456: Cook Like a Food Stylist with Pearl Jones

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0:31There's only a few instances that you don't really use real food. Ice cream, for instance, is really hard to get with real ice cream, but you'll want to use real ice cream if, let's say, you're selling a pie and you want to have a nice, beautiful scoop of sexy, melty ice cream on top of it. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Pearl Jones is a food stylist based in New York City. She spent over a decade making food look delicious in commercials, magazine editorials, cookbooks, and more. And she's also one of my close friends. I've obsessed over the contents of Pearl's food stylist kit and kitchen for years. And it's so fun to have her on the show to pull back the curtain on food styling as a career.

1:28pearl jones this is taste thank you for coming on the podcast thanks for having me this is so fun for me for all of our listeners pearl is an incredible food stylist that i greatly admire and also one of my close friends and i befriended you because i met you on a set at a photo shoot and you had access to the free food and i think that's a really auspicious start to our friendship and also a great reason to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much. Yeah, I love that perk of the job, and I loved having you in my neighborhood and now my neighbor. So how do you tell when people just want to be friends with you for the food?

2:01Do you have a tell for people? You can kind of tell whose eyes are wandering over to the food when you're on set, and I typically set aside things for people. Someone's eyeballing the ribs, for instance. You're benevolent. Yes. So Pearl, to start out, can you tell me what exactly is a food stylist? What does that job entail? A food stylist is the person who is making the food sexy for whatever you're trying to sell. So if you are the food stylist on a cookbook, you're the person making all the food for that. If you're doing it for, let's say, a magazine that's trying to sell a pitcher, maybe you're making a really beautiful lemonade, something like that.

2:46to sell the picture. And I feel like people think that the food stylist comes in with like an air brush and fake food and things like that. But that's not really true. Like you're actually cooking the recipe, right? Yeah, completely. There's only a few instances that you don't really use real food and it's very specific. Like ice cream, for instance, is really hard to get with real ice cream. But you'll want to use real ice cream if, let's say, you're selling a pie and you want to have a nice, beautiful scoop of sexy, melty ice cream on top of it. That's different than if you are shooting a movie, for instance, and everybody has to have ice cream and there's hot lights and it's melting all over the place.

3:31You kind of have to have a backup. So what's the backup in that secondary, like it's too hot for ice cream situation? There is a combination of things that one mixes. I think that a lot of food stylists have their different methods of going about it, but it's a combination of shortening, powdered sugar. I like to use, for instance, if it's strawberry ice cream, I use strawberry jam, maybe some food coloring to get it the right consistency. Maybe caro syrup is involved. Wait, caro syrup? What is that? Caro syrup. It's that clear. It's almost like glycerin. Oh, see, I'm not a food stylist, so I've never purchased this in my life.

4:08I think that people use it for like pecan pie. Yeah. Okay, wait, I know exactly what you're talking about. Candy. Yeah. Pecan pie is the only time I've ever made this before. It's like pure corn syrup, kind of. Yeah. Corn syrup. Okay. I kind of love that. And can you take a step back and tell me, like, how did you decide that you wanted to be a food stylist? How did you know that was even a job that somebody could have? I was going to culinary school out west, and I was taking classes as electives on the side, and one of the classes was a film class. And I watched Marie Antoinette by Sophia Coppola.

4:42I love that. I know. I love that movie. And the food scene was absolutely insane. And at the time, I was kind of stressed about what I wanted to do in food. I knew how hard it is to work in a restaurant. And not that I don't work hard, but it's just exhausting. If you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know that you're on your feet all day. It's hard to be a woman in that industry. There's just a lot of things that go on. And so I was kind of feeling out what I wanted to do. I watched the movie and it kind of just clicked for me that I wanted to be I wanted to make the food for movies. So I started Googling, found out it was a career and then moved to New York.

5:27I love that you moved to New York with the dream to be making like the kind of ornamental cakes that were in Marie Antoinette and all of that. I would imagine that your first jobs in the industry you were not making like elaborate pedifours. How did you go about like building a name for yourself? Is it mainly rooted in assisting other stylists at first? So, yeah, I sent out a bunch of cold emails and I didn't realize that the people I was emailing were kind of top dogs. And so I just kind of naturally was able to assist people. They responded. And, you know, I think I worked for free for a couple months and then somebody took me under their wing and really showed me the ropes.

