All That Glitters: CCF At Home with Claire Saffitz

well thanks for joining us everybody so excited to welcome you to an evening with claire sappis we welcome her back to her native clayton missouri sponsored by the clayton community foundation and wow do we have a lot to be proud of with this native daughter of our region her book dessert person is a runaway bestseller and the new york times review of books called it one of the best cookbooks of 2020 so we're going to get into that and make some forever brownies before this hour is over thanks so much for joining us we are sponsored tonight by our friends at the clayton community foundation established in 2008 a partner to the city of clayton focused on four things art history parks and sustainability tonight is a special at home and we're kind of celebrating also all that glitters which usually takes place in person as a way of thanking all those who have donated to the clayton community foundation and so we hope that our donors did receive the special gift that we dropped off at your homes you know the clinton community foundation has actually raised more than 10 million dollars since 2008 with the support of the community the foundation is fundraising to save the pocket park on maryland just east of the clayton library so stay tuned for that detail but there are other exciting developments as well including the clayton neighborhoods video it's a project that debuted in december it features st louis county historian esley hamilton sharing insights on eight neighborhoods the first videos highlighted hillcrest carswald and clayton's forgotten african-american neighborhood subsequent neighborhoods will include bemiston and more so watch for that and also by the way we have a marker program where we're marking historic sites within the city of clayton and soon we're going to recognize the site of the attic school which was the school district of clayton's second school to serve african-american school children and if you haven't yet please take that autocast tour what's that well it's a tour that you can take from one public art installation to another and it happens to be uh hosted by yours truly the ralph clayton society honors donors who have given annual support of a thousand dollars and above to the clayton community foundation society members are generous leaders supporting the annual fund and committed to the clayton community all donations are welcome so ladies and gentlemen enough with the preface let's get to the heart of this book or our program tonight we welcome a woman who attended captain elementary then wydown middle then clayton high school before going on to harvard university reasonably well known school out east perhaps you've heard of it she also got her master's degree in culinary history from mcgill university studied pastry at a cole gregoire farande in paris i'm sure i butchered that pronunciation was a senior editor at bon appetit she had a video series called gourmet makes and i'm telling you each of these episodes and there are about 25 of them got eight to nine million viewers she is a real sensation a force of nature and a new book as i said dessert person is just selling out internationally claire sapitz congratulations and welcome how are you thank you i'm great i'm so excited to be here it was an extremely kind and generous introduction so thank you um and i am i'm coming to you from new york where i live um but charlie as you said like st louis native my whole childhood and adolescence and um i'm just really happy to sort of virtually at least be back home uh you know celebrating clayton um and i'm really happy to be here so thank you no thank you so much and uh i know that you lived at one point a couple of doors away from me i didn't know you at the time you were at 101 aberdeen place and i got to believe that your early culinary roots included maybe a power bar at caldi's on demand well i remember when calvi's on demand opened i was in kindergarten and i remember it vividly we would go and get hot chocolate i was with my older sister and i'm sure my mom um and we would get hot chocolate from caldi's and so i feel like caldi's is mine you know yes they'll even though i don't live there um so certainly the caldis hot chocolate and gooey butter cake were like very formative for me those are those are important touchstones in my my culinary experiences in st louis i got to believe that now that you're a best-selling author your high school english teacher mrs tisan must be very happy i was just thinking about mrs tisson the other day um i i was talking to my older sisters both of whom also went through chs and why down um and i was just sort of popping to my head the other day and i think about a lot of my teachers often um and i was actually just speaking to a friend my friend anya abrams who also went through clayton high school and were still good friends and keep in touch and we were talking yesterday about how um how our education at chs made us really good writers and we didn't even really know it as we were progressing through education but now as adults we're super grateful for that so i think about maybe that's why i was thinking about mrs chison but i think about my teachers often and what a great foundation we got at chs students well i will say this on watching one of your bon appetit series you were trying to recreate the ruffle potato chip and and that's what you were known for uh maybe originally to the masses anyway you would reverse engineer some of these popular items like twinkies peanut m ms oreos snickers cheetos skittles gushers kitkats and pringles but with that ruffles you are actually measuring the amplitude of the wave and you were referring to your high school physics class when you did it yeah i remember freshman physics uh with mr de la paz and how i thought the class was so hard and felt like it was a real triumph of mine that i like ended up doing well in that class by the end of the year um it's true i feel like i do draw upon my science background which essentially stopped after i left chs but was very strong because of the teachers that i had there um and chemistry also comes into play a lot with baking because that's sort of my that's my bread and butter um so i think all of that that really strong foundation in chemistry and physics helps a lot with what i do which if you had told me at the time that i would be using some of that knowledge in my career i would not have believed you um but here we are and also math as well certainly math um with conversions and um you know like grams to volume and all that it's it's it is important and i do use it i did not think that i would but you know here i am so um