Ok, finally I got started on this rather ambitious project. It’s actually quite a bumpy start. You know to start the verrine project the first I thought I should find is obviously the verrines. By the way for you who don’t know – verrines are type of dishes that is served in small glasses. It is derived from the french word “verre” which means “glass”. Quite popular now especially in the restaurants that serve modern western dishes.
Anyway, so I began the quest to find the verrines by visiting the major store like David Jones, Myers – and I found nothing. Then I tried the popular kitchenware warehouse Victoria Basement – and I found nothing. Ebay – nothing! Then I google “verrine buy” and finally I found several website that sell different set of small glasses. Most of them are french or british website. “Yay!” I thought, happily add the items to the shopping cart and proceed to check out – and guess what – they don’t deliver to Australia! It happens that all website that I found either only deliver locally or don’t deliver to Australia. They say its our Custom, they are too strict. Great, big speed hump before I even get started.
So you all have to excuse me that this first verrine project is not really made in a verrine. I just use whatever glass I have that I think is reasonable. So here we go.
Niçoise crumble with goat cheese cream
Food Creation/Preparation
This is also the first food shot that I have to make from scratch. Well when I say “I have to make from scratch” I usually mean “I read the recipe about 5 times and attempted to make it myself but then I make a big mess in my kitchen and my wife jump in and take it over from there – meanwhile I start setting up my camera”. I still find it fun tough, not sure what my wife think.
As the title implied, this verrine starts with a ratatouille as the base, followed by a think layer of goat cheese cream, then another layer of Nicoise crumble on the top. One tip that I can give here is that when putting food into a clear kitchenware such as a glass for photography purpose, let the food cool to room temperature before putting them in. Otherwise the inner side of the glass will become foggy and you can’t see clearly through the glass. Unless of course that’s the effect that you want.
In the first attempt, the second layer (the cream cheese layer) quickly sip through the base layer because the base is not dense enough. The result is that there is no clear and clean separation between the base and the second layer. So we have to start over. This time we really compact the base layer until it’s really dense before pouring the second layer. This time it works ok, although I still think if you want a cleaner separation you need another technique. One technique that I can think of is to pour a liquid jelly on top of the base layer and let the jelly set. This will then became a rather solid base for the second layer to sit on. Other trick may be to spray glycerin on top the first layer. I’ll give it a go next time.
Second layer is not as difficult but you really need to be careful so that the cream doesn’t touch the area of the glass that you don’t want to (such as the tip). It’s really difficult to clean, you can’t really use napkin to wipe it off because it’s greasy (well, cmon, it’s cream!) We use Windex to clean the glass – and gloriously render to batch inedible.
The Shooting
As usual, it takes probably good half an hour to come up with a composition that I like. I decide to do a low key shot this time since all my previous food shot is rather high key. I also got this nice table mat as a base to cover off my blindingly white kitchen bench. Shooting a low key shot on a reflective white surface is rather challenging.
I positioned the softbox rather high, 11 o’clock direction and a big reflector on the approx 2 o’clock direction to lighten up the crumble on the top. The most challenging part of this shot for me is to reduce the reflection on the glass surface. As I mentioned before the kitchen bench is white, so you can see it pretty clear on the glass surface. Now I don’t have a big black cloth so 3 of my black T-shirt need quite a bit of washing after I sacrifice them to be used to cover my kitchen bench. Even after that you can still see some reflection from the stuff that I can’t cover (such as the white plate etc). Now if you know how to get rid of the reflection completely in this kind of setup would you pleeaaaasseeeee let me know. I still can’t figure it out.
I use my usual 100mm macro, and set the f-stop to 3.5 so I can get a nice blur on the book on the background. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s the book that contain all the recipe for this project.
What’s next
I’m thinking to alternate between savoury and sweets so next one will most likely be a sweet verrine. I hope I have the proper verrine glass by then. If you know where I can buy them AND deliver them to Australia, please please please let me know 
Very nice image… regarding the glass, i think that any whiskey tumbler with a thick bottom would work. They usually have thicker glass which is less prone to break in pieces when one eats. For sweet verrine you could even use some smaller and taller versions (I am thinking even frozen vodka glasses, but that might add a level of complexity in the preparation)
Regarding the reflections, you can’t get rid of them. This is why you need to use a different kind of glass that won’t reflect back the bottom of the scene.
Take a look at http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/Tags/verrine for inspirations on both the setup and the food preparation (notice how very often there are light items sticking out of the glass rendering the composition even more “vertical”)
One last thing… while you can’t remove those reflections, you are certainly making them more visible by setting the entire scene in black… my humble suggestion is to go brighter. Glass = clean = light, i don’t think a low-key setup fits very well with verrines. I would go on a lighter setup without blowing the highlights wrapping the scene with reflectors of all sorts.
again, study the images at http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/Tags/verrine and try to write down what you think the light settings were for those images.
Francesco, thank you very much for your insightful responses. Just by looking at examples from the link you gave, it really gives a lot of ideas.
I just recently bought a set of small thick glasses. Hope that goes better in my future verrine series. You’re right about vodka glass. I’ve been thinking of using those too, but it really depends on the type of verrine that I’m trying to make.
I read from somewhere that using polariser might help with the reflection, although it can’t be fully suppressed. Again it depends on the material of the glass. I’ll experiment more.
Awesome… Nice colors, details, composition,lighting and DOF. Regards from
Carlos
[...] This helps a lot in terms of avoiding reflection (as I had a lot of difficulty getting rid of in my previous post). I’ll talk more about this later. This week’s verrine will be a sweet one (I plan [...]