PhD programs because many people go through eight, nine, ten-year programs and still find that getting a job is so difficult. I have a sister who’s an academic, but she’s anomalous in that she’s fully in it, and this is her career. So I’m glad I did the master’s, and I spent a year in Montreal, which was a really interesting transition from Paris back to New York. But I missed New York, since I lived there before I went to Paris, and really wanted to move back. About halfway through my master’s program, I realized that I didn’t really want to be in academia. I decided not to pursue a PhD program. I knew I wanted to be reading and writing about food, but also making it. I missed being in the kitchen, and I thought that if I was going to be writing about food, I’d like it to be for a wider audience. I remember being in my apartment in Montreal in the kitchen, and thinking to myself, “well if I want to write about food, and still be cooking, but not in a restaurant...someone has to write the recipes!” I had never really thought about it. I was so inexperienced with all the magazines and publishing, but I got really, lucky finding this opportunity in the test kitchen at Bon Appetit.

JZ

How did you find the job?

CS

I had met a woman in Paris who, at the time, was working as a Paris based writer for GQ covering fashion, and she knew the then-editor in chief of Bon Appetit, Adam Rapoport, because earlier in his career he was at GQ. This must have been around 2013, not too long after the relaunch of Bon Appetit, when Conde Nast bought and moved it from the West Coast. The magazine was installed in New York, in the former Gourmet Magazine offices. I sent this woman my resume, and she sent it to him. He sent it to their food editor, possibly never even having opened the email. [Laughs.] But she called me, and she was wonderful. She let me come in for an informational interview. Two weeks later, she called me back and said, “My recipe tester is leaving. Do you want to come in and trail?” You sort of audition; you cook recipes that they’ll try. So that was the summer of 2013, and they liked me enough to have me come back for a month. I was on a temporary contract, and then they kept extending. I was in this permalancer position. I was thrilled. I was like, this is my dream job. Then a couple months after that, I think there were some promotions, and the assistant food editor job opened, and I got it. Starting as a recipe tester is how I learned to write recipes, from testing recipes that the other editors were writing. I worked my way up over the course of about five years. So that was my one and only job in food media.

JZ

Would you have ever thought about doing the video side of it before you started?

CS

I doubted my abilities for video, because, as a kid, I never had an instinct to be seen, to call attention to myself in any way. [Laughs.] I didn’t like being looked at. So it was very unlikely for me to do that. But I also really liked teaching.

JZ

I wanted to ask you about that aspect, because these videos do have a strong educational component. The whole seed of a show like Gourmet Makes is you make these crazy complicated recipes, and you’re giving people a step-by-step guide at the end. But you’re constantly problem solving and talking people through it as you go.

CS

The talking part is helpful in the process, because you’re talking out the problem. You can go back and see the early videos that I did for Bon Appetit that are still on YouTube—I’m very uncomfortable. They hadn’t figured out what the formula was, so it was very stiff, and we knew it wasn’t right. We eventually fell into a groove with it, and what I really got out of it was the exercise of approaching a problem, trying to figure it out, troubleshoot, and develop the recipe as I go, along with the teaching aspect. I liked working with the people. I’m the kind of person who, just because of my personality, has a very low tolerance for being unhappy on a day-to-day level. Not always a great quality, but I just won’t do it. So even if I was getting all the benefits out of video, if I didn’t like being with the people in that environment, I wouldn’t have done it. But the crew that worked on the video series was so great and fun. I had a good time doing it. It was a lot less focused on the reception and more on, how am I spending my time? Does this feel good? Do I like it? It was difficult—I was managing my duties as a food editor, in addition to video, all at the same time—but I always enjoyed it.

JZ

You’ve now done some much more technique-based videos for New York Times Cooking, which feel even more like teaching tools because they’re such classic recipes. How did that come about?

