314: Claire Saffitz

24:30I knew that that wasn't right for my temperament and really how I wanted to spend my time. I'm someone who's like analytical and slow to process things. I like to take my time and I just knew that that was not the fit for me. But they were still very understanding and sort of – and like worked with me to sort of like accommodate that in a lot of ways. Like I was – I was like anytime you want me to do prep, I'm happy to do prep versus service. It was like I liked sort of being alone in the prep kitchen. Like I remember one task they had me do was snapping the little triangular leaves off of the stalks of asparagus, not peeling them, but just one by one.

25:10Oh, like the bark, the little barky things. Yes, one by one from each stalk of asparagus. I loved it. I was like, this is great. I'll do this for five hours. Yeah. Because I was at least I could kind of like go into a certain state of sort of. Yeah, it's like ASMR vibes. Right. Right. But all of that being said, I did learn a lot about stress management and time management and a lot about sort of what – like how I could produce good work under certain constraints. I mean I think I basically just matured a lot as a person and as someone like a working person in that environment. Did you start writing recipes when you were in France?

25:53Did you have – like this notebook was probably, you know, observations and recipes from the restaurant. But were you starting to think yourself like I could actually write new versions of XYZ? Not at that time. I had actually sort of begun to do that earlier. It was in the years right after college. I had about two years between my – finishing my bachelor's and going to culinary school. And it was really in that time that I started doing what was basically recipe development, but I didn't really know it at the time. I didn't have that like word to – I didn't have that way of describing it. I didn't know what it was.

26:27But I would think a lot about something that I wanted to make. And then I would do tons of research and I would look up – I would buy cookbooks or I would look online and I would sort of think about, okay, I like the way this sounds. I like the way this looks. I'm going to – you know, and I would do a lot of sort of synthesizing of different recipes. And at the time it was like that was kind of – it was a version of recipe development. And then I really treated my time in Paris and culinary school as a way of just kind of like learning and absorbing and building skills. And then it was when I left culinary school and went to grad school that I started – picked it up again.

27:01And I was sort of using all of that foundational knowledge to then – to really kind of create my own recipes. But you were studying culinary history in grad school. And that's not cooking. So, I mean, it might be some cooking. But what were you – what kind of text were you diving into? I'm really fascinated in this part of your career. I think it's less reported about you. We know about your recipes and your cool YouTube work, but you are a culinary historian or in training. I was going to say that's very generous. Your face is like, nah, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. No, I mean I have a master's degree, so I went to – Oh, stop.

27:36Well, then you're a master's degree holder in culinary history. There you go. And it was like a one-year master's, which was in Canada. Yeah. And you're undermining this case I'm building about you, Claire. I mean, you said it, not me. I know. But thank you. Yeah. So I went to I did a one year master's in the history department at McGill. And I went there because there was there was and still is a professor there named Brian Cowan, who did really and does really interesting research around food and kind of the intellectual history of food, the early modern era. So I was like, I'm really into this.

28:08I had just come from a year in France where I was so interested in this question of how French cuisine became codified the way that it did. Because in culinary school, like you're going through this canon of recipes and the way that it's organized is so specific and so defined where it was like, OK, so here's your bechamel. And when you add, what is a Gruyere, you make a Mornay. And then when you add mustard, you know, it's like everything has these, you could sort of chart this very like hierarchical. They're the mother sauces. They call them that. Right. Right. And the, you know, I think French cuisine is so interesting in that you add one ingredient and it becomes something else.

28:48You know, it has a different name. And so I really had these questions around how do cuisines become codified and how did these things start and what is the history behind this? So that's what I studied at McGill. And it was so great because there are so many interesting texts that are also in the public domain. So you can go into Google Books and you can find, you know, the earliest cookbooks from the early modern era, from the 16 and 1700s that really came out of like household how-to manuals. And a lot of them were written by kind of the first wave of like professionalized chefs who cooked for big, you know, noble houses or royal families.

29:28and were these books for other chefs to learn how to cook for, you know, other fancy noble families and royalty. And they're just fascinating texts. I have a question. So these earliest texts, I've always wondered this. Are they – are these texts teaching people to cook for scale and for commerce or are they like more artistic endeavors like a da Vinci, you know, had like – you know, his was very like much – it was science and art blending. So was there like an artistic kind of moment for these earliest texts? Not really. I mean, they were not written for the general population, the earliest ones.