that's one of the things i love about baking is it draws upon like lots of different skills i i can't think of a better endorsement for the clayton public schools than the one you just gave it claire sapids but um i i also noticed in one of your features when i can't remember the food that you were recreating but it came from an experience a camp thunderbird which you attended as a youth um oh yeah uh combos combos combos is right yes yes my sisters and i all attended camp thunderbird which was like owned by st louis natives um coincidentally the family that now lives in what i call my house at 101 aberdeen um good family friends of ours and yes like i growing up we didn't have a lot of like snack kind of foods in our house and both my parents cooked a lot and our whole family cooked a lot even if it was like super you know we would microwave a tortilla with cheese on it we didn't really have a lot of snack food and so camp butterburg was where i ate like the kind of only i don't know what you want to call it junk food the kind of snack foods that i was then as an adult having to revisit and recreate so um yeah yeah i was just you know i think about camp thunderbird all the time too these are some real strong midwest um experiences that that i had as a as an adolescent i i'm sure well you know i i we want to get into the food soon but i do find it remarkable that your street that you lived on uh from what age 5 to 18 i think you said um also uh tennessee williams the great playwright maybe the greatest you know in america post-world war ii lived at 42 aberdeen place and then more recently i think after you moved out new york times best-selling author curtis sittenfeld also lived just a couple of doors away from your home she must have been like at 107 or so she she was in a big home with the pool she has since moved to minnesota but i'm telling you the clayton community foundation should have a literary trail just walking down aberdeen um wow we'll have to think about that i did not know that about career sittenfeld that's amazing and um tennessee williams is an author and well play right near and dear to my heart because um i was sort of fascinated by the st louis connection and as a junior in high school studied tennessee williams as my my author as my and so um yeah like i'm so grateful for having that that education and having read so much tennessee williams um and i have that same kind of st louis pride when i think about tennessee williams oh that's good here well you know he also lived on arundel he lived on aberdeen and wydown at various points through his life but speaking of great cookbooks you know um irma rombauer who created the joy of cooking during the depression to make ends meet she was self-published and she lived in north st louis on cavity and uh by the end of the century she had sold 14 million copies and that book was out of st louis missouri wow that i also did not know which is wild i cannot wait to tell my mom that story i didn't know i had no idea wow now how how does someone uh and i know that we do want to get to the brownies and we also have a poll and time is limited so i apologize for that and we've got to get into some of the uh the heart of dessert person recipes and guidance for baking with confidence but um how about a quick cv how did you go from harvard to youtube sensation oh wow it's just it's funny i'm 34 and like and the idea that i'm what was on youtube is just so funny to me because i never thought that would happen so it was not a direct line at all um so i graduated from harvard in 2009 right at sort of right right as the fallout from the financial crisis was really hitting and job prospects were not great and i had recently moved to new york with my very close friend and was like pretty lost and clueless about what i wanted to do and as time went on in this kind of like period of my early 20s all i wanted to do was cook and bake that was like the only thing that i could think of and would look forward to every night so i started to pursue it really seriously and i thought to myself after a couple of years like if i want to do culinary school because i really had such a strong desire to learn and to gain experience um i also had a really strong desire to live in another country and to try to take advantage of being young and sort of aimless and so i i i enrolled in culinary school in paris and you did a great job pronouncing by the way and cole gregoire and nailed it um oh you say that to all the guys and it was a relatively quick like international cuisine program so i was with adults of all different ages from all different countries um and we were in this school that was really like a trade school for french teenagers um and like the french teenagers in the culinary program which wanted nothing to do with us and never talk to us um but it was great and then i had following an eight-month sort of intensive training i had sorry now i'm going to very into great detail but i i did a stage or an internship in a in a restaurant and then i decided at that point in my life i thought maybe i would be an academic and um i you know i love the idea of just sort of learning for a living and teaching and so i pursued a graduate program at mcgill um i did a master's in history and thought i could combine my love of cooking and my love of study and so i studied culinary history which was wonderful and i loved that program but after a year i really missed the act of cooking um and that's when i sort of decided oh there's like this thing called food media that i didn't really know anything about that was mysterious to me but it felt like a way to write about food and cook food and and have it be for a popular audience um and i got very lucky and got a job as a freelancer at one fpg as a recipe tester um and i think that the level of experience i had was was the right level of experience um so and recipe testing uses like a lot of different kinds of skills and so it i loved it and it was kind of my dream job and then i i for five years i stayed there and eventually kind of worked my way up the the masthead as into senior food editor and worked in their test kitchen developing recipes that primarily that was what i was doing a little bit of writing um and then got kind of swept up in this initiative to sort of like bring conde nast the parent company into the 21st century with video um and the test kitchen became a sort of studio space of sorts and um the idea for growing makes was not mine i didn't really i didn't see myself as someone who you know would would would be good at or um enjoy this kind of reverse engineering of snackwoods but it did become this phenomenon that i would have never