Denise Vivaldo of L.A.-based Food Fanatics dishes about food styling: "I always
tell the actors the food is poisoned so they can't eat it. If they have to nibble on
camera, I serve them a few salad leaves."
Here’s what I did last weekend: Blow-torched a nearly raw chicken into gleaming submission, sealed limp hamburger buns with Scotchgard, built a toothpick scaffolding to prop up a collapsing wedge of chocolate cake. Then there was the no-melt “ice cream” made from a blend of Crisco, powdered sugar and cornstarch, and…
Well, you get the picture.
All this occurred during a two-day Master Food Styling Class given by Denise Vivaldo and Cindie Flannigan, the powerhouse team behind the L.A.-based Food Fanatics. Denise and Cindie are the go-to-girls when, say, Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson do a cooking segment on the Ellen DeGeneres show. They’re in there making sure the strawberries are picture perfect and that hundreds of other culinary details are just right. They’ve lent their recipe and styling talents to cookbooks for celeb chefs like Sandra Lee and Suzanne Somers, designed feasts for countless movies, TV and print ads, launched a series of their own “Do It for Less!” books. If you’re thinking mini-empire, you would be right.
And the class was fun! Here’s my diary for a few hours of the first day:
8:57 AM: It’s gloomy outside, but inside Chez Bay Gourmet Cooking School, the lights are blazing and a video camera is ready to roll. Denise—who’s got short reddish brown hair, quizzical eyebrows and hands that swoop, swirl, pat and stab the air before they ever touch the food--is already dishing out styling info peppered with wicked tales of certain Food Network chefs.
“Honey, you don’t think she comes up with her own recipes! You’re so sweet! The woman doesn’t know how to find the kitchen!”
9:07: While Denise keeps us laughing, Cindie is unpacking a box of raw chickens from Costco. A former art director and graphic designer, she’s blonde and quietly intense, a perfect match for Denise’s megawatt personality. (Denise: “I’m ADD, she’s OCD-- we’re the ideal couple!”).
Meanwhile, it’s introduction time. There are 17 of us—mostly personal chefs, caterers, ex-restauranteurs, budding food stylists--anxious to hit the big time where you can pull in $800-$900 a day tweaking lettuce and making perfect mustard drips. There’s Martha who’s just closed her Maine fish market, Kelly who wants to expand her Hawaii catering business, and Norie who’s already styling food segments on Houston morning shows. Brent, the sole, very genial guy in the class, runs a national personal chefs’ network out of Charlotte.
And there’s me, the blogger. I met Denise at Changi Airport in Singapore six weeks ago when we were on our way to Kochi for a culinary tour of India. She’s a top West Coast food stylist and super-savvy, award-winning instructor: When she invited me to join the class, I couldn't wait to learn a few tricks. And besides, she's one of the funniest people I know.
Chef Brent plumps up his discount store chicken with paper towels.
9:45: “Oh boy, these are really ugly chickens,” exclaims Denise. “ It’s much more challenging this way. If you’ve got the budget, always buy organic chickens. They’re soooo much more beautiful.” She points to a red blotch on her bird: “Look, he’s got a birthmark, and here’s a tear in his skin. That’s what paprika and pepper are for!”
Like everyone else, I’m diligently stuffing the cavity of my chicken with a wad of paper towels, then plumping up its cold hard breast before tucking the wings underneath and trussing the legs. “Tie them up really tight,” commands Denise. “We always say we never want to look in there!”
10:09: The chickens, sprayed with PAM, are ready to go in the oven, but only for 10 to 15 minutes, just enough time to take away the raw look.
Meanwhile Cindie unpacks some “horrible, frozen” hamburger patties, and shows us how to make them look delicious: First, she blow-torches the raw pattie, then paints it with dark Karo syrup, blots with paper towels, torches it again and sprays it with PAM. After all that, the pathetic discount meat is starting to look pretty appetizing.
10: 17: “Now for the grill marks,’ she says. She plugs in an electric charcoal starter. When the prongs are hot, she presses one side onto the surface of the burger. Voila: a perfect sear. She repeats at regular intervals to get the look of the grill.
Denise tip: “This is a great technique for steak, especially if you need it to look charred on the outside but rare and juicy inside.”
10:24: Cindie picks up a can of Scotchgard and does a doubletake: “We don’t usually use the carpet kind.” Oh, well. She sprays the white foamy stuff on the inside of the bun.
Denise tip: “It works the same as it does on fabric. It seals it so moisture can’t get in. You can use it on pancakes too—you don’t want the butter and syrup to sink into the pancake.”
10:33: Now Cindie is building a better burger, creating gorgeous layers of lettuce, red onion, tomato, the pattie and, as the final touch, a slice of American cheese which she’s melting with a hairdryer.
Warily I’m eyeing my own just-thawed buns. They are flat and the top crust is cracked—definitely not what stylists call “heroes.”
Denise tip: “Spritz them with a little water and stick them in the oven for a few minute to puff them up. You don’t want your burger to look like Fatty Arbuckle sat on it!”
Definitely not ready for prime time: My burger's lopsided and there's
a nick in the tomato. "Fix it with red food coloring," advises Cindie.
