How To Stress-Bake with Claire Saffitz
S1: Have you ever started baking only to, like, realize halfway through the recipe that you don’t have some of the ingredients you need?
S2: Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I think baking is really scary for a lot of people and they get, like, super freaked out about it. And so I feel like my job is to be sort of a guide through the process and to because, like, I made all the mistakes, I’ve made the mistakes so that you don’t have to. And I hope to give people more confidence.
S3: Welcome to How to. I’m Charles Stuart. Do you remember the early days of the pandemic when everyone seemed to be baking all of the time? Xyloto, who knew how many people of Salado and yeast you would go to the grocery store and there would be no yeast left on the shelves?
S4: Everybody was baking? Oh, yes, I have been baking up a storm ever since everything has started. This is Daniel, a podcast producer at Slate. And since the pandemic started, his kitchen has been going nonstop. I baked like four different cakes that I ended up freezing and then throwing most of them away just because I did it for the activity of making cakes. And I’ve made like cinnamon rolls over and over again.
S1: Daniel’s turned to baking as a comfort activity, but you can only cook the same cinnamon rolls so many times. So he started experimenting with more complicated recipes.
S5: I think the weirdest thing is pistachio buns, because I had to soak and peel like 12 ounces of raw pistachios. And luckily I made it through somehow. And was it good? Oh, yeah, I was thrilled.
S1: But it’s also easy to get stuck in a baking rut or not know what new thing to try next or feel frustrated by shortages of the grocery store.
S5: I feel like I’ve just baked all of the normal things. I’m like familiar with the normal flavors and I love sweets, but I just want to break out of maybe just like the sweet spot that I’m in.
S1: So we turn to clear Savitz, who you may know from her Bon Appetit video series Gourmet Makes, where she takes her favorite food from our childhood, like Twinkies or Pop Tarts. And she deconstructs it and attempts to recreate it with a gourmet flair.
S6: Before we can make our own Twinkie, we have to know what a Twinkie really is. In essence, the Twinkie is a snack cake that is filled with cream. Think it needs a little more time. And I overfill them. I OK, it’s harder than I thought I was going to be.
S7: But what do you do when you have the ambition to soar in the kitchen but you don’t have the supplies? Well, Claire has a delicious but simple recipe that only uses ingredients most of us already have. And you can cook along as you listen. And if you’re missing something, don’t worry about it. Claire has solutions. And besides, it’s a pandemic. Who’s going to complain? Stick with us.
S1: OK, so what are we going to make today?
S2: So today we’re going to make me so buttermilk biscuits, as most people would have everything to make them at home already. And it comes together relatively quickly. But it is, I think, a really interesting spin on a kind of classic American, you know, flaky butter about biscuit.
S5: Daniel, how do you feel about biscuits? I’m from the South, so I am a big business.
S8: OK, this is me. I know. I know. I’m worried, you know, but it’s OK because I’ve never had a Mizo biscuit before.
S2: I have a complex about it. And I’m just really freaked out that I’m keeping a Southerner how to make biscuits.
S5: So I’d be curious, like if you could maybe help me figure out what if I don’t have buttermilk, if I don’t have miso or.
S2: Yeah, I mean, they are miso buttermilk biscuits. There’s like only five ingredients to start with. So if you’re missing a couple of them, then you might be in trouble. But I think that the thing about baking is like, yes, there are rules, there are techniques and procedures you have to follow. But once you know and understand them, that’s when you can start to break the rules a little bit so we can talk about those moments and troubleshooting.
S5: And I definitely have miso, but I actually don’t have buttermilk. They were out of it at the store.
S8: So talk to me about the dairy that you do have a whole milk ranch dressing. I have I have butter and a yoghurt or now I have a Greek yogurt. OK, all right. We can definitely work with that. So the important thing about buttermilk is that it is acidulated. You know, there is acid in the buttermilk. It basically never goes bad. And that’s I think people get really freaked out about things spoiling.
S5: I do have vinegar, too, if I need to throw any of that.
S2: OK, all right. I think we should be OK. You’re going to start with whole milk as a base and we’re going to add in a little bit of the yogurt for the acidity, you know, in the natural cultures that are in the yogurt. And then we might even add a little bit of do you have lemon juice? Skip that.
S3: We’ll use vinegar. OK, so you basically seem like like the Walter White of of cooking from my perspective.
S8: Perfect. I’ll introduce myself that Clare is the one who bakes. I’ll take it.
S3: OK, we should say at this point, if you’re baking along with us at home, go ahead and set your oven to three hundred and seventy five degrees Fahrenheit. All you’ll need for this recipe is buttermilk or for like you heard something similar and just a few other ingredients butter, sugar, all purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda and miso, which is Japanese soy bean paste. And if you don’t have me, so that’s totally fine because Claire says you can substitute slightly less soy sauce, which you probably do have. You can find the entire recipe for the biscuits in our episode show notes online. And if you’re not in your kitchen, that’s OK, too, because clear, we’ll talk about how baking can reduce your anxiety and improve your life.