predicted and so i'm grateful for that experience and for the platform that that gave me um and then i went freelance in 2018 and continued to do video as a freelancer for bon appetit and wrote my cookbook dessert person um which came out this past fall so and that's been great it's um i love i just i love writing cookbooks is a dream it's just like you get to recipe test all day long and and write the recipes and create this this sort of self-contained representation of of your all you know your philosophy as a cook and as a baker so um it has been an amazing journey through you know through this career path but not one that i would have ever ever predicted especially not in st louis like i've always loved to cook that was always an important aspect of sociability in my family that i did not know at a young age that i would end up pursuing cooking two quick questions we had danny meyer of shake shack and many great st louis restaurants with our clayton community foundation webinar series in 2020 and he too getting out of college went to study food in europe before embarking on his restaurant empire in new york city i think that like especially paris is such a um and for americans there's a real romanticism to i i was sort of like i was quite um like seduced by julia child's story and when i was right around the asia i was deciding to go to culinary schools when the movie julie and julia came out and i just thought like what could be better than going to france to you know to study french cuisine um and it was wonderful i wouldn't have traded it for anything but there are certainly like many other paths to pursuing that but i do think it is a relatively common path for people especially cooks who can go and you know there's exchange programs where can sort of extern at a at a restaurant abroad so there's lots of this kind of cultural exchange in that sense claire were your parents supportive or did they ever say gee claire with a harvard degree we were hoping that you'd settle down and do something more typical they were support to their credit they were supportive but i think they were like supportive in a nervous way you know i think they were like we are excited for you but like you know like hope hope you hope you figure some stuff out sounds like clayton parents to me yes yes for sure i think that they like as people that love food and cooking i think they inherently respected the pursuit you know um but it certainly wasn't the typical path that uh you know a harvard graduate would take at all so um to their credit they were very supportive i will say claire i thought a description of your success from the minneapolis star tribune was very apt and they said they believe your success is you allow people to disengage from the news cycle do you agree with that i think so and i i wouldn't have i wouldn't have theorized that on my own but just from speaking to people especially during the pandemic during the first half of the pandemic who watched the videos as i just heard from a lot of people anecdotally that to watch an episode of before me makes or any other video was a form of escapism and was um even a form of stress relief there was some there's a weird phenomenon where like watching someone else stress out that person was stress relieving for people at home and i mean i can understand that intellectually i it's hard for me to like i can't experience that myself because it's me um but knowing that people found the act of watching it to be relaxing and soothing helped me want to do it more and and to provide that for people so it was sort of a positive feedback loop like the more i heard that from people the more the better my attitude was frankly well it's incredible on youtube eight one million people watched you how to make a cheeto um eight one six point nine million people this is according a couple of days ago these figures are higher now seven million people watch you how to make gourmet twinkies your segment on pringles garnered 8.2 million viewer viewers that's incredible it is and like it's hard to even like understand what those numbers mean especially because i'm i mean i'm a millennial i so like the idea of using youtube as this place for entertainment is like a little bit strange for me you know i'm still like what's on netflix or regular tv and there's another generation of younger people who are like spending you know so much time consuming content on youtube and so it's like it kind of like my brain a little bit short circuits when i when i hear that i sort of can't even imagine that you know the phenomenon that these videos were um but i think that that's a good thing because it meant that like it was a very like low production these videos you know you just sort of show up and start messing around with different ingredients and so um it felt a little bit like bootstrappy in a way that i'm glad it never got more professional frankly oh this is okay claire in a moment or so we're gonna ask you to show us how to make your malted forever brownies and uh that's a newer video it's not as old so only three quarters of a million people have seen that thus far but that's astounding it's it's out of your brand new cookbook dessert person which by the way on amazon.com as of two nights ago number one for dessert berkey uh dessert baking in that category number one for biscuits and scone baking and number 3 in the category of comfort food so you are right there at the top right out of clayton high now we have some questions for you as well as those who have joined us on this clayton community foundation webinar and the first question is your favorite item to bake a cake b brownies c bread d cookies or e pie okay so my person i'm really excited about this poll i've never done a a zoom thing like this with a pole so i love this feature it's really fun and i'm curious to hear the audience results do you want me to share mine as we go even though you might prejudice the um responses i think that's fair because it's a non-scientific poll for sure okay right right um okay so personally of these choices and i think that these choices represent a nice breadth in terms of you know different categories of baking for me i think it's pie i have to say i actually just made a pie yesterday because i'm recipe testing and like i've made like a thousand pies and i was just i was remarking to my husband like i just love making pie i love it so much it feels like so tactile and there's so much it's see it's so simple i made like a very classic american apple pie and yet there's so much technique involved and it's so satisfying and they all every time i love the process and so that's my attention excellent question number two what recipe