30:04It was really like written for other professional chefs cooking for wealthy families or houses or that kind of thing. So it was very practical. It was like here is how you create a banquet for 100 people. Here is how you, you know, course these dishes. Here is how you present these dishes. It was very much like practical, a practical guide for a very high level of skilled professional chef, you know, which were who are all male, of course. And so it was really about the kind of professionalization of cooking and the kinds of like political and social statements that food would make in these politicized settings, which were these like, you know, sort of royal banquets and that kind of thing.

30:46Wow. So, I mean, the professional culinary terminology comes from like the army, right? That's like the whole like the military. Right. And so like look were these like war plans essentially? Or is that like oversimplifying? I think I'm oversimplifying. No, it's a question I don't really know the answer to. But I just it makes me think of certain like certain passages or parts of certain texts. I remember and I would have to look up which book this is from and and the year and the author. But I remember a text I think it was written in English. It was mostly they were written in English and French because there was this amazing cultural exchange between England and France, which is such an – which is what I focused on.

31:31And it was a description of a banquet where – and I remember I started like one of the papers that I wrote in grad school started with this excerpt from this book. But it was about like you would create like a sculpture of a horse out of – I don't even remember what material. something edible and you would fill it with claret or like burgundy red wine and then you would have the ladies at the banquet like throw arrows into it to like puncture it and then it would so the horse would sort of like bleed wine and then you would fill eggs with rose water and they would throw it at the table so that it would like perfume everything and then you would bake i don't remember if this is the same passage but it told you how to bake pies and then fill them with live frogs and birds so that you could open them up at the banquet and then they would like jump out.

32:15This is like performance. It's like Meredith Monk performing some kind of cooking piece. Right. And it was, but there's a political statement behind it, which is like, I have the money and influence and power to create these lavish sort of like, you know, like performances and invite people to my house, you know. So it was really sort of about social status and wealth. And showing that I can actually do this absurd thing. It reminds me of the show The Great. Do you watch that at all? No, I heard it's good. It's really good. I feel like The Great mixed with a food theme is like, you got to write that TV show.

32:47Right. Oh my gosh. Well, I want to ask you a little bit more about the book because, um, like a little behind the scenesy, but I think our listeners will enjoy this. Like you shot most of your recipes. Like there are photos for most, if not all that is insane for a baking book or a dessert book to have so many photos. What was the photo shoot like? Yes. The photo shoot is a long process. And it was very important to me that every recipe does have a photo. Oh, so it's legit. Every single one. Yeah. And that was, I was very upfront with my editor and publisher about that was what I wanted for the book because photos are so important.

33:27If I'm looking at a cookbook and I don't see a photo for the recipe, I'm left with so many questions. I don't really, I'm just not enticed to make it. You know, I'm much more likely to make a recipe where I see a photo of how it turns out. And there's also so much like non-textual communication that happens between a photo and the reader. It's how we learn different styles. We need a photo. Right. I need a photo. You just sort of know like it informs so much of your making of the recipe when you see the final result. So that was really important to me. But of course it means like an epic amount of work.

34:01So I really can't take credit for it. I have to – I mean the credit is all to the photographer and prop stylist and food stylist that worked so hard. So Tina Huang was the food stylist and she had two assistants, Veronica and Elisa, who were amazing. And there is an incredible amount of organization and time that goes into producing all the recipes. And then I had Nicole Louie doing props. And like this is a book with – unlike dessert person, this is a book with a lot of individually plated desserts. Yes. Things that are like, you know, panna cotta's that are created individually or like coops filled with pudding.

34:42They're scapes. I mean they're very prop styled in like a good way and like in a cool way. Yeah. So like poor Nicole. I mean she sourced so many individual glasses to, you know, to plate everything. Yeah. And to create these really nice sort of like tableau and scenes. And then I had a really ambitious idea for chapter openers, which is just that, you know, that photo at the beginning of every chapter where we took all the like many of the recipes from each chapter and put them in sort of this abundant like banquety scene kind of informed by like the, you know, my love of banquets from back from grad school.