S8: This is a great recipe for quarantine because it’s pretty like instant gratification. You know, it’s like you don’t have to do an overnight rise in the fridge. You don’t go away for anything to rise in less than an hour. You have these like delicious slicky biscuits that are best enjoyed hot that can be reformed and enjoyed, you know, for several days.
S3: Oh, and you’ll need one small and one medium mixing bowl measuring cups and a rolling pin if you don’t have a rolling pin.
S8: I always tell people they can use a wine bottle. It doesn’t work great, but it works well enough. OK, all right. You ready? We start. Yes. OK, let’s do ok. I have a normal buttermilk so I’m going to start measuring that out. So you need one and a quarter cups. Let’s first make your buttermilk mixture. I think you should do a quarter cup of Greek yogurt and the rest whole milk and then maybe add in just for good measure, a half teaspoon of white vinegar or whatever kind of vinegar you’ve got. It’s looking buttermilk. OK, good. All right. So that’s good to go. Let’s do the miso next. So this recipe uses a full half cup of me, so which is quite a lot. That’s me. So much. It’s so much of so, you know, keep that humor because sometimes you need a little bit of that when things don’t turn out well.
S1: When did you first think, like, maybe I should put miso in the biscuits because I’ve never heard of miso biscuits before.
S9: You know, it’s a very close cousin of like a cheesy biscuit. Miso has that kind of cheesy flavor. And so I love the kind of challenge of baking something so salty. And I made it and I thought it was delicious.
S5: Well, and I think like with the buttermilk and the miso, these are definitely very cultured biscuits.
S8: Oh, God. Oh, God. It just keeps on coming. You’re killing it today, man. Once you have a smooth buttermilk. So mixture, this can go back in the fridge while we prep everything else because we want this to be cold. And so, you know, a lot of baking is about temperature and controlling temperature. So also, speaking of cold, I’m going to now move to cutting up the butter you have your two sticks of. Old butter, right? I got him. So now we’re going to cut these and a half inch pieces, the size is not super, super important. We just want to break down this butter into smaller bits. You get all those nice little squares. No, I love. Yeah, the the sort of perfection Jimmy comes out and these kind of kitchen tasks.
S3: At this point, Clear puts her perfect little butter cubes in the refrigerator with the miso buttermilk mixture and then grabs a bowl for the dry ingredients.
S8: So now we’re going to build all of the dry ingredients in here. And then this will be the bowl where we put together our biscuit dough. So let’s start with the flour. We want three and one quarter cups, all purpose flour.
S3: By the way, this is totally new to me. So, Claire, I’m watching you and what you’re doing. What I usually do is I take the measuring cup. I just plunged into the flour container and, like, scoop up as much as I can. And Daniel shaking his head, like, clearly, I’m an idiot. So so what you’re doing is you’re actually using, like, a little a little like shovel to pick up the flour and put that into the measuring cup. Yes.
S9: Flour is one of the most unreliable volume measurements in all of baking. So that’s just a means of getting a very, very consistent cut the flour where I’m not, like, overly impacting the ingredients in the measuring. And then we are going to add to that a little bit of sugar.
S8: So just one tablespoon of sugar like salt is a flavor enhancer. And it also will encourage Browning because we want, like, really nice, beautiful brown biscuits. OK, we do want to add our leavening, a tablespoon of baking powder and now just a quarter teaspoon of baking soda. Yeah. OK, so let’s grab our butter from the fridge. And first thing we’re going to do is smash that butter into our flour mixture.
S3: So I’m watching you, Claire, and you’re literally just taking your cut out butter and and you’re just dumping it into the bowl with all of the dried ingredients.
S8: It goes right in. We want the butter to stay as cold as possible through this process, through like speed becomes a factor at this point. I’m just scraping the butter into the bowl.
S9: So I am taking the individual pieces of butter in my hands and I’m using my thumbs to smash and flatten the pieces of butter until they break apart into smaller pieces. So what you end up having in the oven is like layers of dough and butter and dough and butter, all kind of stacked, and it’s having those separate layers that’s going to create that flaky effect when that water content of the butter turns to steam and creates a little bit of a lift in separation. OK, but to that point, we should get to the next step, which is working in our liquid. So, Daniel, you’re good. You’re ready to go?
S8: Yep. I got it out of the fridge. OK, excellent. You know, are you sure you don’t want to teach me how to do this? Because you probably watched your mom do it a million times? I don’t know. I feel like, oh, God, I’m here. I’m following you, please. So I make a little well in the center and then I can just scrape in that whole buttermilk miso mixture.