intimidates you a layer cake b croissants or puff pastries c sourdough bread d none of the above i'm an adventurous baker i have to say so this is i was so alex one of the organizers i was speaking with yesterday about this full um question that and i we were kind of throwing out ideas and for for this one i mean i actually have two answers it's both croissants and sourdough because both are like so rooted in technique maybe croissants even takes the cake um i was working on a croissant recipe and like i became a little maddened by it like a little obsessed and i couldn't stop making them and so it's just to me it's sort of like the apotheosis of baking it is the um like the most sort of miraculous item that you can make using using these kinds of techniques so and they are hard they are they're very tricky so that i would say croissants we just got a text from mrs t sun she's so happy you use the word apotheosis oh my gosh question four what type of dessert person are you a anything chocolate b based dessert c coffee and or cookies d fromage cheese no sweets i just want to say so i i my book is titled dessert person because that's how i identify like that is how i refer to myself i'm a dessert person i love i love sweets i love dessert and i i don't understand people who are dessert people i don't get it it's like it doesn't make sense to me like sweet there's like five tastes you know there's and sweet is one of them like i'm not gonna entirely no one goes around being like i don't eat salty foods you know or i don't like salty um so the kind of thesis of the book is that like everyone is really a dessert person it's just people who think that they aren't haven't discovered what kind of dessert person they are but if i had to sorry that was a little bit of a preamble but i i identify most strongly as a fruit dessert person so there's a lot of fruit dessert in the book um even though tonight i'm going to show a chocolate dessert so we'll talk about that okay and then our fourth question uh maybe that was our fourth question right did i skip one oh i did i'm so sorry big error we'll have to fix this in the mix have you sorry i skipped the important question number three um have you ever invented your own recipe yes a totally my creation be sort of my family recipe with my unique stamp c no but i plan to or d never and doubt i ever will i think this is an interesting question because i've noticed and this might be i mean this is also anecdotal so i have no i have no real um evidence to back this up but i really feel like baking and cooking literacy is at an all-time high and i think that has to do with things like youtube and the incredible accessibility of information about cooking and technique and it's everywhere and so um i wouldn't be surprised if a big portion of the audience was like yeah i invented a recipe even if it was something really simple and it was like you know a stir-fry or like something that you were throwing together for dinner um but that's of course like that's what i do is i i create recipes and one of the things that i keep in mind all the time that i gained from my my culinary um studies like in ed mcgill is that there's nothing really new ever you know it's like things are just variations on themes and ideas and kind of core concepts and um but that said like there's still ways to be creative and to to problem solve and to you know sort of in in small but significant ways innovate so i'm i'm curious to hear the results of this one and um if people have questions during the demo about or or questions later on like about how to how one develops the recipe we can talk about that fantastic so we'll invite those questions and we'll take them um as we progress but also let's get some of those results i think we just saw some of the results of the viewers um and they're baking oh yeah favorite item to bake well claire uh cookies came in 49 of all those polled liked cookies and that was a runaway and then what recipe intimidates you croissants or puff pastries 63 percent that's almost a super majority there so they could pass that through the u.s senate um and then question three do we have those results yet maybe it's a little too soon oh well question three was the one i forgot i really blew that one so maybe we don't have those results yet um we'll we'll get the rest of them as the program progresses okay this has been the preamble now the moment we've all been waiting for how does someone make malted forever brownies from your cookbook dessert person which is available at amazon.com and all the local bookstores here in st louis thank you yes okay so i am excited to demo this recipe it's a brownie recipe which i think is sort of by definition like a simple straightforward recipe but it does have some little twists and turns and some special ingredients so this recipe is called malted forever brownie so it has a little bit of what's called malted milk powdered gardening you can see this right here this is carnation brand you can find it in the baking aisle at most grocery stores and this adds a kind of malty sweetness to the brownie that goes so well with chocolate it's optional but i recommend it so if you want to try this at home try to find it um and i call them my forever brownies because to me this is like the only brownie recipe that i that i'll need going forward i don't need another one this one i'll make forever um so the first thing we do when we bake anything is to preheat the oven so i have my oven on 350 and that's been preheating and we prepare the pan whatever the baking vessel is so this is a metal 8x8 pan i think that this was in the box that's that some donors received so i'm going to bake in this 8x8 pan if you want to make these brownies and you only have for example a 13x9 pan you can double it and make double the amount but one recipe fits in an 8x8 i have a piece of foil i'm going to press the foil into the pan and fit it into all the corners so smooth it out i like to line the pan because it makes it really easy to lift the brownies out completely claire can i ask a quick question yeah please interrupt um glass versus metal why metal oh my god great question i this is such an important distinction that i think a lot of people don't know is that glass and metal bake very differently so i i almost always bake in metal and the exception is pies i bake pies in glass but metal heats up and cools down faster than glass and as a result things tend to fade more evenly because so like when glass because the glass retains the heat when it looks done in the oven by the time you pull it out and it cools the outsides tend to over bake so a good tip is if you only have a glass pan because