35:14Classic James Beard book style, like having like an escape, like a big cornucopia. Right. Well, and I wanted the book to be really, really celebratory. celebratory and i wanted it to be a book that was less about solo time in the kitchen and more about sharing the end result with with people so that led to these you know big abundant photos so the the team and then um jenny huang as the photographer like just a team that worked together so diligently and so hard for a very sustained amount of time yeah i wonder so do you are you making these desserts ahead of time and bringing them to set and shooting because i mean are you baking like do you have multiple ovens or not really ovens but multiple like cooking apparatus and like making it there?

35:56Yeah. I mean a big part of the production of it is like fridge and freezer space and oven space. These are the kind of more like rate limiting factors. I mean Tina and her team did everything. Like I was in the middle of copy edits. I told myself after Dessert Person, I was like I am doing the second book so differently. I am like getting everything in early. So by the time the photo shoot comes around, I can be in the kitchen with the team and helping. I was like, that was so not what happened, of course. I was literally in the middle of copy edits, still writing bits and was on set with my computer.

36:32Oh, I know that feeling. And making edits as the dishes are being plated. It's actually the kind of way you should be doing a cookbook, because it should be accurate. Right. It does make it dynamic in a way that is actually like and leads to I think like good better work in a lot of ways poor Tina had to hear me being like hey Tina can you change that like the recipe says this but like let's you know do it this way it must have been really fun at the end of the day to decide who gets what right well yes but I think with Tina and her team was like they're so used to all the food we just gave a lot of it away that's what I mean like for like the people in the studio right like the people on the street who happened to walk by.

37:15Yeah, the studio had like a second studio space next door where we would give, we'd be like, hey, do you want like four pies at the end of the day? Twist my arm again. All right. But it was a solid two weeks of shooting. Not totally consecutive. We would have a break here and there. I think we did a week on, a week off, and then a week back on, something like that. But it was a lot of days in the studio. It really shows in the work, though. It's a beautiful book, and I love the style, the design, too. I want to ask you a few other things. We live kind of close to each other in the Hudson Valley.

37:45You're up there a bit. I live up there full time. What's that like? What's it been like? My question about living in the Hudson Valley, a little more rural than New York, has it changed the way you cook at all? I know. It's so funny to learn that we're neighbors. I know we are. We live about 20, 30 minutes a week. I know. We should meet at the farmer's market. I still haven't been. Goshen Farmer's Market on Fridays. It runs until the end of May through October. It is so good. S &O is there, which is a great farm. Yeah. They're like one of my favorites. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so cool to be in the Hudson Valley and to realize that these farms that you had been, where you'd have been visiting their farm stand at the Union Square, you know, Green Market or your local Green Market, like there's a real place.

38:28They're like down the road. Yeah. Where that food is. Right. So that part has been so great. I love, we're in an area with so many farms that produces so much food, which I love. So we have near our cabin, about a mile and a half away, is a farm that, you know, they have like a farm stand in the town but also just on the property like a little hut where you can go and like leave the money in a box or Venmo and stocked with all the stuff that they're producing. So like I love that aspect of the lifestyle. And there's a dairy farm nearby and a place that raises Berkshire pigs. Oh, cool. And you can go and buy pork.

39:04I'll give you the name of it. It's great. Definitely swap notes. Oh, it's awesome. Like, it's just I love being able to cook that way. So it has helped me, I think, get closer to the way that I want to be cooking all the time, which is just kind of driven by the products that are available and that are local. And so that part is such an incredible pleasure about living in that area. Cool. Well said. Thank you for sharing because I think I agree with you. It's definitely nice to have a farm down the street. And it definitely poses some challenges because availability is certainly limited. Our grocery stores are a little different than Manhattan.

39:39But yeah, I feel very lucky. Thank you. I can't skip this question about a recipe. I was going to skip it, but I just remembered. Okay, so you have a hot chocolate recipe, which, okay, can we get to the city bakery level? Or do you like city bakery hot chocolate? I just generally miss city bakery. Yeah. Can we talk about that? Yeah. I mean, like an institution that's no longer with us, and I'm very sad about it. The cookies and like the Brussels sprouts. Like they were doing Brussels sprouts and bacon like in 96. Yeah. Which seems funny to say out loud, but like it was early. Right. Right. And the – was it the pretzel croissant that they were famous for?

