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Podcast Summary: Ruthie's Table 4 - Episode with Claire Saffitz
Overview In this episode of *Ruthie's Table 4*, host Ruthie Rogers converses with renowned food writer and chef Claire Saffitz. Known for her accessible baking style and engaging online presence, Claire shares her journey from a liberal arts education to becoming a celebrated cooking show host and cookbook author.
Key Details
- Podcast Title: Ruthie's Table 4
- Episode Title: Claire Saffitz
- Episode Release Date: (Date not provided)
- Main Guest: Claire Saffitz
- Host: Ruthie Rogers
- Partnership: Moncler
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Key Themes and Discussions
- Introduction to Claire Saffitz
- Background: Claire majored in history and literature at Harvard, transitioning into cooking almost by accident.
- Cookbooks: She has authored two New York Times best-sellers, *Dessert Person* and *What's For Dessert*.
- Food Memories and Influences
- Childhood Cooking: Claire discusses growing up in a cooking-centric family from St. Louis, where homemade meals and family dinners were a staple.
- Key Memory: The importance of fresh bread, vegetable salads, and family meals.
- Father's Influence: He introduced her to flavors, particularly through memorable dishes like linguine with clams.
- Culinary Education and Career
- Claire attended culinary school in Paris, which significantly shaped her perspective on cooking and baking.
- Transition to Food Media: After culinary school, Claire worked at Bon Appetit, where she gained experience in recipe testing and video production.
- Baking Philosophy
- Baking Style: Claire emphasizes classic and rigorous baking techniques, valuing tradition over innovation. She enjoys creating comfortable and familiar desserts.
- Dessert Person Book: Explores not only sweet desserts but also savory baking, advocating for the joy of eating without guilt.
- Influence of Social Media
- Claire acknowledges the role of visual media in sharing food and baking techniques. She believes it enhances teaching and learning processes in cooking.
- She maintains a balance between sharing her food journey and keeping her private life separate.
- Future Projects
- Claire is working on her next book, which will focus on savory cooking and celebrate the joy of cooking for oneself and others.
- Expected Release: 2026, with a comprehensive approach to meals for every occasion.
- Comfort Food
- When asked about her comfort food, Claire reflects on boiled potatoes with butter, an embodiment of warmth and simplicity from her childhood.
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Key Takeaways
- Food as a Connector: Food is integral to personal history and family bonding.
- Practical Cooking: Claire emphasizes that cooking should be enjoyable, not stressful, and advocates for a healthy relationship with food.
- Culinary Education: Claire's background in history and literature enriches her approach to food, viewing recipes as part of a larger cultural narrative.
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Conclusion This episode provides a heartfelt exploration of how Claire Saffitz's experiences and upbringing have influenced her culinary perspective and career. The conversation underscores the deep connections between food, memory, and identity, all while celebrating the art of cooking and baking in modern life.
For more insights, recipes, and updates, listeners are encouraged to visit the River Cafe's website and follow them on social media platforms.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.
0:54We'll be right back.
1:00at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4, in partnership with Moncler. We've only just met, but I'm sure Claire Saffitz and I will be friends forever. Being a modern woman, I know all about her from her beautiful and brilliant YouTube and Instagrams. The closest, I guess, I'll ever come to dating online. Though I'd have a lot of competition dating Claire, She has over a million followers who love her. Claire is open and she is honest. She shares with us the challenges of baking and of life in general. She's a star in a new era of food writers who are experts in their knowledge, passionate about their craft, rigorous about their work.
1:45Claire majored in history and literature at Harvard, pursuing a career as an academic. Then one day, in her own words, almost by accident, she became the host of her own cooking show. Claire has also written two cookbooks, Dessert Person and What's for Dessert, both of which are New York Times bestsellers. I've come to New York to meet Claire, the dessert person, and most of all, my new best friend. One million other friends, I'm not worried. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to see you. And here we are in New York. Beautiful day. After the eclipse, did you see the eclipse?
2:22It was cloudy where I was. I was in Hudson Valley. You were in Hudson Valley where? That's where I came from. We're in Orange County, sort of not too far from the Catskills. Yeah. I was born in Monticello. Oh, we're not too far. Actually, very close. It was clear all day until about 3 p.m., and then I couldn't see anything. The great thing about being here yesterday was the amount of people on the streets, in the park. On the rooftops. On the roof. People want to share seeing something, don't they? It was so beautiful to see the kind of movement on the streets of everybody on the streets. Yeah, New York comes alive in spring.
2:56Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and today is a beautiful day. So we're here, and I am so happy to meet you. And my favorite dessert is vanilla ice cream, and it's the one you went right to. Yes. So would you like to read it? I'd love to. Okay. Okay. Vanilla ice cream. 1.75 liters double cream, 450 milliliters whole milk, four fresh vanilla pods split lengthways, 15 egg yolks, 350 grams castor sugar. Combine the cream and milk in a large saucepan. Scrape the vanilla seeds out of the pods into the pan using a knife, then add the pods to. Heat until just below boiling point. Remove from the heat. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until pale and thick.