6:08So I know a little bit about what assisting a food stylist entails because I have gone grocery shopping for you for photo shoots before. Thank you. Which is normally me like at the Union Square Green Market texting you photos of tomatoes to see if they're beautiful enough to be used on set. But what else is kind of like the full life cycle of a job for you as a food stylist? Like what are all of the steps of the process? So typically on a photo shoot, I'll just give you kind of something that I'm working on today. Someone gives me a bunch of recipes if it's an editorial photo shoot where we're selling the recipe.

6:45And I will go through that. I will make a grocery list. I will type it up. I will kind of analyze what the, you know, there's always a mood board involved. So I'll think about the mood board when I want to buy a beautiful label for wine or, you know, what type of apples we want to see, something like that. And then I will type it all up. I will put in an order on Fresh Direct or, you know, Whole Foods Marketplace, something like that. If it's something that, you know, I don't want to be carrying around five pound bags of flour. But and I think that's pretty unnecessary. That stuff gets sent to the studio and the rest of the stuff is hand shopped by me and an assistant.

7:30If there's things that need to be done ahead of time, those things need to be made like pie dough, things like there's a marinade that has to be on the food overnight. We try to really go by the recipe, but you have to read the recipe and analyze it in a way that it's like, oh, is that going to look better doing it as the recipe? Or do we have to go a little bit slower, cut things a little bit more intentionally, stuff like that? Yeah, it's interesting to me. Editorially, I feel like the food stylist is kind of the last defense against a recipe not working because you're cooking the recipe. So let's say you're doing a Bon Appetit shoot.

8:09You're cooking the recipes that are going to be photographed. And if it really doesn't work, then you're this opportunity where you can say like, hey, maybe someone should go back to this step again. But at the same time, you want it to look as best as it can be. So maybe you're like doing a really hard or sealer on a grill mark or something like that. How often do you find yourself giving feedback on the recipe versus just taking it where it needs to go yourself? I would say that most of the major food publications have a good series of steps to make sure that nothing messes up when it gets to me.

8:43And if something does mess up, which is kind of inevitable with the amount of recipes that you cook along the way, I definitely make notes or I contact the food editor and say, hey, it's doing this. Is this what it's supposed to do? Have you experienced this before? And see what they say. Because if I were developing a recipe, I would want feedback like that, that something wasn't working, something, you know. Yeah. And you're also like already in conversation with the developer. Likely they have reference photos they've sent to you or something like that. Yep, completely. Yeah, which is actually really helpful.

9:17Some people don't. For cookbooks, for instance, you know, it's a 50-50 gamble whether somebody has a reference photo or not. Yeah. So obviously you've been doing this for a while. How many years have you been food styling? I think 11. So 11 years at this point, you probably have made almost everything under the sun, I would imagine. But I'm curious if there's ever been jobs you've been on where you've been asked to do something that's been out of the ordinary and you had to kind of do extra research or knowledge on your part to make it happen successfully. Yeah. Just recently I made – have you seen that TV show, Is It Cake?

9:50Is It Real or Is It Cake? Yes. Yes, I've seen. Yes. It's quite amazing. I normally don't watch food TV shows because I know how the sausage is made and I just like can't stand to watch them. Yeah. But someone asked me to make it and so to do a little bit of research to see if I could actually do it. What did they want you to make out of cake? A sweet potato. A Japanese sweet potato. Wait, I've seen photos of this. It's incredible. Okay, so how did you achieve this? Because it really looks like a sweet potato. Yeah, it was so much fun. um so instead of spending all the time on making the cake i went out and i bought loaf cake and like pound cake cut it in the shape the general shape of a sweet potato and because i had several of them i got different types of sweet potato shapes from it and then covered it in frosting and then there was i think it's called modeling chocolate rolled it out folded it over trimmed it and then took a tool that I think it's normally used I just went to Blick and I bought a bunch of stuff there was a little tool where you can go in the creases of something I don't know what it's for trying to remember maybe like clay or bookmaking it probably was for clay like a sculpting tool and I went through and just made little creases I also had an assistant helping me which was very convenient um and also shout out to kayla for that and then i bought an airbrush bought some airbrush paint and then went through with the airbrush and then powder so that it looked natural and then there were little hairs that are in like little roots that come out of the sweet potato and i plucked those directly from the sweet potato and then I included them on the sweet potato.