S3: Oh, OK. So you’re pouring it all in the whole buttermilk miso mixture. Yes.
S9: And now we basically want to work this into a fairly shaggy but also evenly mixed. So so because we want this to be tender, I want to try to mix as little as possible. So now I’m switching to a spatula and my technique here is basically just fold the mixture onto itself a few times.
S5: Yeah. Feels like it feels like I’m tumbling my laundry.
S9: Yes it is in the dryer drum right now. Exactly. And now I’m going to take my dough and the bowl and just turn off the entire thing onto that surface and I’m going to pat it down with my hands into a square that’s about like between a half and three quarters inch thick. You can just sort of eyeball it.
S3: So it’s like Plato, you’re like making like a Plato Square. Yes. All the dough. Yes.
S7: Next, Clear and Daniel cut their dough into four sections and they stack the sections on top of each other, kind of like in a in a tower. Then you roll out the dough until it’s about half an inch thick. And the key here is to not put a lot of pressure on the rolling pin because, again, you’re trying to keep those crumbled pieces of butter intact so that when they melt, they leave these air pockets inside the layers that make the biscuits flaky.
S8: You go, Daniel, I’m ready.
S5: I dropped my towel for a second, but I recovered. Excellent.
S8: OK, and now we’re ready to cut our biscuits, so we make sixteen biscuits.
S3: So you just you just have your sheet there. You put the paper down and now you’re just placing the biscuits on the parchment and then is that it. Are we ready to put it in the oven.
S9: You could, but I sort of do an intermediate step where I chill the biscuits real quick, just as an insurance policy, like maybe the forming took a little bit of time or, you know, you got distracted or, you know, your mom called and everything’s getting a little warm. I just throw it back in the fridge, even the freezer. If you have the space to rest for a second and firm up before I bake as your dough is chilling, melt half a stick of butter.
S3: Then after a few minutes, grab your biscuits out of the fridge and brush the melted butter of. The top of the hour and you can sprinkle a little black pepper over the top two if you want, and then it’s finally time to pop them in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes until the tops of them are golden brown. And while we’re waiting, we’re going to talk with Claire about how baking kind of saved her career.
S10: So stay with us.
S1: We’re back with Daniel and are baking expert Claire Savitz, author of the new cookbook Dessert Person and Clear, since her love of food started when she was about five years old.
S11: Both of my parents are phenomenal cooks and my dad was making. Linguine and clam sauce, and he was frying sliced garlic and olive oil, and I remember as a very, very young child smelling that smell, and I remember even then thinking to myself, while there has got to be no better smell in the world than the smell, and I still believe that that’s true.
S1: And I like give my little five year old self a pat on the back for being right about that that feeling, even though she liked cooking, she didn’t really seriously pursue it until after college.
S11: And I was sort of a lost, adrift, like college grad living in New York and not having any idea what I wanted to do, kind of bouncing from internship to internship.
S1: And all I wanted to do was cook and bake so clear, shipped off to a culinary school in France and eventually found herself back in New York testing recipes at Bon Appetit magazine. Then one day, the video team nudged her in front of a camera.
S6: Oh, my God, no. Pathetic. Oh, God damn it.
S4: Oh, I think you did a better job than I thought you were going to. Oh, thank you. Because it’s a tricky one. I like being underestimated.
S2: And that was sort of where Gromek started and it became this huge YouTube hit. You know, I really I learned to like the show in the beginning. I hated it and I thought it was totally pointless. But eventually I learned to love it because it was about the intersection of creativity and problem solving.
S7: Well, and one of the things I love most about your videos, Claire, is that you you make mistakes along the way and you kind of like you. You immediately fess up to the mistakes, but you explain what the mistake was.
S8: Yeah, I think it’s important to show that that happens all the time.
S2: And I grew up on the kind of glossy food shows where, you know, you have like a recipe and it’s a straightforward presentation of that recipe. And it, you know, by the miracle of TV, there’s a swap and it comes out perfectly. And that’s not what it’s like to cook at home, you know, in anyone’s kitchen.
S9: So I think it’s really important to show that, like, sometimes my stuff doesn’t turn out either.
S5: Well, and something that I think your show really helps me with is that, like because of all of your failures and yet your, like, willingness to just figure out what went wrong or keep going is kind of made me more adventurous. Like I got really into, like, sugar cooking and like was able to make marshmallows and things like and just kind of made it less scary, just made me like willing to try them even if I was going to mess up like you did.
S2: I think cooking and baking has made me better at facing my fears in other realms because I sort of forced myself to like do things that feel scary in the kitchen, like makes you feel like a lot more powerful and in control.