3:38Pour a little of the warm cream into the egg yolk mixture and stir. Return this to the rest of the cream in the saucepan and cook gently over a low heat, stirring constantly to prevent the custard from curdling. When the custard is thickened enough to coat the back of the spoon, strain it into a heatproof bowl and leave to cool. Pour into an ice cream machine and churn until frozen. What made you choose vanilla ice cream? I have a memory of culinary school. I went to culinary school in Paris at age 24 or 25. and I did a sort of general culinary program. So I didn't focus on pastry, even though now I'm mostly a baker.
4:12Um, but we had one day a week of pastry and I was very influenced by our chef, chef Antoine was our pastry chef in culinary school. And I remember the day that we made vanilla ice cream, we were doing all the custards and he, you know, he was late in his career. He had worked at lots of, um, Ty Vont, like lots of three Michelin star restaurants in Paris And we made vanilla ice cream, and he took it out of the ice cream machine, and he tasted it. And he just got this look on a total sort of like exalted look on his face. And he was just like, I love vanilla ice cream. It's the best thing there is.
4:45And so that was really formative. And he was right. It really is the most delicious dessert. I love dairy-based desserts. I love dairy in general. Vanilla is one of the most unique, incredible flavors that comes from the earth. So I just think it's the most perfect dessert that there is. It's so interesting because I do too. I mean, when I go to the River Cafe now and I know every dessert, I've made every dessert, and I just love them, but they almost don't ask me anymore. They just bring me a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Right. And I think, do you make your ice cream in the same way? Do you use the vanilla pods?
5:24Yes. I mean, I like this recipe because it has a lot of vanilla for the amount of dairy, which is great. But I do make ice cream at home. I got an ice cream maker last year, a good one, finally a good one, so you have a good result. But I like, you know, I went to culinary school in France, so I like the Creme Anglaise base and lots of egg yolks and it makes the most delicious ice cream. And so if we're going back, because I would love to talk to you more about coming to pastry and how you came there and going to France to learn to cook. Because, again, there's a similarity there that my living in Paris, as I did as an adult working in an architect's office.
6:00It was there that I decided to become a proper cook. And I went to, do you know the mastering the art of French cooking? Of course. I'm so old that Simone Beck was living in Paris, and I somehow got in touch with her and asked her if I could have some time with her. And so I used to go to her apartment in the 16th. Wow. But this is about me, and I want to talk about you. So tell me about growing up in your house. Tell me about your parents and food. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in the Midwest. I would say it was a very typical kind of suburban childhood of the 1990s. But both of my parents cooked all the time.
6:38Both did. Both did, yeah. Mostly my mom, who was home more. My dad worked more. What did he do? He was actually recently retired. He worked at Washington University Medical School. So he was an academic physician. And that's what brought my family to St. Louis. They were not originally Midwesterners. My parents, they're from the East Coast. So they moved out to the Midwest where my grandma was sure we'd never get a bagel. She was very worried for my family. She came too. No, she was just, my whole family's on the East Coast, and she was very scared that no one would get a bagel. Turns out we had a great bagel shop nearby.
7:11I have two older sisters. We were all born in St. Louis. And I just come from a house where cooking was very central, and we all ate dinner together every night at the table. My mom made dinner almost every night. And I think as a child of the 90s, I learned later in life that that wasn't so typical, that a lot of my friends' parents both worked, and my mom worked as well, but she was a teacher, so she had more time in the afternoons. So she'd come home, and it wasn't uncommon for her to bake a loaf of bread in the afternoon. And so we'd have fresh bread for dinner, and she'd make lots of soups and everything homemade from scratch.
7:50So I grew up with that very normalized. and very kind of typical. We started every meal with a green salad where she'd cut up crunchy vegetables and mostly romaine, and she'd put olive oil and red wine vinegar and some grated Parmesan on the salad, and that was how we started our meal. And it was really ideal. I think that taught me from a young age about the importance of cooking. And I think my parents also modeled really healthy behavior around food, which I think, again, as a child of the 90s was not so common, really. That was the era of everything was low fat or no fat with a lot of snack foods and prepared foods.
8:30So that wasn't really a thing in our house. I think I learned, it gave me good habits as an adult because I'm not a snacker. I'd like to eat a proper meal. So I'm really grateful for the modeling around food and cooking in our house. So how do you think she did that? That she would teach and then she would go shopping? Or do you think she'd wake up in the morning and think, I know what I'm going to cook today? Or did you? I have to really ask her. I mean, she has still today a really extensive and well-curated recipe box. I mean, multiple boxes, really. But I think my mom really liked cooking.
9:04And so it wasn't, it was a chore for her because, you know, with family of five, I think it's always going to feel like a chore if you do it every night. But she also liked it. So I don't really know how she decided what she would make, but we would have dinners of, she would have, to me, looking back, I think that they were really inspired meals. We'd have like French onion soup and crocs one night, and then we'd have, what were other sort of typical meals that she would make? We would have like baked potatoes and steak and broccoli another night. So we had really well-rounded, abundant meals.
