Claire Saffitz

About

Claire Saffitz (born September 16, 1986) is an American food writer, chef, and YouTube personality. Until mid-2020, she was a contributing editor at Bon Appétit magazine and starred in several series on the Bon Appétit YouTube channel, including Gourmet Makes, in which she created gourmet versions of popular snack foods by reverse engineering them. Since leaving the company, she has published two cookbooks, Dessert Person and What’s for Dessert, which both became New York Times Best Sellers. She has continued work as a video host on her own YouTube channel and as a freelance recipe developer, including for New York Times Cooking.

Claire J. Saffitz was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. In the early 1900s, her great-grandfather immigrated to the US from what was then Russia but is now Ukraine; before emigrating, he worked as a baker.
She attended Captain Elementary School, then Wydown Middle School, and finally graduated from Clayton High School in 2005. She graduated from Harvard University in 2009 with an AB in US history and literature. A couple years later, she attended culinary school and studied French cuisine and…