11:51You know, when I saw a photo of this, I think it was the hair-like roots on the sweet potato that I found to be the most transfixing because I felt like that was such a tiny level of detail that you would only include if you've spent a lot of time around sweet potatoes, which you obviously have. But I love that you actually did surgery on the sweet potato and moved them over. I feel like that's really cute to think about in that kind of way. Yeah. The best part about foods, not the best part, But one of the amazing parts about food styling is it doesn't actually have to be edible. So I think that in the TV show is a cake where people are actually eating it.

12:24Like you wouldn't want to have a sweet potato hair and they might make that out of candy, something like that. But for my purpose, it doesn't really matter if somebody can eat it. Yeah. What was the final result? You were making like a social video where they cut into the sweet potato? Yeah, they were making a social video and they, you know, had a bunch of them lined up and cut into them and it was really fun. Yeah. So you alluded to some tools you were working with before. I think one of my favorite parts about being on set is getting to look into like a food stylist or a prop stylist's kit.

12:55There's something about like a well-stocked kit that makes me feel like everything is going to be all right in the shoot and maybe in the world at large. I'm curious if you could walk me through some of like the most core elements of what's in your kit. Completely. So I have a huge toolbox and then I also have a set tray in the toolbox. I have things that, you know, my knife roll. I have mandolin. I have, you know, drawers of tweezers and spoons and Q-tips and wax modeling gel. I have, what else? Scissors are very important. Yeah, do you have the joist chin? Yeah. Why are these scissors the scissors that every stylist has?

13:34Because I do think they're universal. Because that's what my predecessors had, to be honest. I'm like, they work. They're great. And they're pretty cheap. You know. They're very sharp. They're very sharp. They're small. You get them in a yellow and you know they're yours when you stumble into the prop section and they have the yellow joist trends and you ask them if they're yours. Yeah. But also, like, what do you use the scissors for? For the scissors, I use them all the time. Let's say that you're, this is kind of a weird thing to think about, but, you know, if I'm making a steak and there's like a little piece of fat that's hanging off in a weird way, I might snip it.

14:17Talking about food, shrimp, peeling the shrimp and, you know, curving the front so it's not just a bunch of gross dangly bits. Wait, what do you mean curving the front? You know where the head of the shrimp is? Yeah. When you buy shrimp with the peel on them, there's all that, like wherever the head connected to the body, it normally isn't cute. And so as a food stylist, I think about that and I trim it up so that it's like a natural curve instead of like a straight line or just dangly. I love that. Those are like the tiny details that I hear stylists talk about that I think only other food people know to look for.

14:56But for you, if you saw a shrimp that wasn't cut like that, would you would that bother you? Would it seem somehow off? I try turning that part. I try turning the judgment off. I don't want to ever look at somebody else's photo and think that's not done well. I will look at a photo and be like, wow, that's beautiful. But I reserve judgment. I don't I don't like doing that. OK, that's very big of you. I'm sorry for trying to nudge you down that path. No. You also, I feel like I see a lot of stylists that use scissors to trim herbs really quickly over a dish, which I think is a cool technique. I feel like scissors are kind of an underused home cooking tool.

15:32Yeah. Yeah. I love scissors. They're great. Are there any other elements of your kit that you would suggest maybe a home cook get and use just to make their lives easier? I love a coon spoon, like a nice big spoon for plating and dolloping and swirling, everything like that i probably that's probably the most used tool in my toolkit is is a good spoon and the coon spoon is like a specific brand of spoon what's so good about that one i just like the the depth of the spoon i like the size of the spoon it's kind of the perfect spoon yeah perfect spoon is that the most used thing in your kit the spoons tweezers you know to pick things out.