9:40Would you ever go in the kitchen? I would help her. We all had chores, my sisters and I. So it was like setting the table, clearing the table, not so much helping with the dishes. My dad is sort of a maniacal dishwasher. And so we were not actually, he didn't want our help with that. And so I would bake with my mom more often. I was a really studious child. So I would be doing my homework when my mom was making dinner. But on the weekends, I would help her with baking, baking projects. Would you have dessert also every night? You'd have green salad, would it go on to the dessert as well? We would have dessert every night.
10:16It was small. It was like a little bit of ice cream after dinner. Everyone would kind of do it. We wouldn't properly have it at the table, but everyone could kind of help themselves, and there was no restriction or judgment around food, which was really important. And you said your father cooked as well. Yeah, my dad cooked. It was more of a weekend project. He would make us breakfasts, and And we'd always have, it was very common in my family to have like a Sunday brunch with bagels and scrambled eggs and fruit and that kind of thing. And he would cook. One of my earliest food memories is my dad sauteing sliced garlic in olive oil to make linguine with clams.
10:53Where did you live? Where was it? No, we were in St. Louis. So where would you get the clams from? So in those days, I think he would use canned clams. We had a pretty good fish market where a lot of the fish came up from the Gulf because we were in St. Louis. So I grew up eating fish, but not like here in New York. But that memory, and especially the smell memory of the garlic and olive oil, I still to this day think that there is no better smell in the entire world than garlic and olive oil. And sometimes you need that smell, don't you? I mean, there have been times when I just need to have that smell.
11:27Yeah, it's very grounding to me just because of how early on I remember that. So in my family, we always joke that we discuss the next meal at the current meal. So we'll be sitting down for dinner and then we talk about what are we going to eat tomorrow. I think that might become more common. There's something about, because I remember saying that to my mother. I should say, well, you know, what are we going to eat tomorrow? So you just were slightly groaning from a three-course meal. But then it's fun. It's fun to go to bed thinking what are we going to eat tomorrow? What are we going to wake up to tomorrow?
11:57We loved a meal plan. And so your father, more about your dad cooking. So he would do the breakfast and he would do the weekends. Was it his family that came from Ukraine? It's very fuzzy. Yes and no. Ukraine or Russia, we don't really know. It's been actually very difficult to find. On my mom's side, my mother's grandparents came from Ukraine and only spoke Yiddish. and her grandfather before coming to the United States was a baker, which I didn't know this until I was an adult, like not even that many years ago. Were you a baker at the time when you found out? I was working on my first cookbook and I was with my mom because my mom and I cook together all the time now.
12:40And she kind of offhandedly mentioned this. We were in the kitchen together and she said, oh yeah, well, you know, my grandpa was a baker and I had truly never heard that before. But it makes sense because we have a small but really important collection of family recipes from her side of the family of, you know, sort of Jewish baking recipes. So apple cake and mandel bread and poppy seed bread, all these sort of like Eastern European Jewish. And they would have come from your grandmother. Right. Who has got them from her mother. Yes. So we have Aunt Tilly's apple cake, which is my grandmother's sister.
13:18It was Tilly. I have an aunt Tilly. Oh, really? Yeah. A famous apple cake recipe. Actually, my mom submitted it to, this is like in the 90s, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, our local paper. And it won recipe of the year. So it was a famous apple cake. Famous in our family. What was special about it? It has orange juice in it, and it has sour cream. So it's like a very, very tender cake. And it just has, mostly it has just a ton of apples in it. and it's delicious. I haven't made it in a very long time. Did your parents entertain? They did. They entertained a lot. And it gave me a false sense of how easy entertaining is because my mom made it look so easy.
14:01She was so organized and would always have, like, be dressed and ready and flowers arranged 15 minutes before people started showing up. Yeah, not like us, right? Right. My hair is wet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My hair is wet. Right. But I grew up with those kinds of parties. My dad's fellow faculty from the hospital would come over for parties, and I grew up with that kind of as a kid from the top of the stairs looking down at the party and the kind of little chit-chat and sort of sound effects of a good party I grew up with. And when you left this dream and you went off to, it was the first time you left when you went to college.
14:45Yes. And what was the food like there? I know the university and I know Harvard and I know, so I don't, you know, what would be interesting is to know what was it like in terms of food? It was, at Harvard, it's most common for students to live on campus all four years. So it's not typical to be living in an apartment where you have a kitchen and can prepare your meals. So that's what I did. I lived in the dorms and we ate in the dining halls, which was sort of typical dining hall food. I think right around the time I was a student, they had begun a program to work with local farms. But in Boston, that just means you're eating winter squash for most of the year.