they are very common drop the temperature by about 25 degrees when you bake in glass and then that and then that will be more similar to baking and metal but excellent questions but you can absolutely make these glasses i've made them in glass but go ahead and bake them at a little bit at 325 rather than 350. okay so i have my pan all ready to go just go ahead and smooth out any big wrinkles or anything you can kind of just press it into the pan and i had a knob of softened butter and i'm using a pastry brush to just brush it into the pan across the bottom and up the sides just i'm greasing it so you could use a little spray oil you could use regular oil it doesn't matter and like the brownies don't really stick but it's just to discourage any sticking at all and are these going to be chewy brownies or crispy brownies or another excellent question so i like i have my job as an editor for five years like was to have a lot of opinions so as a result i have a lot of opinions about food and things like brownies so i deeply prefer a chewy brownie and i tested this recipe many many many times attempting to get that chewy texture that i wanted and it's a little bit tricky but there's a couple of points in the recipe where i'll make it really clear like how we're going to get that chewy texture so i'm going to talk about that so this is a chewy or brownie a little fudgy on the inside um but that's why i like i like those corner pieces because that's where you get a lot of the chew okay so i have a large bowl here i'm using a whisk and a spatula so there's not too many pieces of special equipment here we're making it all by hand i'm gonna grab i have a pot of simmering water i'm gonna grab it okay now i'm using a little bit of cocoa this recipe uses cocoa and melted chocolate so this is a quarter cup of cocoa if you can find it i recommend what's called dutch processed cocoa it is a cocoa that is treated with an alkali so it some of the acidity is neutralized and i find that the flavor is like a little more roasted and a little bit deeper rather than something kind of fruity and light so that's my preference but if you have only natural cocoa that will work too um and i'm doing a step sort of a pre-step called blooming the cocoa this is water as i said with simmering and i'm taking about a quarter cup and whisking it into the cocoa and as soon as you do that you'll probably notice that it's going to smell like hot chocolate it's going to this brings out the flavor of the cocoa so this kind of like wakes up all of that those aromas in the chocolate so i mean all you have to do is whisk until comes together and then i'm going to put the bowl actually on top of the simmering water and i'm going to add this is five ounces of semi-sweet chocolate this is like those chocolate discs that you get at the store in the baking aisle i will say that like since i was a kid the baking smile has come a long way from the days of my childhood where like you should only find us the chocolate chips which are fine but now it's much more common to see you know really good quality chocolates in the grocery store i'm also adding six tablespoons of unsalted butter cold room temperature doesn't matter and a quarter cup of neutral oil you could use olive oil or avocado oil like whatever you have but this is something that will help give it a chewier texture a little bit of oil in addition to the butter okay so i'm using my whisk and so this setup that i have here with the saucepan below and the bowl sitting on top and i have a little bit of simmering water in the bottom this is called a double boiler there's like an old-fashioned piece of cookware called a double boiler which is like a pot that actually is designed to settle into a nest into a pot below but you don't really see those anymore so you can just create a double boiler with a you know heat proof bowl so just make sure that the simmering water isn't so high that it's touching the bottom of the bowl the point of a double boiler is to use very gentle heat to melt or warm whatever is inside so chocolate is good to melt on a double boiler because it's a really really temperature sensitive ingredient and you can really easily burn it or you know cause it to separate so it's better to do this in a double boiler and the bonus is that what you know you're melting it in a bowl and then the bowl is where you make the batter so it's kind of it's really a one bowl dessert okay so i'm whisking this if you don't have those little chocolate discs and you're using like a bar of chocolate just go ahead and chop it up so that the pieces are small and this will eventually melt so go ahead and whisk until mean if you're i'm not working on the stove because i brought it over here so you can see if you are on the stove you can actually remove it from the heat when you still see some little pieces of chocolate because the residual heat in the bowl will continue to melt everything that's in there so this just needs a little bit more time we have a question if you have time for a quick one yes please family of five loves your work they've heard that the water in st louis is hard is this something they should take into account when baking interesting you know i in new york there's also fairly hard water i like hard water i don't know that it makes any functional difference when you're baking the only time when it might have some effect is if you're doing sourdough and you're using a natural starter so that's sort of this um like a mixture of flour and water that is inoculated with yeast effect naturally bacteria from the air that can sometimes be sensitive to chemicals in in the water so sometimes it's recommended to use filtered water for that but i make sourdough with hard water and i just use it right on the tap so i don't i don't think so i don't think you should could really expect any kind of functional difference using using tap water from anywhere really unless there's like something crazy going on that i don't know about but clear i'm asked to remind folks that there are benefits to being a donor to the clayton community foundation all donors received their eight by eight inch metal baking pans baking chocolate and your recipe card so of course we can go to the clayton community foundation website to learn more about becoming a member meanwhile morgan writes morgan's 10 years old love to cook and watching tonight with my mom what would you recommend to bake that's easy and delicious i do a zoom cooking class for kids my age and i want to know what i should bake well it's hard not to recommend the brownies which i think are easy and delicious of course it depends on like your love or you know possibly dislike a chocolate