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Brad and Claire Make Doughnuts Part 1 | It’s Alive | Bon Appétit

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Brad Leone and Claire Saffitz are back in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen, and this time they’re arguing about whether “sour doughnuts” should be a thing.

Bon Appétit dropped “Brad and Claire Make Doughnuts Part 1: The Beginning” on July 11, 2019, reuniting the two It’s Alive favorites for their first joint project since their sourdough bread collaboration. The twist this time: instead of commercial yeast, Brad wants to leaven the doughnuts with his beloved sourdough starter, and Claire, the trained pastry technician, has to figure out how to make that actually work in a fried dough recipe.

• The episode reunites Brad Leone and Claire Saffitz following their earlier It’s Alive sourdough bread video.
• The core concept: doughnuts leavened with active sourdough starter instead of standard yeast, which Brad repeatedly pitches as “sour doughnuts.”
• Part 1 covers only the prep phase — mixing ingredients, incorporating the starter, and starting the bulk prove — with Bon Appétit splitting the full doughnut project into multiple parts because there was too much footage and banter to fit into one video.

The Sourdough Angle

Sourdough starter doesn’t behave like packaged yeast. It’s slower, less predictable, and depends on how active the culture is that day — which is exactly the kind of variable Brad Leone has built his entire on-camera persona around embracing. Claire Saffitz, who made her name on precision-driven Gourmet Makes recreations, is the one tasked with translating that unpredictability into something that will actually fry up into a doughnut rather than a dense hockey puck.

That tension — Claire’s technical rigor against Brad’s “let’s just see what happens” energy — is the engine of the episode. She supplies the pastry math; he supplies the starter, the improvisation, and the jokes.

Brad’s pitch never wavers: this isn’t just sourdough bread’s cousin, it’s the birth of the “sour doughnut.”

Part One Represents The Beginning

True to its subtitle, “The Beginning” doesn’t get anywhere near the fryer. The video is built around the early mechanics of the recipe: combining the dry and wet components, folding in the active starter, and kicking off the bulk proving stage that has to happen before the dough is anywhere close to being shaped or cooked. Bon Appétit made the call to split the full doughnut-making session across multiple installments specifically because of how much usable footage — and how much Brad-and-Claire chemistry — came out of the shoot.

For a channel that’s built an audience on long-form, unedited-feeling kitchen chaos, that pacing decision fits the brand. Viewers who show up for It’s Alive aren’t there for a tidy five-minute recipe rundown; they’re there for the process, the tangents, and the two hosts riffing off each other in real time.

Brad And Claire’s Chemistry

What makes the crossover work is the contrast. Saffitz plays the control variable — measured, technically fluent, occasionally exasperated. Leone is the wild card, hauling in his starter like it’s a science experiment and treating the whole thing as one more excuse to talk fermentation. That dynamic is the same one that made their earlier sourdough bread collaboration a fan favorite, and it’s clearly the reason Bon Appétit paired them again instead of sending Claire back to solo Gourmet Makes territory.

It’s the kind of long-form, process-obsessed internet video that lives in the same ecosystem as other creator-driven marathons and stunt videos — the stuff that keeps people watching a full runtime instead of clicking away, the same instinct that fuels stunts like Working Out For 24 Hours Straight or record-chasing bits like World’s Longest T-Shirt Launch.

Part 1 ends with the dough still proving and the fryer nowhere in sight — which means anyone invested in whether Brad’s “sour doughnut” campaign actually produces an edible doughnut has to wait for Part 2 to find out if the starter did its job.