Fried Chicken Madness
Back in March, I teamed up with food photographer Jennifer Chong and prop stylist Jaclyn Kershek here in LA to make as many varieties of crispy, spicy friend 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 by a client, I receive a deck with the specifics, including the order of ingredients, how many pickles, how many tomatoes, how the cheese should drape, where the sauces should pool. And every brand likes a different look - we get asked for “perfectly imperfect” a lot; some like really tidy even levels with no crumbs, and others are a little looser in their approach. I have spent lots of time trimming the edges of hamburger buns with tiny scissors, toasting them just so on an electric griddle, and rearranging the sesame seeds on top with a bamboo pick and Elmer’s Glue. And measuring the thickness of tomato and onion slices with a ruler to make sure they are 1/4” thick, or 8 mm, or whatever the specs are.
Since this shoot was just for us, we could take any approach we wanted to, 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 beauty within the rules. Sometimes!
Food stylists tend to have really 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.