CS

New York Times Cooking approached me because they were interested in developing this series of more project-based baking recipes. They approached me when I was working on the second book, and I loved the timing of that, because I was working on recipes for the book that were all so simple. I love being able to work some muscles in the kitchen occasionally. That’s the kind of baking that I liked to do before I turned professional: spend a weekend in the kitchen doing a project, doing all the research associated with it in advance. It felt like great timing, because I missed doing that. Which led to the New York Times croissant recipe, which has been a popular recipe for them, and I see people making it all the time. The editors there are wonderful and collaborative.

JZ

Would you ever co-write a project with anybody? I know you have guests on Dessert Person sometimes.

CS

Yeah, I think co-writing a book could be great for me sometime in the future. I don’t think I would ever write a book unless I had something to say. So I think co-writing could be great to help someone else figure out what they have to say.

JZ

Maybe with a younger writer.

CS

Exactly, or someone who has a perspective, but doesn’t have the same background in recipe development, because it’s not that common. There are so many people writing cookbooks, but from the background that I have, being able to have tested the recipes is just tantamount for a book.

JZ

There’s no single mandate with the publisher about testing recipes, right? Ultimately, it comes down to the author’s integrity or sense of thoroughness.

CS

There isn’t a requirement for the process of testing your recipes, or for a designated tester, so it’s up to the discretion of the author. That’s why a chef book is always going to feel different than a book for the home cook. If you’re a home cook and you’re making a recipe from a chef’s book, you must understand that there’s a shorthand. I’m speaking generally, because there are many chefs who are amazing recipe writers, but I also spent so long at Bon Appetit working with chefs on stories and filling in information that was not being included.

JZ

It comes back to the element of problem solving—how do I translate this chef’s recipe for the home cook. And that comes in as well when you’re showing people something like your pizza oven, which you’ve constructed entirely yourself. I was wondering about this component of a lifestyle brand—are you interested in that?

CS

It happened very organically, because we found this property outside the city, and I spent the first two years after buying that house staying mostly in the city because we had no kitchen and no internet yet. I had to write the second book, so I sort of said goodbye to my husband and stayed put in the city. But the house there opened this entirely new lifestyle for us. I love New York. I love living in the city. I never want to not spend time in the city, and we’re incredibly lucky that we can afford our apartment here, and I can come back, and the two spaces are close enough together that it can be a commute in some ways. But it’s wonderful to have these two vastly different environments. It took me a while to get used to the back and forth; I used to find it disorienting. Now I think it’s the greatest thing ever. We have a place where we can garden, grow vegetables, keep chickens, and cook outdoors. So in the videos, we naturally include a lot of that, because that’s where we do our production for YouTube. In the city, it’s a cramped, not very well-lit kitchen. So it’s also for practical reasons that we work upstate. It becomes natural to think, well, let’s go outside and grill something, or let’s make pizza, because I built this oven. It’s still not done. [Laughs.] I gave up—there’s this one last step on the oven, and I may need help from an actual craftsman. It’s putting the stucco on the outside. I have watched a million videos, and I could do it, but it would take me two days where it would take a skilled person maybe three hours. [Laughs.]

JZ

Did you know you wanted to make it entirely from scratch?

CS

I did. It came about because a very close friend of mine is a general manager at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, so I’m always following what’s happening up there. It’s a fascinating place that’s really innovating in growing and sustainability. During COVID-19 they had a guest chef series where they were inviting chefs up for a few weeks to do their own menus. One of the chefs was Pam Yung, who’s a Brooklyn-based chef who has been traveling for many years. She’s an amazingly talented bread baker. Her series up there was based around whole wheat sourdough pizza. I followed along on Instagram, and I saw that they built an oven for her residency there. I followed the trail back to this man named Kiko Denzer, who’s a homesteader with a very strong philosophy. He wrote a book called Build Your Own Earth Oven, where he approaches the idea of using what you have, building with found materials. I was reading it, and he made it sound easy. One of my natural qualities is that I think I can always do it myself, which sometimes doesn’t serve me so well, because I am also a recovering perfectionist. [Laughs.] The versions of the oven that Kiko talked about in the book weren’t the versions I wanted to make; I wanted to make something that looked beautiful and would last forever. But I needed it to be up on a plinth, and have brick finish, and all that. So it took a long time, and I probably spent way more money on it than if I’d had it done professionally. But it was such a cool learning process, and super empowering, because as a woman, I think you just absorb this idea that you can’t work with big equipment and tools. I was telling people, as I was building the oven—since there’s so much concrete and mortar from laying concrete bricks—that it’s like icing a cake: working at the border, keeping it level. The skills translate! I did a lot of research on YouTube, because I like being an autodidact and just taking it upon myself.

