Hacking HUDS with Claire Saffitz

“Oh my god, are you Claire Saffitz?”

Standing in the Adams Gold Room is, indeed, the cookbook author and YouTube star, easily recognizable by her signature streak of face-framing gray.

Claire J. Saffitz ’09 smiles at the starry-eyed student who spotted her, briefly whisked away from our interview for a quick photoshoot, displaying the sort of starstruck fervor we, as reporters asking her to “hack HUDS,” had to bury in the moment.

We can’t take full credit for the idea of asking Saffitz to zhuzh up some everyday fare. The culinary celebrity first found fame with videos of her attempting to recreate junk food and childhood snacks with fewer additives and artificial ingredients in Bon Appétit’s gleaming test kitchen as part of the YouTube video series “Gourmet Makes” — where Saffitz attempts to gourmet-ify classics like Takis and Lucky Charms. The videos are filled with mayhem and infused with enough of Safftiz’s candid determination to make it nearly impossible to avoid cheering for the pastry chef when, after days of toil, she succeeds.

The series regularly amassed millions of views and helped propel Saffitz to both culinary and YouTube stardom that persists five years after she left the show.

Today, Saffitz continues to share recipes and cooking tricks on her own personal YouTube channel. She’s authored two cookbooks, one of which, “Dessert Person” was a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best cookbooks of 2020 (a year when we all desperately needed cookbooks).

But the cook’s rise to success didn’t happen overnight.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, the Adams House alum studied History and Literature at Harvard. She went on to study French cuisine at the École Grégoire-Ferrandi, a culinary school in Paris, France before earning a master’s degree in history from McGill University. Missing her time in a chef’s apron, Saffitz combined her love of writing and cuisine and, in 2013, began work as a recipe tester for Bon Appétit.

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In her Bon Appétit days, Saffitz began every “Gourmet Makes” with a thorough look at the ingredients list on the package of the classic snack. In Adams dining hall, she was no different. She took a moment to look over her options, bouncing from the salad bar to the hot bar and back again, and began planning the best way to optimize the effort to happy taste buds ratio.

Then, it was time to attack. From her choice of iceberg lettuce to the quick drizzle of an olive oil vinaigrette by the sauce bar, Saffitz’s work was confident and efficient. Her final product is simple but hearty, a salad bowl featuring hummus, feta, avocado, cucumber, and accompanied by a Caesar salad topped with chicken. It’s a distinctively Saffitz technique: don’t ignore the classics, elevate them.

“I’m very happy,” she says of her final HUDS creation. “I give it a high mark.”

As we sit down to eat, Saffitz emphasizes the difficulties HUDS faces dealing with a variety of needs: varying student tastes, sheer volume cooking for thousands of mouths, and the limited options to find fresh produce in Massachusetts. “It’s hard to get excited about cold storage apples,” she says, “and squash basically all the time.”

It’s a thoughtful philosophy she believes all food critics should employ. “Because restaurants are such difficult businesses, you should only write a review if it's a good one,” Saffitz says. “I don’t believe in negative reviews, basically.”

Instead, she believes a restaurant critic’s utmost responsibility is “to be respectful of people’s time and effort and artistic vision.”

“I think I’d be a really good food critic,” she adds, harkening back to her own tenure on The Crimson’s art board, where she spent her senior year writing film reviews.

Saffitz has found what many Harvard students dream of: a career that allows her to make money being great at what she loves, with a healthy dose of fame as well. But unlike the 53% of Harvard’s Class of 2025 who will be graduating with careers lined up in consulting, finance, or technology, Saffitz’s profession and her college education aren’t as obviously connected.

“When I was a Harvard student, no one even talked about careers in the humanities, much less a career in the culinary arts,” she says.

Instead, she credits her education as equipping her with analytical and writing skills that made her a good communicator. It’s a rarer skill than one might expect, she says, and one that proves useful regardless of career. In that way, “I do think Harvard helped a lot,” she tells us. “Even though, in terms of coursework and subject of my classes, there was really no overlap at all.”