10:47: Cindie checks my burger. Expertly she tucks in a stray bit of lettuce, then points to a little nick in the skin of the tomato. “You can fix that with red coloring.” She sprays the cracked top of the bun with PAM. Suddenly it looks delicious.
10:59: The chickens are out of the oven and already look better than when they went in. I spray mine with Cindie’s “proprietary” blend of Kitchen Bouquet, yellow food coloring and water, and it starts to glow. Now for the blow torch. “It’s not so much to brown as to tighten up the loose skin,” explains Cindie. I sizzle my bird with the flame and the skin shrinks visibly. Then I get a little too enthusiastic and torch a rip in the skin. It widens alarmingly. “Don’t worry. You can cover it up with paprika.”
The makeover: An "ugly" chicken gets a paint job with Kitchen
Bouquet and paprika. Blow-torching the skin helped too.
Denise tip: “If you have to carve a turkey in a movie, cut the cooking time in half, just until the breast turns white. They’ll do dozens of takes, so you need to have at least four or five cooked breasts in reserve plus extra skin from the thighs. I always tell the actors the food is poisoned so they can’t eat it. If they have to nibble on camera, I serve them a a few salad leaves.”
11:29: Next up: deli sandwiches. Cindie says, “Scotchgard the bread if it need to last a day. Otherwise put the lettuce on the bottom and start adding ingredients.”
I just have to use the Scotchgard. After the chemical foam dissolves, I start layering: lettuce, a thick slice of tomato, then ruffled folds of turkey and ham, a thick slice of tomato and another slice of bread. I decide to skip the mustard drip. Wow! It looks great, almost good enough to--
“There’s a nick in the turkey,” points out Cindie. “Try to fill in with a little Vaseline.”
It may look tasty, but this sandwich is not to be eaten. The bread's
been treated with Scotchgard to keep it from absorbing moisture.
12: 12: Food, food everywhere and not a bite to eat. Luckily it’s lunchtime. Brent, Karla, Norie and I head over to Kim Son for Vietnamese food--the edible kind.
1: 01: We race back to class, where Denise is delivering one of the big lessons we’ll learn over the two days: “The food is easy. The engineering is what’s tough.” And indeed, a lot of food styling is engineering, whether it’s plumping up a cherry pie with cotton balls or building a toothpick scaffolding to prop up a slice of chocolate cake.
Like engineers, food stylists have an arsenal of tools. For a frozen mustard drip on a sandwich, they’ll mix the condiment with xanthum gum, a natural thickening agent available at Whole Foods. Another tip: Marie Callendar’s thickener makes sauces stick to a plate.
And speaking of sticking to a plate: “We were doing a Hooter’s commercial. Now, what are we really selling in a Hooter’s commercial?” asks Denise, rolling her eyes. “The waitress had to run through the restaurant with a plate of shrimp and slap it down on a table. Our job was to make the shrimp stay on the plate and not fall off--we stuck museum wax on the plate and them used bent pins to attach the shrimp to the wax.”
1:25: The problem: making pasta dance. Cindie’s dishing out gobs of cold spaghetti coated with oil to keep the strands from sticking together. At our stations we have neat piles of ingredients for styling pasta primavera: defrosted peas, cherry tomatoes, carrots, multi-colored peppers, purple onion and parsley. I mound pasta in a bowl, taking care to tuck the ends of the strands underneath so they don’t show. (This is one of many unwritten rules of food styling.) Then I start positioning the vegetables—soon the dish looks like a Jackson Pollock with lots of drips and spatters. There’s definitely movement, but…
Cindie tip: ‘The trouble is, all those ingredients are pulling the eye in different directions. Group some of them so the eye has a place to rest. “ She picks up a hunk of spaghetti and caresses it into a thick swirl which she lays over the tangled mound on the plate. Then she deftly re-arranges a few slivers of purple onion and red pepper. Suddenly, the dish comes alive with motion and rhythm--and dare I say dancing.
New and improved pasta primavera, after Cindie rearranges the
strands of spaghetti and re-groups the vegetables.
2:01 PM: Struggling to dress another plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce that looks like something other than clumps of lava sliding sluggishly down a volcano slope. Secretly, I'm beginning to suspect this is not my metier.
Denise cuts to the chase: “Honestly, you need to let go. There’ll be some days when you’re going into overtime and the food still doesn’t look right. You’ll say, ‘I could work on this for two days and it would never get any better.’ And you know what, someone is going to look at a shot of mango sorbet that looks like a duck’s bill and say, ‘Oooo, I love that shot. The sorbet is melting and it looks so natural.’ Go figure.”
“Food stylists are pretty much down there with security guards,” she adds. “If they have to wait on the food, it’s a pretty sure bet they’re not going to hire you again.”
There was lots, lots more that day and the next. And then, Sunday night…
!0:30 PM: I’m watching a Kashi commercial on TV. Suddenly I notice that the milk in the cereal bowl isn’t moving. I fire off an email to Denise: What’s up with that?
The next morning…
7:30 AM: “White glue. We did a Kashi commercial a few months ago. Could be one of ours!”
I should have known. OK, white glue is definitely going on the list…
For a schedule of upcoming food styling seminars given by Denise and Cindie, go to www.culinaryentrepreneurship.com. And for more on Food Fanatics, see their website, www.foodfanatics.net.