16:16Let's say you accidentally sprinkled, you know, chopped parsley over something and then you look at the photo and they're like, oh, it wasn't chopped parsley. It was chopped chives. Having to pick that off is sometimes it's painful, but it's easier than replating sometimes if everything else is perfect. The other food item or food tool that I see Silas use that I want to get for myself is the hulkin bags that everyone uses to carry things around. Could you explain like what a hulkin bag is to somebody who's never seen someone using them on the subway before maybe yeah hulkin bag well the ones that i have are these black shiny bags with wheels on the bottom and handles on both sides in the front where you can drag it you literally can drag it anywhere and it kind of can spin i mean i use mine for laundry sometimes when i take it out of the building i saw someone using one at the airport recently like a mom who was transporting all of her family's stuff from the gate to where they were going.

17:16And it was all in the big Hulkin bag. And I gasped out loud because I'd never seen one in the real world before. And she unprompted turned around and she was like, this is my bag. It's so amazing. She was evangelizing on it. I love it. I know. I prefer the medium-sized ones to the large ones. Why? Because I overfill the large ones. And they just, you know, the smaller one, they're a little bit more manageable, especially when you drag them down the road. Yeah, I feel like an underrated part of the job, or maybe it's not underrated, but I think a part of the job that people don't often think about is how much schlepping is involved.

17:51Like, I feel like that's actually one of the biggest things you probably have to do is just move things around. Oh, completely. Yeah, it's a lot of schlepping, but it gives you some good arm muscles. Yeah. How is your Uber rating? It must be dicey. Oh, gosh. It's probably, I say it's probably, I think it's like 4.8. Oh, that's great. Yeah, not too bad. But I also have my own car and it's so much easier and a little bit cheaper to just take my car and to find a parking garage. My friend Liz, who's a prop stylist, has like an Instagram series called Uber Drivers Hate Her. And it's just photos of her in the back of a car with like a giant plastic shell or like these kind of giant things that she's schlepping around the city that I think is like the least glamorous part of what ostensibly is a very glamorous job.

18:35Yeah, people always think it's like very, very glamorous to I guess we're in the photo world. So it kind of is in in one way. But, you know, I'm also cooking. Sometimes I'm, you know, over a grill all day and sweating. And a lot of it's not nice, but a lot of it's, you know, very fun. So for a food stylist, I feel like the commercial gigs are maybe where like a lot of money is being made. Are the cookbook jobs kind of like a prized job to have? Cookbooks are great for a couple different reasons. It's a solid chunk of time that's booked, which is nice as a freelancer. It's also great promotionally.

19:18You know, if you do someone big's book, then it's nice having your name associated with it. But you also get a lot of images if you're shooting 100 plus recipes. You're bound to have a lot of images that you love looking at and want to publish for yourself on your Instagram. So we're talking about like 100 recipes. How many recipes are standard in a cookbook? Like 120 maybe? I think so. Somewhere around there. It depends on the person and the type of book. Right. And not all of them are being photographed for the cookbook, especially these days. but roughly how long would you say a cookbook shoot is and how do you prepare for something that substantial?

19:56Yeah, I would say in general, the cookbooks that I've worked on are about two weeks long. And sometimes those are separated seasonally, which is kind of nice and also kind of a pain. When you say separated seasonally, like they'll do a week long shoot in the summer when there's good produce and then another one in the winter or something? Yep, completely. Yeah, I'm sure that it's a lot of people don't think about when they book their cookbook. If you're wanting to shoot in November and you're asking for a bunch of heirloom tomatoes, it's going to be a hard ask. Yeah. What do you do in those contexts?

20:32Do you have like a secret heirloom tomato dealer? Oh, man. I ask the Internet, ask my other food stylist friends. I, you know, search all the places that one can. I actually have a grocery store that weirdly has out-of-season fruit, and it's not like a high-end grocery store. It's just a basic— What store? City Acres. Have you ever been there? Oh, yeah, it's right by the bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge. Yeah, I love it. And all of the, like, Hasidic families shop there. It's kind of like their grocery store. Yeah, it's normally—I think it's much better than going to Whole Foods. It's just, you know, empty.