um but i think that so like the cookies was the most popular answer for people of what they like to bake and i'm not really surprised because i think cookies tends to be the best combination of like easy to achieve and like most you know best kind of comfort food like but most enjoyable to eat also um so like the dessert person has a chocolate chip cookie recipe that doesn't use a stand mixer um that's similar to the brownies in that it has sort of like little little tricks and little sort of um you know particular steps here and there to achieve a really particular result but um i think cookies and and bars like a brownie is a really good place to start um the book also has a halva blondie in it so halva being a sesame based middle eastern candy um so it has tahini in it and that's a really nice one and a good combination of easy but a little unexpected so i just want to show you that my mixture is melted i don't know how well you can see that i'm like a little far away yes yes i want to help it because the whole thing will spill out um so now i'm going to add my sugar and my eggs i am using a half cup each brown sugar and granulated sugar um and i think that that brown sugar does contribute that kind of molassesy texture of the brown sugar does also contribute a little chewiness for the eggs i have one whole egg and two yolks and the extra yolks adds like a density to the brownies that i really like that i think helps with that chew um and just like adds a little bit of richness so go ahead and add your sugars and those eggs and the yolk i'm gonna move these out of the way so you can see a little better now what i had before i added those was like this beautiful super smooth glossy chocolate mixture and now that i've added the sugars in the egg it's like looking a little wonky it looks a little bit broken or separated where like you can see but like chocolate is an emulsion of fat and other solids and like sometimes that emulsion can break and so like this mixture looks a little greasy and weird but because i've added eggs eggs are an emulsifier so as i continue to agitate this mixture like keep whisking and it will smooth out and become this like ultra glossy beautiful mixture again so don't fret if it looks a little bit separated it will come back together so you can like there's really not a way to over mix at this point and in fact one of the tricks that i've learned for achieving that kind of crackly shiny top on brownies that i love to see it like to me that's what a brownie should have one of the things you can do is when you add the eggs really beat the mixture and that will help give you a crackly shiny top okay so i have this beautiful mixture and now i'm going to add my dry ingredients oh no sorry my vanilla i forgot my vanilla so i'm using pure vanilla extract do i'm going to do a teaspoon and a half so this is a three-quarter teaspoon measure so we'll do two of those go ahead and whisk that in and now i'm ready for my dry ingredients i have i'm using my malted milk powder again this is optional sometimes it's hard to find like in like a fancy grocery store like a whole food sometimes won't have it um but a more kind of like standard grocery store will so two tablespoons i just love i love malt like i love that that malty flavor that you if get don't have that around the house is there something else you can substitute one thing you could do if you want a malted flavor but you can't find the malted milk powder is you can actually because i'm adding chopped chocolate to this at the end i'll show you one thing you can do is use chopped up like whoppers you know malted milk balls and that interior is made with that malted powder so you get the same you get the same effect that way um okay so then i'm adding my flour this is three quarters of a cup and then salt one thing that you might notice if you bake from dessert person is like a lot of the recipes have a lot of salt and that's because i find that people really under salt their baking and salt is a flavor enhancer it doesn't make it salty but it does make ingredients taste more of themselves so this brings out of all the flavors of the chocolate and the brown sugar and all that so that was one teaspoon um i'm using diet okay so here's like an interesting regional quirk this is diamond kosher salt which i usually bake with but i think in st louis morton is much more common so if you're using morton's it's there's a different density to the crystals like a teaspoon of morton's is twice as salty as a teaspoon of diamond so use half whatever quantity i'm using at home with your morton to use hat wow but that said if you used a whole teaspoon of morton like it's going to be good because like a salted brownie is delicious so you won't ruin anything so now that i've added the dry i'm whisking but gently at first because i have to incorporate the flour and here is another tip for achieving a chewy texture to your brownie once you add the flour it comes into contact with the liquid in the recipe and the proteins in the flour have a chemical reaction and they produce gluten people heard about gluten it's like the stuff that makes bread chewy a lot of people don't eat it i'm not sure why but i mean i know why because if they're allergic to it but like not everything has to be gluten free so gluten as i said is what makes bread chewy and so the more that you work flour and and moisture together like the more gluten you develop so i want these to be chewy because i'm making brownies so i whisk this for like a long time i'll whisk this for you know a full minute which if you time yourself while mixing and then it actually takes an incredibly long time because i want i want them to have that kind of chew from the flour so like you cannot over mix at this point and you'll notice that you'll just have this really really thick super glossy um texture and it will see you i actually have a little piece of chocolate in fully milk so my pan wasn't that hot but you'll find that the mixture does something called create a ribbon when the mixer like falls off the whisk it kind of folds over onto itself as it hits the bowl and then like will slowly dissolve back into the mixture so that's how you know you're done i'm going to mix more but it's fine now the last step is to fold in a different chocolate now so i used semi-sweet in the recipe and this is six ounces of milk chocolate i have a thing something weird has happened to me as an adult where i become like really sensitive to chocolate i think part of it is because there's kind of been a trend in the last 10 years toward really like fruity bitter chocolates and i just like kind of want to eat milk chocolate because it's creamy