JZ

Are there food or cooking fads right now that you love, or any that really bother you?

CS

None that really bug me, but I just won’t participate. There are social media trends that I sometimes pay attention to just to see what’s going on. There’s a trend of highly decorated cakes, which I think is fascinating to watch, and the visuals of it are great. But I don’t do it myself.

JZ

It doesn’t really make for something that tastes good, at the end of the day.

CS

Generally, there’s an inverse relationship between the level of decoration and how good it tastes. I just don’t have the patience for it. But I admire the skills, and it is an art form.

JZ

I wonder how you feel about restaurants right now. I feel like I’m often the last to know about new places.

CS

I always ask my friends where to go. When I’m in the city, I know what I want to eat, and it usually doesn’t mean going somewhere new. My dining out now is more focused around a craving. Reservations are impossible. Dining has become very expensive, and I don’t fault the restaurants—they’re just trying to stay open. My husband is a restaurant owner, and I feel deep empathy for the people in that industry. But it means I often go to the same places again and again.

JZ

What are your standbys, the things you know you’ll crave when you’re here?

CS

There are certain types of foods that I want all the time; in the summer, all I want to eat is cold soba noodles. I love Raku for a cold dish, and I often go to a lot of Japanese spots. There’s a great Vietnamese place in my neighborhood that I get takeout from. And then my husband’s restaurant serves a delicious burger, or we’ll go somewhere like JG Melon. I’ve become really entrenched in my food taste, and not in a limiting way—it’s just that I now know what I like.

JZ

We talked about the principles of your first two book projects. If there is, at this point, a central thesis to the third one, what would that be?

CS

So it’s a savory cookbook—part of me looks back on the first two books and thinks, why did I write two dessert books? [Laughs.] So I’m really excited about that. In many ways this book is a meditation on eating versus cooking. Often with food, recipe developers focus on the parts of the recipe that are not actually about how delicious the dish is, or if they want to eat it. It may be about the making of it, the technique, the ingredients used. There can be a little bit of an ego there. In this book, I’m trying to approach the process completely from the perspective of the eater, to show the things that I enjoy. The thesis is how to live a good life by cooking for oneself. Because I don’t think that it’s impossible to live a full life without cooking, but if you want to eat well, you have to cook. Only the most privileged people in the world can eat well and not cook, and even then, I doubt that they’re really eating as well as they could be. Such a central focus of my life is the pleasure that I get from cooking and eating for myself. So this book is really all oriented around that idea, and the recipes are very diverse and all-encompassing. It’s everything from breakfast, lunch, and dinner; to entertaining; to holidays—a wide range, all focused on the question: what do I want to eat? What’s the most delicious thing?

JZ

What am I excited about?

CS

Exactly, what gets me excited to sit down and eat. When I crave a hamburger, which happens every couple months, to be able to make that for myself is incredibly satisfying. This project is about that idea of feeding oneself and living a good life.

JZ

I can’t wait. I need that book in my life now! [Laughs.] Because I’m more a baker, less a cook, so something like this would be incredibly helpful for me.

CS

It’s really a book for anyone who likes to eat. [Both laugh.] Everyone’s gotta eat.