15:28We were just limited in our options. Did you go to? An interesting anecdote is that my parents moved to the Boston area when I started college. My dad switched jobs. So my parents have been in Boston for the last 18 plus years. But it meant that I had a home that I could go to if I wanted to cook. So I would go home on the weekends and bake sometimes. I'd bake pies. And if I just really felt like I wanted to have that kind of domestic time away from school and academics, then I would do that. So I was lucky that I also got to do that. Do you think the smell of baking was as powerful as the smell of garlic and oil frying in the pan?
16:08I do. Because it is about smell baking. Right. My mom, I know when I, it's so funny, when I first started working up on Appetit magazine, we worked in what was the former gourmet test kitchen, where they really didn't have hoods, and I always knew when something was done because I could smell it. And then we moved facilities into a much bigger, newer kitchen where they had really powerful hoods, and I couldn't smell anything, and it really kind of screwed me up. Yeah. But baking is very evocative for me of my childhood. My mom, we had outside of my sister's window, we had a sour cherry tree, which is very special.
16:48Sour cherries are partly because of my childhood and partly just because they're incredible. Always my favorite baking fruit. And they're so temporary, so fleeting. What is the season for a sour cherry? It's really early July. It was just about a week or two where you get the window. because they're very, very fragile. When they're ripe, they are so soft, and so they go bad so fast. So my mom would bake pies with sour cherries, and we would pick the cherries out of my sister's window from her bedroom. My mom would be terrified we were going to fall out of the window. So before the birds could get them, we'd try to pick enough cherries from my mom.
17:26Did you preserve them? Would you put them in jars? We didn't. I wish we had done that. I would do that now. One of my favorite things to eat is cherries and grappa, and the really strong alcohol. I don't like them so much in syrup, but the French do it in a kind of eau de vie, and the Italians do it in grappa. I love those. Yes, my mom would bake pies. She would just bake pies. Yeah, so the smell of pie baking is to me very reminiscent of my childhood. So you'd go home at the weekends and bake. And you were saying in the introduction that you were studying literature and history and the liberal arts education, but then you had a moment.
18:09Was there a moment that you, sort of an epiphany when you said, actually, what I want to do is cook? Or was that a gradual thing to do? It feels like it was both in a way. When I graduated from college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I moved back home for the summer and I started cooking basically nonstop. It became the only thing that I really, I wasn't really motivated to find a job, but I was highly motivated to cook dinner every night for my parents, me and my parents. And they kind of loved it, but they also wanted me to like figure some stuff out. So that's when actually I got an internship.
18:46I moved to New York. that's when I became even more serious about cooking and eating and exploring New York's restaurants to the extent that I could on living on a stipend from an internship. Then I applied to culinary school because... Which one was that? Ferrandi in Paris, which I only applied to one. It was the only one I really knew that much about that had been recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend. And so I pursued culinary school more as a means to moving to another country. I wanted to live abroad. I wanted to get that education and have that experience. I am a, you know, I'm a lover of Julia Child and I just wanted to be her basically.
19:35But I always had the plan to resume academics. So after I did that, I went back to school and I did a master's in history, but with a focus on culinary history, basically looking at the sort of intellectual history of food. And I loved doing that, but about halfway through my master's program, I just decided that I missed cooking. I missed that feeling of making something with my hands that had always been so important to me. So I finished my master's program, and that's when I decided, like, I think that I have to be making food and not just reading and writing about it. And did you think that having that academic knowledge, knowing the history, knowing, influenced your actual cooking?
20:24Do you think you would have been without all that, a different kind of cook if you didn't know or have that knowledge? I think it just informs my perspective. My perspective is just very long, I think, when it comes to cooking. Because when I would read these early modern cookbook texts, some of it would seem very contemporary. What year? When you say early modern, what year are you talking about? 1700s, for the most part. 1700s. Yeah. What were they making in 1700s? Oh, so most of the books from that period were written by professional chefs, all men, of course, who worked in big houses, big noble houses, or in royal households.
21:03and they were in the same genre as household manuals. So how to keep a house. Is this in France? In France and England, both. And England, yeah. So this is really when the, these are kind of proto cookbooks. These are sort of the first examples of cookbooks as we know them. And they would talk about how to throw a banquet, make this kind of pie, how to make these sort of sculptural pieces that would go sort of in between courses and a very heavily spiced food, sort of food that was not so unlike food of the Middle Ages, really. Also, where sweet and savory were not divided between... There really was no concept of courses.
21:41Everything would just be laid out together. So sweet and savory would be mingled. I loved reading these books. And they were illustrations, so it was fascinating. But really just knowing, having that knowledge makes me realize that when I am creating a recipe, I'm never really making anything new ever. You know, everything's already been made before and I'm just maybe putting a little touch on it or something or changing the proportions. So it just gives me that perspective of like, someone before me has already done this. You know, I'm not the kind of cook that is so motivated by the idea of originality, you know, because I just, things are classic for a reason.
