A food stylist is a culinary professional who prepares food for photography, video or film. It’s actually a hard job making food photogenic! The top food stylists come to a photoshoot with a variety of techniques, even if it requires using non-edible materials to achieve the best results. This tomato soup photo is from an intensive food styling class I took in NYC. It was really fun to learn the techniques involved in producing a beautiful food photo.
That being said, all of my blog photos are of edible food and representative of the actual dish that I’m posting 🙂 The recipe below is my favorite tomato soup from Barbara Lynch’s Stir cookbook. The soup gets better as the flavors meld, so I always increase the recipe and we devour the leftovers. For this photoshoot we garnished the soup with popcorn and fresh herbs, although crème fraîche is suggested in the original recipe. Pair the soup with a simple grilled cheese sandwich or a hearty green salad.
- 2 tablespoons extra-vigin olive oil
- 1 yellow onion thinly sliced
- 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes or more for a spicier soup
- 2 28 ounce cans of whole plum tomatoes I like the San Marzano brand
- 1/4 cup fresh basil leaves
- Kosher salt, to taste
- Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
- 1/4 cup popcorn for garnish
- 2 tablespoons chopped scallions for garnish
- Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan or Dutch oven, over medium heat. Add the onion and red pepper flakes and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is tender, about 7-10 minutes. Add the tomatoes and 1 1/2 cups of water and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 30 minutes. Add the basil, season with salt and pepper, and let the soup cool briefly before pureeing the soup in a food processor, or a blender. Blend the soup in batches, and only fill the blender or food processor halfway for each batch. Be careful processing hot soup as the steam will need to escape. Pass the soup through a fine-mesh strainer, pressing on the solids with a ladle. Add the strained soup back to the saucepan and warm over a medium-low heat. Season with salt and pepper, to taste. Garnish with popcorn and sliced scallions.