(Photo courtesy of Cooking Light)
My food styling assignment this past week was to find a photo of a plated dish and try to recreate it at home using three different sets of props. I chose the above image out of the April 2009 issue of Cooking Light magazine for a chicken, cashew and red pepper stir-fry, as my inspiration for the assignment. I thought recreating a stir-fry would be less challenging that a plated meal of filet mignon and scalloped potatoes, and also cheaper since this food would inevitably end up in the trash! When you are recreating a recipe for the sole purpose of photographing it, you don't actually have to make the exact recipe. Ingredients that won't be seen, such as 1/2 teaspoon of white wine vinegar, are usually omitted. The stir-fry recipe I chose actually had a lengthy ingredient list, but I was able to get by with only a small amount of purchases since all I can see in the shot is rice, chicken, peppers, nuts and scallions. I decided to throw some yellow peppers in my shots for color and I swapped peanuts for cashews (mostly because I had peanuts in the pantry). In order to prepare the food to shoot, I made the food in stages and waited to work with it until it was room temperature. Hot food can let off steam that fogs up the plate and your camera lens. I did not actually stir-fry the chicken and peppers, instead I cooked them separately and then applied "the sauce" to them. My faux sauce was a mixture of corn syrup and soy sauce, for color. I hoped the corn syrup would give the dish a nice glistening look. My stir-fry was assembled on a nice big scoop of crisco so I could easily hold the peppers and chicken in place. My teacher liked my shot on the light background the best as she thought it had the freshest look. The critiques of my assignment were that my peppers were not randomly arranged enough, there were too many laying in the same direction, and my sauce application was not heavy enough. Ah the trials of being a food stylist! Hopefully my next assignment of shooting and styling a panini and soup will go a little better. I do have to say that for a mock stir-fry brushed with corn syrup and laying on a bed of crisco, it does look pretty tasty. If you would like the real recipe for the chicken, red pepper and cashew stir-fry click here to check it out.
Comments