As she stepped into the post-grad life, she realized that what she always came back to was cooking. She used to rush through her work for her New York City internship so that she could come home to spend the rest of her time replicating New York Times Cooking recipes. After a while, she realized she could make it a career.

Saffitz’s best advice for today’s Harvard students who don’t quite know what they’re doing is as simple and accessible as her cooking: talk to people. “Find someone inside or outside of the Harvard community that has a job that you think is cool, then talk to them about how they got that job,” she says.

“There’s so many more paths out there than you think when you’re a student.”

At the same time, Saffitz pushes back against the idea that everyone’s interests should inform their profession like hers do. “This idea of ‘you have to pursue your passion’ I think is sort of tyrannical, a little bit, and oppressive,” she says. As a case in point, she references a good friend of hers from Harvard who took a very different path.

“She’s like, I don’t have a passion, so I'm just going to be a lawyer,” explains Saffitz. “And I think she's really happy.” Contrary to popular advice that tells young people to “follow their dreams” through their work, Saffitz posits that the two don’t always have to be coupled.

“You could be happy having a hobby that you love and a job that is a job that allows you to do your hobby,” she says, leaning forward in the booth. “There’s a lot of ways to find the balance.”

In fact, Saffitz initially worried her love for cooking might not survive becoming formalized. “When I was deciding to pursue food as a career,” she says, “I did wonder, is it going to kill my passion for it?”

Thankfully, it didn’t. Having left her position at Bon Appétit to work freelance, the accomplished chef and baker is now working on her third cookbook, which will see her venture into savory territory.

Nevertheless, Saffitz has been more cognizant than ever about the need for balance since she recently became a mother. Juggling a career in food with the daily grind of prepping meals for her one-year-old son is a challenge that reminds her that cooking can sometimes be a burden.

“I’m like ‘oh my god he has to eat everyday, and I have to figure out what I’m gonna give him every single day,’” she says of the transition. “And I don’t want it to be the same things that I’m eating because I want him to have the most pristine, perfect, healthy food all the time. So it is work, absolutely. Being in the kitchen is work, and I connect with that feeling a lot.”

Consequently, she writes her cookbooks with busy home bakers in mind, striving to make delicious and high-quality recipes feel approachable to all. “Part of my job,” she tells us, “is alleviating the burden of figuring out, like, what are we going to have for dinner tonight.”

Indeed, the ‘Saffitz way’ to make a dish gourmet doesn’t require any unusual equipment or ingredients: just a pan and some butter. “If there’s any recipe that has butter, why not brown it first? It’s going to make it taste better,” she tells us. These little techniques go a long way toward enhancing flavor in the whole dish, and hence a humble weeknight dinner is transformed into something just that bit more gourmet.

Her philosophy of food emphasizes cooking what makes you happy rather than abstract ideals of fine dining. “As much as I like the idea, from a creative standpoint, of a dessert that has miso in it, or gochujang caramel or something, what I want to eat is a warm chocolate cookie,” she admits. “So I believe in adding creativity here and there, but really sticking with the things that are tried and true.”

It’s an approach that encourages everyone to experience the joy of cooking within what she acknowledges are very real time and willpower constraints for many people. Ultimately, Saffitz thinks the benefits of making your own food are worth the effort.

“Food is sustenance,” she says as we head out of Adams dining hall, “but it’s also one of our primary sources of pleasure. If you want to live a really good life then you should probably learn how to cook, because it’s the key.”

In classic Saffitz style, she has a hack for this, too. “My advice is, just keep a huge stash of frozen dumplings at home,” she says, walking briskly to make it to a coffee chat with students from the Science and Cooking Gen Ed. “Because any night where we do not feel like cooking, that is what we have. And I'm still always happy to eat it.”

—Magazine writer Megha Khemka can be reached at megha.khemka@thecrimson.com

—Magazine writer Alexander W. Anoma can be reached at alexander.anoma@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @AnomaAlexander.