22:25You know, these combinations that are tried and true, it's because they taste the best, you know. So I'm never really trying to innovate so much. I just want to make the best version of the thing that I want to eat, you know. So, you know, when I'm recipe developing, I try to be very honest and upfront about that. I noticed that with your food. I noticed that with the cooking. It's pretty classic. It's classic and it's, as I said, rigorous, you know. And I think we can all find those ideas, recipes, you know, let's do this or let's do that. But what we're interested in is how to make the perfect, I don't know, tart à town.
23:07How do you make, I'd like to learn how to make a kind of chocolate mousse that actually has that depth of flavor and not by putting something in it that we've never seen or making it higher. Right. Which is not to say, try it, you know, try the experimentation. but yeah, that's what you do and that's what I like about your food and I like about the recipes that you cook
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25:46If you're planning a fall getaway, start at discoverlancaster.com forward slash soul sessions. So you're becoming a chef in New York, right? Doing the book with Bon Appetit. And then how did you segue into doing it on your own and working by yourself? So I started working at Bon Appetit in the test kitchen almost right out of grad school. I got so lucky to have gotten that job when I did. And I was thrilled. I could not have been happier. I get to move back to New York, which I really wanted to do. And I just thought that food media was truly the perfect place for me because I got to make food and I got to write about it.
26:29And it really was. I started as a recipe tester. So I wasn't developing recipes. But the food editors would develop, they would go through a series of tastings and then write the recipe and then I would get it. And I was sort of the last person to touch that recipe in the kitchen before it would get published. So it was my job to flag anything that didn't work. And I learned so much about recipe writing and development during that time. I think it's so essential to learn how to test a recipe if you want to do recipe development. And then I got promoted and I went through all the different levels in the magazine world of like associate editor, assistant editor, associate.
27:11I think I was senior associate and then senior finally. So I was there for five years and developing recipes the whole time. And I just got to the point in the magazine cycle of like, I don't know if I can do another Christmas issue. I don't know if I could do another Thanksgiving issue, summer grilling. It's very repetitive. So I just sort of thought after five cycles of doing that, that it was time to move on. But I had also begun to do video as part of my job in the test kitchen. I worked for Bon Appetit, which is part of Condé Nast. and they had this big, beautiful new space at the World Trade Center and they had a video team.
27:53So I started doing some video hosting at Bon Appetit with basically no training in that. I hadn't had any experience in front of the camera. I didn't really want to do that as part of my career. It just happened. And it was extremely successful. And I did this show called Gourmet Makes where I reverse engineered. They basically knew that I liked to bake. And they were like, well, we can have Claire, we could hire a pastry chef from a restaurant in New York to come in and do this, or we could just have Claire do it. And she's already on staff and we already pay her. So I started doing that show, which was really successful.
28:31But I just was like, I think I've been doing this long enough. I want to kind of do my own thing. Did you like the desserts that you were being given to Ryan and Ford? Or did you? You know, I mentioned earlier that I didn't really grow up with a lot of store-bought food. Yeah. So I was sort of, you know, like the first thing they had me make was a Twinkie. It's like, I don't even know if I'd ever eaten a Twinkie before. It's not... To describe a Twinkie, the audience, well, the American audience will know a Twinkie. It's that kind of little roll with cream inside. Yeah, it's like a bar-shaped cake, individually wrapped, with a cream filling.
29:11but it's not cream C-R-E-A-M. It's C-R-E-M-E, which is, they can't actually call it cream filling because it has no dairy in it. Oh, because it has no dairy. It has nothing in it, yeah. So a lot of the things that I was trying to recreate were not in and of themselves really food. Yeah. They were things that are edible but are really not food because it's all packaged stuff. So that was really my job, was like, I'm going to make this into actual food that someone could make and that you could eat. So I learned a lot doing it. I don't think that in and of itself the task of making a Twizzler was so useful, but I learned a lot.
29:52And I think it helped me become a better recipe developer. And also just to understand more of the problem-solving process. So I left in 2018, so I was no longer on staff, and that's when I started writing my first cookbook, which was Dessert Person. Tell us about Dessert Person. Yeah, Dessert Person is a book of all the stuff that I like to bake and eat. It's not all sweet. There's some savory baking because baking, part of the thesis of the book is that baking can be many different things. And it can be dinner and it can, you know, it's not just sweets. But really it's a book about kind of not restricting oneself and not sort of assigning morality to food and not saying that some food is good or bad or thinking that you're doing something wrong by eating dessert.
30:47It's just not how I think about it. And so that's kind of the underpinnings of the book. It's sort of like it's okay to eat dessert and we should celebrate it. And food is one of life's great pleasures, if not a great pleasure. So you might as well enjoy it. I still look upon it so fondly and with a lot of pride because it was a book that really felt at the time like the culmination of everything I had learned about pastry and cooking, but also about eating and about the kinds of foods that I like to eat and about my style of baking. And so it's very fresh produce driven. It's very seasonal. There's fruit desserts are kind of my favorite kinds of desserts.
