Claire Saffitz
American pastry chef, food writer and YouTube personality
Biography
Claire Saffitz is an American pastry chef, food writer and video host, born in 1986. She is best known for her years at Bon Appétit magazine and for her cooking videos, which brought professional-style baking to a broad online audience.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family, she graduated from Harvard University in 2009 with a degree in US history and literature. Some years later she trained in French cuisine and pastry at École Grégoire-Ferrandi in Paris, and then earned a master's degree in history at McGill University in Montreal, focusing on French culinary history of the early modern era. She joined Bon Appétit in 2013 as a recipe tester and rose to senior food editor. There she starred in series such as Gourmet Makes, in which she recreated popular packaged snacks like Doritos and Twinkies in elevated homemade versions.
After leaving the magazine's staff in 2020, she published the cookbooks Dessert Person and What's for Dessert, both New York Times best sellers. She has since worked as a freelance recipe developer, contributing to NYT Cooking, and in 2024 launched Claire Recreates on her own channel, a conceptual successor to Gourmet Makes. Her legacy lies largely in making serious pastry approachable and in explaining technique with precision and good humour.
Key contributions
- Gourmet Makes: Bon Appétit series in which she recreated packaged snack foods with professional technique, becoming a popular figure on YouTube.
- Dessert Person (2020): baking book that teaches readers to bake with confidence, with detailed recipes and technical guidance.
- What's for Dessert (2022): second cookbook focused on simple dessert recipes.
- Claire Recreates (2024): series on her channel that conceptually succeeds Gourmet Makes.