Photo-Illustration: by Stevie Remsberg When I walk into Claire Saffitz’s Upper West Side apartment on a rainy Wednesday morning, there are two restaurant-level dishes sitting on her counter: a concord grape and apple pie with a flawless, wavy crust and a galette filled to bursting and surrounded by buttery pastry.
Saffitz pads across the room and sits down at a small table next to a bookshelf filled with seemingly every notable cookbook of the past 25 years, opens her laptop, and begins adding notes to a spreadsheet of all the recipes she’s currently testing while also compiling a list of what she needs on our Whole Foods run.
“I really like following roadmaps,” she explains as we walk through a now-foggy stretch of the Upper West Side to the nearby Whole Foods. It’s a side of her personality that she can trace back to childhood, when a friend tried to convince her that they could make chocolate chip cookies without a recipe. “I remember, as an 11 year old, being like, ‘We definitely need a recipe, what are you talking about?’ Of course, the cookies were terrible.
“If you understand flavors, and you understand the transformation and alchemy of cooking, then you can bake,” she continues. “It doesn’t need to be scary.” “It’s hard for me to wrap my head around how popular they are,” Saffitz says, handing me some star anise for the cake batter. “It’s obviously changed my career, because I didn’t see myself pursuing this and doing this, but I am very happy to see where it goes and what opportunities it leads to.”
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