40:18The brownie, which was like – you know, it was like any place in New York that makes it onto an episode of Sex and the City is pretty iconic. For sure. So, yes, I'm sad that it's no longer with us. I do remember City Bakery hot chocolate. But my general complaint with hot chocolate is that it's so rich I can't really drink more than a couple sips of it. So I think the like City Bakery hot chocolate is amazing but it's like a great thing to split with someone. It's like, you know, even drinking eight ounces of it is a lot. Was my move. I mean like that was really, really rich but wow. Yeah. Like the feeling you get after eight ounces of City Bakery hot chocolate, it's like I don't do drugs but that's kind of what I'm thinking.

40:57But anyways, continue. Right. Well, I think when you're at like a place with the big espresso machine and the steam wand, like you're getting something really – it's bringing out so many flavors of the chocolate and the milk. So I think you can get something like it at home. I don't know what they – they probably had like a chocolate base or something or syrup that they were then like adding the steam milk to or something like that. So in the book, you're just kind of combining everything on the stove and it's a mixture of – I can't – I'm trying to remember. I think it's just unsweetened chocolate that you're like melting into milk.

41:35But there's also like lots of options. It's like do you want to make it vegan and do coconut milk? Or if you want to make it richer, you can throw in half and half. Or, you know, if you want to make it less rich, which actually helps you taste more of the chocolate, you could do – you know, you could do water if you wanted to or do half and half. so um but the unsweetened chocolate actually was inspired by this place that i would go when i was in paris called um it's like cafe viennoise or something like that i say it in the book which was like a student hangout it was kind of it's like near the sorbonne and um had an extremely unsweet hot chocolate that's cool you do write about that in the book and i i want to know for me city bakery hot chocolate was about texture it was like like getting that melted bar velvety texture.

42:17Yeah. I think that comes from melted chocolate, not cocoa. So that's what you get in the book. And if you don't want it to be so bitter, you could just use like a nice semi-sweet chocolate. Good. I mean, I love that this really represents this new book, which is like hot chocolate. Like, it was not in the first book. It is here now. I love it. So many great recipes. I encourage all listeners to check out the book. A few more questions. I asked Molly Baz. I just had her on like a few weeks ago. What's it like not having all your friends around like like ba was about friendship there was a lot of really obviously you were like tight with you know many of your colleagues and do you miss that and having an office and having like a group think and having a test kitchen which you're famous for i i don't miss the office yeah at all to be honest um i'm a very very happy freelancer working from home Yeah.

43:09Very happy. I think I was never really – I don't think I was really, like, constituted for it, actually. Yeah. You just went in because you had to. I didn't know any different. Yeah. But in retrospect, I'm not that good at, like, getting places on time and, like, showing up when I'm supposed to. I really like to be on my own schedule. But, of course, I miss the collaboration. I miss having people taste my food whose opinions I trust and value and people who have great palates and have ideas or different perspectives to offer. I developed so much of this book by myself, like truly alone, because at the time I was developing the recipes, we had no kitchen in our house upstate.

43:55It was this little cabin that we bought, and the first thing we did was rip out the kitchen because it was really falling apart. And at first we were like, okay, we can manage. And then it became very clear, like, we cannot – this kitchen has to go. So my husband was upstate a lot of the time, like, managing a lot of the fixing up of the house that we were doing. And then I was in the city because I needed that kitchen space and I needed things just to be easy and, like, accessible. And I was alone a lot of the time. And my husband is my main taste tester because he's, like – He's a chef. Former chef, like just really like the only person's opinion that I really care that much about.

44:33Yeah. That's love right there. Love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I just want him to say that he thinks everything is amazing, which he doesn't say. Yeah. But he's very honest. Yeah. So I didn't even have him. And I'm fortunate that I have great neighbors that are like, but they're just so enthusiastic about everything. So Claire, what kind of media do you actually, what do you like doing? I do love producing all the YouTube content. for a lot of reasons. One, my crew that I work with were just like good friends and people who are amazing at their job, Cal and Vinny. Vince Cross was someone I worked with at BA for many years and I called him in summer 2020 and was like thinking of starting YouTube.

