My First Marx Foods Photo Shoot

 
Since joining the MarxFoods.com team at the beginning of February, I’ve had the opportunity to bring you a variety of recipe and technique posts. What you may not have realized is that most of these posts grow out of marathon photo shoot sessions that we schedule once a month.

Late last month I had an opportunity to attend my first such photo shoot, which focused on uses for many of our exotic game meats. Some of the game meat we offer is so unusual (for example, turtle meat and kangaroo meat) that even our executive chef, Chris, had never worked with it before.

On the morning of Feb 18th I drove over to Justin’s house where the shoot was going to take place. Because of Chris’s busy schedule, these shoots are designed to develop, prepare, shoot, and eat as many disparate recipes as possible in an eight hour day.

While Chris and Justin cooked, Ryan snapped photographs of the process for use in recipe and technique posts. My job was to write down everything they did while quizzing Chris on ingredient amounts, cooking times, and the reasons for the idiosyncratic (yet brilliant) little techniques chefs develop over years in the industry that a home cook wouldn’t necessarily think of doing.

Most of the morning was spent chopping, marinating, and blending the various ingredients and mixtures that would be needed for the afternoon’s recipes. While Chris and Justin buzzed about the small home kitchen, Ryan captured every step in the recipes. One of the more difficult elements of my job during these shoots is keeping the recipes organized. Chris may jump from a marinade for bison kebabs to a romesco for grilled kangaroo loin to boiling boneless turtle meat for a soup, all within a five minute period. If I’m not paying careful attention to his movements from dish to dish, I’ll miss a step or ingredient when I write the recipe, and all of these recipes will be very hard to follow.

Once the prep work was done, Chris told us all what order he was planning on making the dishes in, and started sending them out of the kitchen. As each one was finished, one of us had to carefully carry the presented plate to the photography area (in this case, due to gorgeous weather, outside on Justin’s deck).

Fresh food without the benefit of food stylist techniques like inedible glazes and replacement ingredients (shaving cream “whipped cream” anyone?) dries out extremely quickly. Our photo shoots have one rule: everything must be edible…no funky photo tricks. While the human eye or taste buds may not be able to notice a five minute wait, the camera picks it up immediately and anything that isn’t super fresh doesn’t look nearly as appetizing in photographs. So when Chris was done with a dish Ryan needed to get it outside as quickly as possible without jiggling skewers out of place or tripping over Justin’s dog Nyoki (who would like nothing better than to have a chunk of beautifully cooked venison kebab land on his head).

Once Ryan finished photographing one dish it was on to the next, although we often stopped for a second to taste the brilliant combinations that Chris had come up with.

The end result was over twenty-five blog posts with accompanying photographs. Oh, and some very tired (and stuffed!) staff members. Much as I enjoy writing about food in the office, these photo shoots offer a great change of pace, not to mention an opportunity to try some delicious dishes.

I can’t wait for next Thursday’s seafood shoot!