and delicious so i like the kind of contrast between a slightly more bitter chocolate in the brownie batter and then these little pockets of sweet creamy milk chocolate that you get by folding in the pieces this is optional if you want a slightly less sweet brownie and i don't think they're too sweet but if you like a really bitter chocolate um use use a bittersweet chocolate for this um i like the milk chocolate because i think that because the rest of the batter isn't super sweet it really benefits from those little pockets of milk chocolate and then i switch to my spatula and i'm just folding that in to distribute and this is a good time to mention that one of the reasons why you want to use a double boiler is because you don't want the mixture to get really hot inside the bowl because at this point if it's really hot you might melt the milk chocolate um which is not the worst thing in the world if you do but then you don't get quite as defined little pieces um i was looking for milk chocolate discs but i could only find bar chocolate so i just chopped it up you can do that or you can use chocolate chips or whatever form you've got okay so that's all mixed together i have my prepared pan right here and i mean everyone knows what to do at this point this is just going directly into the pan if you have some people have like a 9x9 baking pan this one is an 8x8 you can definitely use a 9x9 it just means that the mix the brownie will be a tiny bit thinner but i think brownie thickness is really a matter of preference so it's up to you so scrape in every last bit i'm kind of a sucker for like getting every every last amount of batter in and then last step is just to smooth it out and get it in a single layer there's all sorts of variations and this is in the cookbook too but if you wanted to like you could add pecans or walnuts or almonds you can do that you could add about a cup of any kind of toasted chopped nut you could have pistachios you can do a mint version which i think is really nice i as sensitive as i am to chocolate i really like chocolate and mint maybe from growing up eating mint chocolate chip ice cream from baskin robbins um so you can add a little bit of peppermint extract and instead of the chocolate pieces at the end you could add little chopped up pepper patties or like andes chocolate mints anything like that um so they're very customizable and you can even swap a different kind of flour you can make them with rye flour which is kind of a nice touch you could make them with buckwheat flour they're super versatile and like you can't really mess them up which is why this is a great recipe for people who are trying to get more okay so here is my pan the mixture make sure it doesn't slide out but the mixture is all spread in there another thing you can do is a little flaky salt on top if you have a malden or any kind of a fleur-de-celle or a sea salt you could do a little bit of that on top which gives a nice crunch but i'm just going to leave it plain and then these go into the oven depending on how how your oven works and how the heat flows the big time can be a little variable but they basically bake for about 25 minutes um and then i'm going to pull out ones that i already made because you have to chill them and i'll talk about why so that's important so these go in and then so here are ones that i baked earlier today wow you can see so i've been chilling them they are super solid and the chewing stuff is really important for a couple of reasons first i don't know if anyone's ever cut a pan of warm brownies before they know what i'm talking about because the brownies just like clump on the knife and you get these really messy brownies and i mean it's not the worst thing in the world but then you just eat the little pieces off the knife and like but um when you chill the brownies you tend to get really clean cuts so that's one reason to do it another reason is because a colder brownie when it chills it allows the sugars to kind of set and crystallize and the butter hardens and that's when you get a super chewy texture so i'm not saying to eat them cold but definitely like let them cool off by chilling that so i'm going to cut them and show you so you can see actually like they're not um they're not cold because you can see that some of the chocolate milk is still melted in the inside and came off on the knife but i'm still getting clean cuts and with an eight by eight i'll cut them into a four by four grid so you get 16 brownies so cut them in half in both directions and then import in fourths in both directions claire i don't know what's more impressive your baking skills or your communication skills thank you that's very kind i love i love teaching i love being able to share my knowledge that i've gained and like frankly the knowledge that i've gained in baking is because i've made all the mistakes you know like i've i've done all these things and realized that there's a better way and so and that's what i hope dessert person is for people is that it's sort of this um accumulated wisdom that i've that i've put into this book and the idea is as the as the subtitle says is to help people fake with confidence so um i'm happy to make the mistake so you don't have to basically so i'll show you i'll put them on this plate and i'm glad that i greased the foil because they release really cleanly and here i'm going to come around so you can see here is what the lighting is inside that's unfair that's torture they banned that at the geneva convention i have to say they look and smell pretty good um i'm excited to eat these so that's the that's the malted forever brownie oh i think that shot just sold about 100 books right there that is really amazing we can get your book at barnes noble left bank books the novel neighbor webster books main street books and st charles as well as amazon.com and i just must say the new york times did say it was one of the best cookbooks of 2020. you must have been jumping six feet in the air when you read that i was incredibly thrilled and uh called my mom i'm sure right away as you can imagine the calls are coming in like crazy um maybe we should have a lightning round so as not to take you too much over time because i think we're threatening to do that as we speak what did what did you study at harvard claire i studied history and literature an interdisciplinary concentration um with the focus on american history and literature in the 19th century so you know humanity's all the way um you couldn't be in a new york city kitchen with the size of that kitchen could you i'm not if anyone has seen the dessert person um videos on youtube you'll know what my kitchen looks like and i am