31:29So there's tons of fruit in it. Tell us about fruit desserts. If somebody's listening to this and you want to tell them about what they should be thinking about when they think about fruit desserts, what is this month now? This is April. So what are we thinking about right now? Oh, right now I'm just waiting until we get strawberries, which in New York will still be, you know, at least a month. So I have a kind of a hierarchy of fruit desserts. Okay. I think the top fruit dessert is, as I mentioned, sour cherry. I think there is like no better baking fruit. And then after that, apples. Apples are just an incredible baking fruit.
32:03Is there a specific type of apple that you use? Actually, my favorite apple, and I live in New York, which is truly like the land of apples. There's like hundreds and hundreds of varieties. My favorite is called Gold Rush. Have you ever had a Gold Rush apple? I really don't. They are. It is the firmest apple I've ever tried, to the point where if you want to eat one out of hand, it almost hurts your mouth to bite into. But the flavor is incredible. Like honey and lemon and even almost like tropical fruit, it's so complex and is so amazing for its sweet tart balance. And they hold together incredibly well when you bake them.
32:41So if you were making a tartare ten, back to the tartare ten, would you use that for a tartare ten? I'd use Gold Rush, yeah. Because it is challenging, I think, when you make it. Let's talk about tartata. Oh, I love tartata. I do, too. I love making it, and I love eating it. Yeah. And what is your, and so you start with the apple. Can you tell me about your tartata? Yes. I've made it so many different ways. So the kind of classic way is just to make your caramel in your skillet and then add your apples and cook them. And there's all these tricks of, like, you can dry out your apples in advance by peeling them and cutting them and keeping them in the fridge.
33:17Do you cut the apples in half or do you cut them in pieces? I sort of cut them in lobes. Like I cut around the core. So I end up with pieces that are slightly different sizes, which can be useful for tucking them into the gaps because there is a lot of, they lose moisture and so they shrink. Yeah, they shrink, yeah. So I like to actually pre-cook my apples. I think it just takes out some of the variability. So I like to cook, I actually roast my apples in caramel before I assemble the whole thing Because what doesn't make sense about Tarte Tatin is putting cold pastry on warm apples. Yeah, yeah.
33:51And I like to avoid doing that because it just feels so wrong. So I roast my apples in caramel covered really tightly in a low oven until they're soft. And then they cool in the caramel and they kind of absorb. Like the best thing about Tarte Tatin is the way the apples candy in the caramel. And you cut into them and the apples have absorbed the caramel all the way through. It's not just like they have a ring of it around and then the flesh is white on the inside. So this really facilitates that. And then I just lay the apples. They're already sort of imbued with that caramel. I lay them in, put the pastry on top, everything's cold, which is great, and then into the oven.
34:30So it's more work. It's not that kind of spontaneous, like cooking on the stove and throwing the whole thing in the oven. When I came back from Paris, that was always the dessert that I wanted to perfect. And we had a tiny, tiny kitchen. It was so tiny that you couldn't actually put an oven in there. So we made a window and stuck it back. It looked like an air conditioner from the road. But it was the oven. And actually, it's interesting to hear you say that because that's how I did the tartatam. Because they do shrink. And the whole point is to have the caramel and to have them dark brown and to have them really strong.
35:10I think that's how I ended up making them in two stages. That texture of like a soft but not mushy apple, that's sort of caramelized all the way through, and that spooning into it is just one of the most satisfying food textures for me. There are so many books out there, cookbooks and dessert books, and this book was a huge success, wasn't it? And what do you think that was due to? Why do you think your book reached so many people? I do think a lot of it was the timing. It came out in the fall of 2020. So not a great time all around, but a great time for a cookbook, for a baking book. People were making banana bread like crazy.
35:49They were making so much for you, in England as well. I have more text messages which include a loaf of bread than practically anything else. Right, right, how do I make this? People texting you, how do I make this? I would do Zoom call, FaceTime cooking with friends of mine's children or trying to get, I try to get perfect. Do you have a perfect chocolate chip cookie? I do, and it's in Dessert Person. Yeah. It's so good. Oh, good. Is it a thin one, or is it too thin? It's thin with, like, the very outer edge is crispy, and the rest of it is chewy. And it gets it kind of wrinkled, because it's a thinner cookie, it has a higher proportion of butter, so it gets it kind of wrinkled edge, which I love.
36:28And it has both dark chocolate and milk chocolate in it. Do you just break it up? Yes. Yeah, so chopped up from a bar. and I brown the butter, which that combination of the brown butter plus brown sugar plus vanilla gives you so much of that intense butterscotch flavor, which I love. Do you think that this book and your books and your influence, how much does that coincide with being visual online, being on YouTube, being on Instagram? What do you feel about the new revolution in food? I have to say that I am in favor of it because I'm a part of it. I'm in favor of it. I have my mixed feelings, I think, overall.
