Hearty soups with relatively long cook times like minestrone, for example, are chock-full of aromatics and flavor-lending ingredients like bacon, onions, and garlic. These infuse the water with their flavor and produce a clean-tasting broth all on their own.

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For rave-worthy soups, skip the store-bought stock. You can extract a cleaner, stronger broth from a combination of water and several pantry ingredients. It's all about layering powerful flavor-enhancers that you probably already have on hand - bacon, tomato paste, herbs, peppercorns, a Parm rind, and, of course, kosher salt.

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You don't need a specialty lame (French for 'blade') to make professional-level bread at home, but it certainly helps in creating those telltale slash marks. You need a truly razor-sharp edge to make a clean cut; even a sharp paring knife will drag as it moves through the wet dough.

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I ate cottage cheese all the time growing up, but it wasn't until I was in college that I became aware of the stigma surrounding it.

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Lemon curd is one of the first things I remember cooking when I was old enough to use the stove without supervision. I looked up a recipe in my one of my mom's Martha Stewart cookbooks and went to work, stirring anxiously and monitoring closely for signs that the mixture was thickening so as not to curdle the eggs.

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As a kid, I was overly studious, overly serious, very academically driven. It was important to me on a cellular level to do well. And then I went to college at Harvard, and I relaxed a little bit.

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No stuffing is complete without chopped onion and celery - they're the building blocks. If you want to deepen the flavor, consider adding leeks, sage, and/or hardy greens.

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It's the ingredients you choose (Chorizo? Sure! Rye bread? Why not?) that will make your stuffing stand out.

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Cassoulet requires a few ingredients you won't find in the typical supermarket.

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Holiday eating is a study in paradox. You're surrounded by food, but you're so busy shopping and cooking that you don't have time to eat. Then, when your blood sugar dips to the point of derangement, you make a desperate lunge for the closest foodstuff - and the next thing you know, you've eaten an entire box of regifted peppermint bark.

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Pierogies are textbook comfort food.

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Deep-frying properly requires you to keep the oil at a precise temperature range depending on the food. If you're frying in more than an inch of oil you really should invest in a deep-fat thermometer so you can monitor the temperature and know when to adjust the heat.

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Ever crack an egg into simmering water only to watch the white spread out and form wispy tentacles? It happened to me until I came across this game-changing fix: Break the egg into a sieve set over a bowl. The watery outer edge of the white will drain through, leaving the thicker white and yolk intact.

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If anything betrays my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage - besides the Casper-the-friendly-ghost-like skin tone - it's my love of fishy fish.

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Can you braid three strands? Then you can make babkallah. The very idea of babkallah came about because the recipe avoids the complicating twisting technique that gives babka its signature swirl.

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I made my first Yule Log as a culinary student in Paris, complete with the traditional chestnut filling, silky chocolate buttercream, and almost-too-adorable mushrooms. Since then, I've tweaked and updated both the recipe and the process - and I've definitely learned tips and tricks to make it easier.

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Simmering vegetables in a covered pot over low heat so that they steam in their own liquid - a French technique called a l'etouffee - is the ticket to achieving a soup with pronounced depth.

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Always use liquid measuring cups to measure liquid and dry measuring cups to measure dry. Especially when measuring flour, accuracy is important, so using only dry measuring cups - or better yet, weighing on a scale - is key.

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You must pre-bake the bottom crust of a custard pie, but this is a tricky step in the pie-making process. Without the presence of filling the crust can slump down into the plate as it bakes, necessitating pie weights to help keep its shape. Then, once you remove the weights to blind bake the crust, the bottom puffs.

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The problem with traditional pie weights is you never have enough and they're expensive. Common substitutes like dried beans just aren't heavy enough to do the job. Our genius solution? Small steel balls that fit inside ball bearings and that can be purchased at any hardware store.

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Claire Saffitz

Books by Claire Saffitz

Quotes by Claire Saffitz