Making Food Picture Perfect

There sits a perfectly sculptured scoop of strawberry ice cream, with its creamy pink chiseled edges and cloud-like shape. How did that single scoop, tucked neatly into a ceramic dish, come to look so perfect? ‘It’s about technique,’ says Diane Elander, a food stylist who uses a special scooper and method to dig the ice cream out of its carton and press it into the dish. She learned to style ice cream (her specialty) from a photographer in New York, and gained clients such as Dreyer’s, Blue Bunny and Borden’s. ‘It’s stressful but fast,’ she says about working with ice cream, which usually has to be shot within a minute, before it starts to melt. ‘If you’re well prepared for it, you just do it.’ Food styling is about 80 percent preparation, says Elander, whose job includes shopping for, preparing and styling the food. She has an assistant who helps with tasks like washing lettuce or sorting cereal flake by flake. Elander’s techniques include melting cheese with a clothes steamer and spraying it with Pinesol to preserve its shiny look. ‘You have to catch cheese before it gets opaque,’ she explains. Similarly, she coats cut pineapple in Karo syrup for an appealing gloss. Before the food is photographed or filmed, Elander spritzes, brushes and primps it’either with her fingers or with tweezers, chopsticks or wooden toothpicks, which she keeps in a fish tackle box. Sometimes, one shot takes two to four hours to set up and photograph, which pushes an average work day up to 11 hours. The constant process of manipulating the food so that it looks fresh and natural requires patience and creative problem-solving. For a Lightstyle magazine cover, Elander squeezed a rubber band around part of a bursting tortilla sandwich to keep it wrapped and concealed the band with a cilantro leaf. For a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf advertisement, she topped a blended coffee drink with a special kind of whipped cream that doesn’t melt immediately and used a strainer to distribute an even layer of cinnamon over the the top. Her designs have also appeared in Bon Appetit, Better Homes and Gardens, Esquire, Southern Living and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Last month, Elander celebrated the 20th anniversary of her career in food styling, which she began at age 24 in San Francisco. ‘Our job is to take the food at its optimal moment and keep it there,’ she says. Sitting in her light kitchen in the Palisades, over a cup of coffee and plate of freshly baked muffins, sparkling with sugared pecans, Elander jumps up from her seat to show me her pantry, which is stocked with pastas, teas and vintage tins that she collects. She pulls a small lacy purse filled with tea leaves out of its container and dangles it, admiring the presentation. ‘I think I was trained early on how to look at things,’ she says, referring to the years she spent studying art history at Williams College in Massachusetts. ‘In art history, you do lots of observation of paintings and writing about what you see.’ Originally from Pittsburgh, Elander earned her degree in 1983. She passed on job offers to be an arts administrator at the Guggenheim, Lincoln Center and the Whitney for a higher-paying position in advertising as an account executive at Ogilvy and Mather in New York. ‘I really wanted to be in the art world, but I wanted a job that linked business and art people,’ she says. ‘I thought it would be advertising.’ After about a year and half, Elander left to work as a production assistant on TV commercials, where she found herself assisting with food and loving it. She was actually backstage curling bacon for a bacon cheeseburger commercial when she realized that working with food was what she wanted to do. Soon thereafter, on her honeymoon in Greece, she met an art director who connected her with San Francisco food stylist Amy Nathan (author of ‘Salad’ and ‘Fruit’). ‘I was hooked on food, and San Francisco was so inspiring,’ says Elander, citing the city’s ‘abundance of fresh ingredients and the food and wine culture, with nearby vineyards.’ She worked in catering, both in preparation and presentation, and assisted Nathan and another food stylist, Bunny Martin, who became her mentor. ‘Bunny wouldn’t tell me how to do it, she’d just make me go home and try it,’ says Elander, who would read ‘The Joy of Cooking’ and practice making recipes. ‘To be a food stylist, you really have to know how to cook.’ She also remembers Nathan asking her in the interview for the job, ‘If I asked you to go into the kitchen and make a white sauce, could you?’ and ‘What herbs could you identify?’ Elander’s answers were ‘Yes, of course’ and ‘lots.’ She continued assisting food stylists in New York, where she and husband Troy moved for his medical internship. She also took cooking classes as well as a course on ‘The Chemistry of Cooking’ at the New School, to understand the properties of food’what happens when it heats up and cools down. This knowledge came in handy when she got hired to do a wine commercial that involved preparing a perfectly brown chicken. ‘I cooked 15 chickens for different amounts of time and doneness, to see which one looked best,’ says Elander, explaining that as the fat under the skin cooks, it creates spots on the bird that were not acceptable in her early days of food styling. ‘Since [the reader or viewer] can’t taste the food, you have to make it look good enough to taste,’ says Elander, who does styling for both editorial and advertising promotions. About 80 percent of her work is print. She explains that tomatoes have to be wet, a glass has to be icy, and coffee has to have bubbles as if you’re pouring it into a cup. Some foods look better when they sit out, or wilt a little, such as tomatoes, which have ‘a wateriness that lends itself to photography.’ Sometimes, Elander brings her own dishes and props to prepare a dish. She selected a dark ceramic Luna Garcia artisan plate she bought in Venice Beach to use for a rustic shot of Kalamata olives floating in what looks like olive oil (but is really water). The photographer she was working with added a real olive branch from his neighbor’s garden. ‘There are so many choices now, so there’s more flexibility, but it also makes things more difficult,’ says Elander. ‘That’s why it’s great to be a team with a photographer.’ Elander also says that putting something in an unusual container or presenting it in a special way, such as ice cream in sundae glasses, can be unexpectedly more attractive. ‘Food looks best on blue,’ she says. ‘There are not a lot of natural blues in food, so it’s a good contrast.’ Elander learned this from testing various foods on her Fiestaware plates’cheese, pasta and apple pie all looked best on blue. She compares having the right dish for presentation to the added pleasure in drinking tea out of a stylish English teacup or eating Chinese food with chopsticks rather than a fork. ‘Food styling is about taking people to another place,’ says Elander, who comes from a family of five kids and traces her food knowledge back to her childhood. ‘Pittsburgh had fabulous farmers’ markets. Mom always made applesauce and Dad grew tomatoes.’ She remembers picking the tomatoes, licking them and then sprinkling them with salt before eating them. ‘After church on Sunday, we always got steak and fresh donuts,’ says Elander, who has taught her own three children about cooking some of her family’s traditional Pennsylvania coal region holiday recipes’breads of paska and nutroll served with a homemade cheese called hrudka and grated red beets with horseradish, called hrin. Elander packs about 17 lunches a week and prepares five dinners, so she’s constantly looking for ways to keep her kids interested in good food. ‘Once a week, they get soup or salad in a wide-mouthed thermos,’ she says. When Elander is developing recipes for clients (something she does in addition to food styling), she tests them on her family. Her recent creations include a blueberry pesto and a strawberry relish for pork chops, which her kids loved. ‘If it’s going to taste good, it’s usually going to look good,’ Elander says, explaining that an all-white meal of white fish, potatoes and cauliflower lacks in presentation and flavor. ‘The bottom line is that it has to be appetizing.’ Her current project is to finish recipes in a cookbook she started about six years ago, called ‘How to Cook for Kids.’ By adding just one other ingredient to each of her recipes, she says, they would appeal to adults, too. Elander’s extensive home garden on Las Casas includes tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, green beans and red peppers. She also grows dill, rosemary, basil, thyme and lemon-scented geranium, and a variety of fruits such as lemons, apples, blackberries, plucots, peaches and pink, variegated lemons. Even with all of the food products available in today’s world, ‘you still have to know how to cook,’ says Elander, who has taught ‘Food Styling for the Home’ in her kitchen for silent auction winners. She hopes to make this aspect of food styling her focus. Elander and Troy, an ophthalmologist, have lived in Pacific Palisades since 1997. They have three children: Samantha, 12, who attends Paul Revere; Annie, 9, who attends Marquez Elementary; and William, 3, who attends Palisades Presbyterian Preschool.