45:14I had the book coming out and he's like, are you interested? And he's been the best partner in the whole thing ever. And Cal, his production partner, who's become also like a great friend. and lives in Connecticut and, like, comes by all the time, you know, just to, like, hang out and help us. He's a really knowledgeable gardener, and so he's helped us. He gave us our first block of chickens. Like, it's been very supportive in our transition. You have a real chicken thing happening. I know. There's been lots of chicken drama. Beautiful. Oh, did you have a coyote or a bird? We had a bear incident.

45:47Like a full-fledged black bear. It was bad. Did any make it? Any of the guys? We had two separate coops at the time. One was total loss. Yeah. It was really bad. But the other hens were fine. I mean, probably traumatized, but like fine. Traumatized. It is – we've had neighbors who've lost entire coops from hawks and from birds. And it's very disturbing what you find. Yeah. It's – Sad. It's – you have to sort of like develop a certain relationship with loss when you have chickens because we have just so many predators. And we work so hard to protect them. But it's, you know, there's some inevitability there.

46:27But YouTube. So I just have fun doing it because it's so – it's just a great, like, collaborative atmosphere. And it's from my house. And it's very – like, I don't feel like I – there is no performance in it. I don't have to feel like I am inhabiting any other kind of, like, persona or lifestyle than what I'm doing. and I have collaborators who just get that. And so it feels very natural. So it's just fun. Like we have a fun time together. And then the other aspect of it that I really like is that it's so teaching focused. That's really what I want to be doing. Like I'm not creating, I don't feel like I'm trying to create entertainment.

47:12I'm not, you know, again, I'm not performing. I'm just using it as a medium for teaching, which is the thing that I think I'm most passionate about. It really comes out in the work that you love to teach. I think that that's like your fans and your colleagues, people watching you and YouTube are getting a lot of information. And it doesn't feel like you're doing some kind of stunt, which I respect that. And I love it. It's why we love it, actually. Yeah. The point to me is not to impress anybody with like look at my skills, like look at what I've created. The point is to share knowledge. And I've spent like an extraordinary amount of time thinking about the intricacies of how does curd thicken and like how, you know, how do you know when a cake is done and all these things.

47:57And I think it's so interesting. And I really just get excited to tell people like I thought a lot about this and like here's this cool thing I noticed and here's how you can, you know, like, you know, be aware of it in your kitchen. Be a better baker, be a better cook. And that's cool. I mean it feels like more of the ATK Milk Street vibe than like TikTok. Right. Are you wanting to? No. I anticipated your question. I am not on. You anticipated cut it off and shut it down. I love that. I am not on TikTok. Claire, we ask all guests on the Taste podcast, if you could write a dream cookbook or food culture book without the burden of time, meaning you have no deadline, or the burden of budget, meaning you have all the money in the world, what would that book be?

48:37I think I would write a book about, and this is book, versions of this have been written before. But I think I would do like a super deep dive, kind of bringing in a lot of my culinary like history and knowledge on like wheat and flour. Because when I'm baking, I really think about how miraculous it is. Like there is this thing that has like can make gluten that can create everything from a baguette to sourdough to croissant to like a like um you know hand pulled noodles like noodles you know and it is truly miraculous and we owe so much of our food and diet to this thing called wheat and it's sort of poorly understood and the more that i've gotten into sourdough baking the more i really can appreciate and really like truly realize how much of a fresh product it is or it should be.

49:36And we're so used to just seeing it as this like powdery white stuff that sits on our shelf, you know, almost indefinitely. Right. And it's kind of just like the key to everything. It's well articulated. It's also demonized by many sectors of culture and in publishing and in pop culture. And certainly we're aware of insensitivities and there are real diseases, but also there's some real junk bullshit science out there about it. Right. Yeah. I mean I kind of laugh when I see things that are labeled gluten-free that are like – it will be like cornstarch and it will be labeled gluten-free. Tortilla chips.

50:08Right. And I don't understand, again, what you said. Like obviously notwithstanding like people with celiac and real medical conditions that can't tolerate it. But it's not – I'm like it's not an inherently bad thing. And in fact it's the opposite. It is this incredible substance that is capable of so much. I just like to celebrate that. Absolutely. I look forward to reading that book. Thank you. It's going to be great. Claire Saffitz, thank you for joining The Taste Podcast. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

50:43The Taste Podcast is hosted by me, Matt Rodbard. It's produced by Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumber. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.