37:13I think it's so easy to feel overexposed and to just think that you can turn your normal daily activities into content and to always be visible, which I don't like. I don't actually post on Instagram that frequently, and I'm told that I need to do it more. but I like to keep, I'm very private actually, and I like to keep my private life private. But I try to remain rooted in the idea that a visual medium for food is the best. It's so much easier to teach someone how to make something when you can show it to write the words on a page. So that's where I come from. I come from a place of teaching when it comes to YouTube and just video and social media in general.
38:02I hope that we still need cookbooks. I think that cookbooks are important from... It's not really about individual recipes. It's about what is a scent book really saying? What's the lifestyle it's advocating for? What is the kind of approach to food that is taken as a whole when you look at the entire book? It's not just 100 recipes put together in a specific order. It's really much more than that. It's about a sort of whole, the way this person is conceiving of the work that they're doing and the work of home cooking. So I do think we still need cookbooks. I wonder for myself if I'm going to keep writing them because it's like once you've said everything there is to say, I'm like, I don't know.
38:45I always say that. I often think we've done 13 or 14. I can't remember. But I think that I often say, does the world need another cookbook? And I do keep doing them because I just love doing them. For me to actually work with, it's so collaborative. We work in a very collaborative way. So we immediately start working with the photographers, with the designers. We sit around the table and we always cook something and then we taste it and then we say, let's do it this way, let's change the recipe. And so for us, I think it's one of the joys of life. It's about informing and it's always aspiration.
39:22I think that people, I think they once did a study of Gourmet magazine, which you mentioned, and I grew up with. And I think maybe Nora Ephron wrote an essay saying, have you ever cooked a recipe for Gourmet? And it was kind of true that you'd buy the magazine and you'd say, I'm going to make that, I'm going to be a better person, I'm going to do this, and then put the magazine down and, you know, didn't. Right. That's how I tend to read cookbooks. I mean, I'm not ever, I'm basically never making recipes out of cookbooks. I mean, I shouldn't say maybe. Literally never am I making recipes out of cookbooks.
39:55But I read them. And that's exactly why. Because I want to sort of see, I love the photography, and I want to see the types of recipes. And I love the other sort of ancillary writings. Sometimes there's essays. So same thing with Martha Stewart, who her 100th book is coming out, which blows my mind. Isn't her 100? I think 100, yeah. Wow. So, yeah, that's why I'm buying and reading cookbooks. Not so much because I think it's going to help me make dinner on a Tuesday. I can already make dinner on a Tuesday. You can make dinner.
40:34If you like listening to Ruthie's Table 4, would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.
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41:39Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200 ,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is a perfect destination for a quick weekend getaway. Explore charming small towns, browse unique shops, and discover restaurants the locals love. discoverlancaster.com makes planning easy with insider tips and upcoming events so you won't miss a thing plan your weekend trip at discoverlancaster.com forward slash soul sessions we went to london a few months ago and we had lunch at the river cafe and then we took the train to paris and we're in paris for a while and i hadn't been back to paris since i lived there for culinary school.
42:36It had been over 10 years. So it was a very emotional trip for me and I had the best time. And I went with my husband. We'd never been to Europe together. Who is a chef? Who is a chef, yes. What is he doing? Before we met, he had been a chef in New York restaurants for 10 years at a couple of places that are now closed. Then he really left kitchens for a long time and went into sort of restaurant operations. And so he has a restaurant that he runs in Chelsea market. It's burgers and shakes. And they partner with this incredible dairy farm in the Hudson Valley called Ronnie Brook. You may be familiar with it.
43:11What's it called? Ronnie Brook Dairy. Yeah. Just like a big New York dairy. Actually, they're not big, but in New York, they're just very sort of an iconic New York dairy brand. And now he's actually returned to kitchens and he's cooking at a place in the Catskills. Where? It's called The Tasting Room at Catskill Distillery. So he's partnering with this woman named Claire Marin, and she has this distillery up in Calicoon. And she makes honey and maple syrup, and so he's cooking at the restaurant there. There's a real emergence or emergence of local produce, isn't it? Yes. People going back to the dairy, to the farms, to, you know, especially in the Hudson River Valley.
43:54Yeah. There's a lot. We're surrounded by farms everywhere we look. And what are you working on now? And right now I've really begun pretty serious, dedicated work on my next book, which is Savory, mostly Savory. The sort of central thesis of this book is that if you want to live the best life, you have to cook. So it's really kind of a meditation on how to live well by cooking for oneself and for your friends and family. So it's pretty expansive and comprehensive. It's like meals for every occasion, from breakfast to a snack to entertaining to holidays. So it's actually very driven by eating rather than cooking.
44:42Because I always make a distinction between there's the things that you love to cook and the things that you love to eat. Well, make that distinction. For instance. I love cooking. I mean, I love French food. So it's like I love cooking kind of multi-step French recipes. Like I love cassoulet. I love cooking it. I don't totally love eating it. It's a lot. It's very heavy. It's just very like nutrient-dense. It's beans and lots of different meats. But I love cooking it. So it's like I love making it for an occasion. What do you love about cooking it? I love... The slowness? The slowness. I love simmering beans.