not in my kitchen um so i am in a cabin about an hour north of the city in a little bit of a makeshift kitchen so that's why there's like metro shelves in the background but um it is more space and yet more challenging somehow like i i love i actually don't mind having a small kitchen and i find that i can work really efficiently but there's something very nice about having a little extra kids even though you said earlier about gluten-free food do you have a dinner party worthy recipe a dinner party worthy recipe for a gluten-free dessert you know i was just thinking about this recipe the other day yes and i think that um i actually like gluten-free baking because there are so many examples of recipes that are just naturally don't have flour you know you don't not every recipe has to have flour um so there's a few in the book one is a cake that i kind of um suggest for passover but is a great cake anytime that is a i call it the flourless chocolate wave cake and it is a very light flourless chocolate cake that uses almond flour instead of wheat flour um and it has this dramatic rise in the oven and then it kind of falls and does this kind of cool wavy edge so um that's a great one and then another one is um a rice pudding cake where you make like the delicious vanilla scented rice pudding you beat in a couple eggs and you bake it and you can then slice it into wedges and that's a really lovely dessert and there's no no wheat flour in it at all can you claire line a pan with parchment you can definitely use parchment um what i like about foil is that you can use one sheet and get it in all of the corners by just by pressing it in because it holds its shape if you're using parchment paper i would line the pan in a way that you are just really have one thick piece of parchment that goes up two sides you don't need it on all four sides so just one server parchment lay across the pan and up two sides and then you'll be great but you don't you don't need foil cartons fine can you remind us what kind of chocolate or cocoa you were using yes the the cocoa is a dutch processed cocoa you can find it in any grocery store sometimes it's not labeled as dutch processed but go ahead and check the ingredients if it says under ingredients processed with alkali that means it's dutch processed you can use any kind of coco though that's not that's not make or break um then in the batter is semi-sweet chocolate i like there's a brand called guitar which is based with san francisco that's a really nice brand uh valrona it's like a fancy french chocolate that you can find that's a great one and then milk chocolate folded in at the end any advice for young bakers the advice that i give to young bakers is to really get as much experience as possible i took a sort of a formal route of going to culinary school and and then doing an externship and and then um you know finding my way into food media but that is not the only path and i don't think that there is any one path for people um i just recommend getting experience any way you can so whether it's you know spending your saturdays working at a bakery because you are curiou you know you're interested in in getting that kind of a professional experience or it's um you know there's recipe testing at home and trying new things and you know watching youtube videos that's great um cooking from cookbooks and you know any way to gain experience is really important so i tell people like if you want to do a thing do it you know and and there are ways to do it so um it's just like i think that it's very hard to learn without doing when it comes to to cooking and baking you know claire our donors did receive some of the chocolate so it must be available in our greater st louis area or available the semi-sweet chocolate baking chips must be available online of course and people want to know when the dust settles will you come back to st louis for a book signing i would love to i i you know the the one of the many disappointments of the pandemic was not being able to go on a book tour and i had i had full plans to come to st louis as part of that um so i would be so happy for so many reasons to come back when it's safe and and and accessible um you can count on it well that would be fantastic i know that we would welcome you with uh open arms the only problem would be could we find an arena or stadium large enough to accommodate all those who would want to be there i'm serious if people missed any of this or if they want to see demonstrations for the other dessert person recipes they can easily go online to youtube right that's right uh the channel is on youtube it's it's just my name and dessert person so that would be great thank you claire's happiness i can't thank you enough for sharing some of your time um i was there anything else about the baking brownies that we skipped right there because i don't want to miss a single step for baking the forever brownies no i think that's all i guess i'll just say one thing which is if you have brownies in the oven and you have there's sort of a some it's not totally clear when they're done they're sort of an optimal point and they're done when the edges are completely set so they're firm to the touch and the center the surface will be opaque so no longer shiny and this the middle will be uh you know set but a little bit squishy underneath so that's how you know they're done that's just my those that's my advice um and one final thing not related to brownies at all i just want to say hi to rhoda and hi to mrs scissors because i know that they're watching that's so nice well thank you so much claire for joining us for this edition of at home with sponsored by the clayton community foundation you're too kind to share your time with your hometown and we you know i will just say this um when i mention your name here in st louis people it resonates so well people get so excited with a smile on their faces just to hear the name claire saffids so i congratulate you on connecting with so many people at this time when we really need connection thank you so much thank you it was a pleasure thank you so much for having me thank you so much claire savage and the book is dessert person everybody hey the gift giving season can't be that far away can it or give it to yourself thank you so much for joining us to learn more information on how you can become a member of the clayton community foundation please go online thank you so much we'll be back march 17th with another edition stay well see you soon thank you

Channel: Clayton Community Foundation

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Length: 61min 2sec (3662 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021