Back in March, I teamed up with food photographer Jennifer Chong and prop stylist Jaclyn Kershek here in Los Angeles to make as many varieties of crispy, spicy fried chicken that we could in one day. As a food stylist, I love the challenge of a sandwich build. It’s a three-dimensional structure and I find I really have to consider everything I do about 5 moves in advance. When I’m hired to make them on a proper photo shoot, I’m usually given a deck with the client’s specifics, including the order of ingredients, how many pickles, how many slices of tomato, etc. And every brand likes a different look - we get asked for“perfectly imperfect” a lot; some ask for really tidy even levels with no crumbs or drips and others are a little looser in their approach. I have spent countless hours trimming the edges of a bun, toasting it just so on an electric griddle, and rearranging the sesame seeds on top with a bamboo skewer and Elmer’s glue. And measuring the thickness of tomato and onion slices with an actual ruler to make sure they are 1/4” thick, or 8mm, or whatever the specs are.
Since this shoot was just for us, we could have taken any approach we wanted, but decided to treat it like a regular commercial food shoot and keep it “ad-style”. It’s a good muscle to flex and personally, I like trying to find the beauty within the rules. Sometimes!
Food stylists tend to have pretty good knife skills but I would just like to point out that, even so, cutting scallions into strips is extremely painstaking. But also oddly zen and rewarding, not to mention a tasty complement to the gochujang sauce this fried chicken was dipped in.
Look at those little chives! Also: do not, under any circumstances, eat something like this on a first date.