S7: You’ve described yourself as kind of an anxious kid, and you’ve said that you you always needed to follow the recipes perfectly. Did did learning how to bake and going on video and making those mistakes on video, did that help you stress less and get used to being more comfortable in the kitchen, you think?
S11: I think it did. I think when I started to give myself permission to mess up on camera and then I saw that other people gave me permission to do that. Also, that sort of reinforced that feeling that it was OK. And now I like love the things that are imperfect about the desserts that I make or the recipes that I create. Hold on. I just want to take a quick pause.
S8: Daniel, how you’re smelling in your kitchen. It smells so good. I just keep taking a deep breath. It’s the best.
S6: So I just did a little 180 degree rotation of the pan.
S5: But even baking, it just looks like some of the butter is leaking out of my biscuits. And it’s kind of there’s some like pools of butter around. Should I be worried about that?
S11: Don’t be worried about it. That’s sort of normal. That butter also will help the bottoms get super golden brown. So don’t don’t worry about it.
S7: So why do you think so many people are intimidated by baking?
S11: I thought a lot about what is intimidating about baking. I think the reason why people feel that way is because, like baking happens in an unseen environment. You put something in the oven and something happens and it comes out transformed and there is something.
S12: So baking is like cocooning.
S8: I’m thinking about that one. Look, I’m sorry, I can’t I’ll just cut it out, I promise.
S4: No, no, no. We have it. We love some more than others, to be honest. But keep looking like like Claire said, you got to keep on experimenting, man. You only you only get the best. Exactly.
S7: So so, OK, so, so clear, one other question before before these biscuits get done, so like one unfortunate thing about this holiday season is that a lot of us are going to be eating alone. What’s the comfort food recipe that you think folks should try that gives them something to look forward to?
S11: There can be a certain tyranny about tradition, like you have to do it the same way every year. And this year nothing is the same. And so I sort of feel like leaning into that idea, which is just to say that I think it’s a great opportunity to satisfy any craving that you have. Like, I had meatloaf on Thanksgiving because I just really like meatloaf and I hadn’t had it in so long. And I just felt like the most comforting thing by not having to cook all of the standards know. And so I can cook whatever I want. If you want to eat Tatiara potato chips in your sweatpants, do that.
S8: By the way, I’m pulling my biscuit tactics, that looks so good. I see.
S4: Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. So so the biscuits are like golden brown. The eye can see, like, the different levels, like where they, like, puffed up and they’ve got like, super flaky. Oh, my God. They look beautiful. They smell so good. Does it smell kind of cheesy or at least like very savory in your kitchen? Yeah, it does. I definitely get just like the umami sniff. So are you guys ready to take the the first bite of your business? I pick the one that I want to eat. Yeah. I’ve had my eye on one specifically to do so on the count of three. Ready.
S3: One, two, three.
S12: Oh my gosh. I’m so jealous of you guys. Thank goodness.
S11: I should say it’s kind of cheating because there were, unlike anything warm out of the oven is delicious, even if later on, once it’s not warm, it’s not very good. So they are so good.
S5: I, I’m in love. I mean, the layers are beautiful, like they’re just peeling up perfectly.
S1: Yeah. It’s like an accordion. You’re just like pulling that thing up and it’s like, yeah ok.
S4: I think I know what I’m doing this afternoon. Thank you so much Claire. I really enjoyed this lesson and getting to talk to you. This is a lot of fun. Next time will be here for your stand up. Yes, of course.
S11: This was really fun. Thank you for indulging me as I taught you this other nerd, how to make the best biscuits I’ve made in a while.
S4: So you definitely taught me something. All right.
S11: That means a lot to me. So thank you.
S3: Thank you to Daniel for letting us into his kitchen and declare Savitz for her fantastic and delicious advice, you should definitely look for her book, Dessert Person, and will post a full version of Claire’s recipe for these biscuits in the notes for the show and its slate dotcom. How to do you have a problem solving or are you just hungry and want more recipes? Well, we can at least help with the first one. If you send us a note of how to insulate dotcom or leave us a voicemail at six four six four nine five four zero zero one, and we might have you on the show. And if you like this episode, check out how to cook one perfect meal in which New York Times super chef Sam Sifton helps. A 20 something bachelor pulled together the perfect dinner to win back his ex. Does it work? Does she return? You can find the answer to that and all of our other episodes for free in our podcast feed. How TOS executive producer is Derek, John, Rachel, Ellen and Rosemarie Bellson produce a show in Merritt. Jacob is our engineer. Our theme music is by Janice Brown. June Thomas is senior managing producer and Alicia Montgomery is executive producer of Slate podcasts. Gabriel Roth is Slate’s editorial director of audio special thanks to Sung Park and Maggie Taylor.
S12: I’m Charles Duhigg, thanks for listening.