45:22The beans themselves are so delicious, the tarpe beans, which I always make a point to get. I love the process, the kind of layering of the flavors and the long cooking. And I love assembling that kind of when you get to like layer the beans with all the different, you know, the garlic sausage and the dot confit and all that. But not my favorite thing to eat. So this new book is really driven by the things that I love to eat most. Okay. So give me five. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Or three. Or two. Well, so it's funny. The book is savory, but of course there's lots of dessert. There has to be because it's proportionate to the amount of dessert that I eat in my life compared to savory food, which is maybe like one to five or something.
46:08I just made like a very simple pistachio cake. It's super simple. You make it in the food processor because you start just by grinding toasted pistachios, and then you just add all your other ingredients in. Flour, butter, sugar. Yeah, basically eggs, very egg-heavy. Do you do it in a loaf tin, or do you do it? I did it just as a single layer so that you can get, I just sprinkled some confectioner's sugar and toasted pistachios over top. Not too sweet. You know, all my desserts are really not too sweet, so you can taste. It's supposed to taste like something else besides sugar. what else? lots of salads I'm a vegetable lover I haven't talked about that yet I love vegetables I love a soft cooked green bean just really simple one of the ingredients that I use most in the kitchen is raw garlic because I think that heat is so important and nothing else is really like it so the other day I made some sort of soft cooked green beans with just olive oil and lemon and a lot of raw garlic a lot of flaky salt I think the other difference between Italian food and French food is that Italians don't understand the word al dente except for pasta.
47:19And all their vegetables are really cooked. I don't know why, and I've been careful because my society is British, but when the British overcook vegetables, you can't eat them. And when the Italians overcook vegetables, they are really delicious. I think it is the olive oil. I think that it's a very, and also the ingredient. But it is, you know, my mother-in-law, who's Italian, never had anything crispy in a vegetable, undercooked broccoli or undercooked green beans. Whereas the French do have, you know, just blanched green beans. Right. Which are delicious too, but I do like what you call soft cook.
47:53I don't want them to be so cooked that they lose their color and vibrancy and the freshness of flavor. But I don't want it to have some of the, I want all the rawness gone. I do too. So it's that kind of special window of cooking. I mean, all the food I love is simple. And this book will be out when? 2026. Oh, okay. I have a while, but I really need to work on it. Okay, better go home and work. But before you do go home and work, I'd like to ask you one question I ask everyone if food is sharing. Food is what your mother did to get her children around the table, to have her children around the table.
48:31to, I'd love to meet your mother because it sounds like she created this home and comfort for you all. And so I would ask you, Claire, if you had a comfort food, the food that you went to for comfort, what would that be? When I think of comfort food, I think of potatoes. You know, something I eat from such a young age and is truly still one of my favorite things to eat. And you can make a potato a million different ways. But to me, just like a buttered potato, which is something that we ate when I was a kid, like a steamed or boiled potato with some salt and pepper and butter on it is still something that I would eat it every day.
49:16It's so delicious. And the kind of heat and steam from the inside and the starchiness and the kind of blank slate that potatoes are, and then just a little bit of butter and seasoning. My mom would make parsley potatoes. Would she? Yeah, just butter and parsley and salt and pepper. And to this day, it's such a comforting food for me. I love it. Good. Well, I look forward to seeing the recipes for potatoes in your book and to seeing more of you. And thank you so much for coming. This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you.
49:58Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in partnership with Montclair.
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51:06Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. This is Amanda from Soul Sessions with Amanda Rieger-Green. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is a perfect destination for a quick weekend getaway. Explore charming small towns, browse unique shops, and discover restaurants the locals love. DiscoverLancaster.com makes planning easy with insider tips and upcoming events so you won't miss a thing. Plan your weekend trip at DiscoverLancaster.com forward slash soul sessions. Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block.
51:49Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. Hey, what's up? It's Mario Lopez. Back to school. It's an exciting time, but it can also be overwhelming and kids may feel isolated. A vulnerability that human traffickers can exploit. Human trafficking doesn't always look like what you expect. everyday moments can become opportunities for someone with bad intentions. Whether you're a parent, teacher, coach, or neighbor, check in. Ask questions. Stay connected. Blue Campaign is a national awareness initiative that provides resources to help recognize suspected instances of human trafficking.
52:27Learn the signs and how to report at dhs.gov slash blue campaign. This is an iHeart Podcast.
From the publisher
We've only just met, but I'm confident Claire Saffitz and I will be friends
Claire shares the challenges of baking and life in general. She's a star in a new era of food writers who are experts in their knowledge, passionate about their craft, rigorous about their work.
Claire majored in history and literature at Harvard, then one day, almost by accident, she became the host of her own cooking show.
She has written two cookbooks, Dessert Person and What's For Dessert, both New York Times bestsellers.
I've come to New York to meet Claire - we have a lot to discuss.
This episode of Ruthie's Table 4 is made in partnership with Moncler.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
