Happy New Year everyone, and this will the our first verrine project in 2010. I think I’m now due for a savoury verrine so I’ll start the year with that.
I have always wanted to to a savoury verrine with salmon. I like its vibrant and bold colour with the whitish strips (the fat). For you who don’t know what ceviche is, it is traditionally a dish of raw fish mixed with vegetables and lemon squeeze. I first had my ceviche in Peru when I was on my honeymoon. Haven’t forgotten the taste of it since then!
salmon ceviche with alfalfa sprouts and white raddish pickle
Food Creation/Preparation and Styling
The salmon is prepared fresh, and cut into cublets. The part that I hate most is separating the flesh from the skin. I think I need to take a culinary course.
First I prepare the base layer with quite a dense layer of alfalfa sprouts. The layer gives a hint of green colour that I think sort of “neutralise” the bold salmon colour a little bit.
The white raddish has a deep red colour on it’s skin which I think contrast well with the salmon when cut in cross section. I put a couple of slices of the raddish on top of the alfalfa sprouts so that the salmon pieces can have flat base to sit on. I also push the salmon pieces agains the glass so the orange salmon colour and the white fat strips can be clearly visible.
I also put a circular slice of raddish on the top of the glass to make it a bit interesting. Finally I added a toothpick with a piece of salmon cublet and a raddish slice into the verrine. You may remember I used similar setup in my previous post on tapioca verrine. Finally I squeeze a generous amount of lemon juice and vinegar mixture on the salmon cublets. The juice makes the pieces more reflective and shiny when photographed.
The Shooting
The camera is setup at quite a low angle with the soft light at 3 o’clock direction coming from quite high up. I used my usual 100mm macro lens, it hasn’t failed me since I had it. The camera settings are set at F8 1/2 ISO100.
To achieve the low key shot I used my black T-shirts to as the base, which I further darkened it in the post-editing.
Observations
I found that when the light is not high enough it produces an unpleasant highlight at the bottom left of the verrine. You can still see the highlight on the bottom left of the verrine.
I chose low key again in this project because I quite like to contrast the orange with the dark (almost black) background. Incidently, the red on the raddish works quite well on the dark background too.
There are quite a bit of diagonal elements at play in this setup. The verrine arrangement is obviously in the main diagonal of the frame. The toothpick on the verrine at the back also reinforce the main verrine arrangement. The toothpick in the front verrine are placed on the other main diagonal of the frame.
The the circular raddish are deliberately positioned so that it lies on the “diagonal plane”, ie the plane angled against the lens focus. I find this gives more interest to the whole shot compared to if the raddish slice is co-planar with the focus plane.
Finally, you can actually see the reflection of my kitchen window and the Windex that I use in this project – not that it’s important, but I thought it’s worth mentioning just for fun!
Such a beautiful presentation. If you didn’t mention it, I never would have guessed you had windex at the window.
The food is for sale?
Very nice shot.
Though, I am ot sure why you keep going the low key way… imho all these shots would look much more appetizing with high hey and some blurred greens in the background.
Also I think that you are either putting the second verrine too close to the first one or you don’t open you aperture enough to separate them.
Just little observations on an otherwise very good food shot, of course!
Hi Francesco thanks for stopping by. I was just in the low key mood and thought that the salmon colour could be nice against the dark background. And maybe ¥øu’re right I need to open up the aperture more to blur it even more. Thanks for the comments!