21:09Yeah, I feel like it must be interesting to be a food stylist sourcing in New York because if you can find anything, it could probably be found here. But then seasonality is a component. Are there any like white whale items or items that were like you had to go to great lengths to track down that come to mind? Just the other day I had to ask our friend Tanya to order me on Baldor some arugula, some mature arugula, because nowadays all you can get in a grocery store is just baby arugula. I'm trying to picture what mature arugula even looks like. Maybe I've never had it before. You probably have.

21:44It's instead of it being like super tiny and frilly, it kind of is more elongated. What kind of job was it that you needed that for? It was for a New York Times opinion piece. So the Times was very bullish on it being mature arugula. No, that was my own, that was my own, you know, desire. You just thought it would look better in the shot? Yeah, just with the idea of what we were shooting, it seemed like it would be nice. Well, I feel like having access to someone with a Baldur account is a good hack for that. The other thing is probably just going to the wide variety of ethnic grocery stores that we have around the city.

22:20I feel like there's so many different things that can be found. Yeah, I love all the Latin markets in like Williamsburg, East Williamsburg. I also love Essex Market. It's kind of a great one-stop shop where you can go around to the different vendors. Do you feel like some of the vendors at the green market maybe like know you by now and know that you're a food person shopping because there is that whole dynamic in the mix? I kind of feel like I black out when I go to the market when I'm on a job. I wish that I could go for pleasure more than I actually do. But normally I'm like very like single focused on what I need.

22:59Like if I'm looking for the perfect peach, I'll truly just narrow in on the peaches and kind of bypass everything else that's beautiful, which is unfortunate. So I'm curious about like the dynamics on set for something like a cookbook. I feel like there's probably a couple of different ways you can be organizing what's being shot when. Like from your perspective, it's probably things that take a like the cooking times work out or something. And then for the stylists, the prop stylist, maybe it's about like turning things over that way. So how do you kind of like collaboratively decide the order in which things are going to be shot on a cookbook?

23:33Typically, it's all a timing thing. If let's say that I'm making a bread that needs time to rise, I will probably want to get that started at the very beginning. But that means that we won't shoot it maybe until the afternoon. And with a cookbook, if it's not a tested recipe, maybe it didn't work out and maybe you have to redo it. So you have to kind of plan around a little bit of, you know, have a few flexible, shorter recipes that you could throw in just in case something messes up. So is it really on you? Are you the person that's going to the team and saying, we're going to shoot eight recipes today?

24:11These are the eight that I think will work well in terms of timing? I think for the most part with the crew, you want it to be a collaborative effort. if the photographer knows the angle that something needs to be shot and it's going to mess them up and, you know, take a lot of time to reset, you'll want to know that ahead of time. But in general, people do look to me on a cookbook. You know, what if we have a bunch of fish that I ordered at the very beginning of the shoot? We don't want to shoot that on the last day when the whole place is going to smell like rotting fish. Yeah, that sounds pretty gnarly.

24:48It does sound pretty gnarly. I want to avoid that at all costs. Do you approach a shoot differently when it's a commercial shoot? Like I know you were doing one for Dave and Buster's, for example, where like you're making things that are like on the table, but there's actors and there's other things going on. And it's not like the cookbook shoot where the food is like the main character. Do you like interact with people differently? Do you have like less say in terms of how everything is going to go down? For the most part, the shoots that I like working on are ones that feel very collaborative.

25:18With that being said, even though the food isn't the forefront, maybe you're still selling the food. So even though there are actors or models involved, I want to make sure, and just from like a sense of pride in the work that I put out there, I want it to look good always. But some things can set, you know, if there's a cake on set, but also it has to have a dollop of whipped cream and then you're also doing, you know, ribs and stuff like that, you'll probably give everybody the things that they need and then go in with a brush and, you know, make it glossy or dollop the whipped cream at the very end so that it doesn't melt under the lights sitting there for, you know, 20 minutes.

26:02If it's a glass with condensation on it and the condensation is fake condensation, I'll probably want to go through that with the model and be like, hey, hey, if you move your hand around, your hand's going to get sticky. You'll probably just want to grab it how you want to grab it and hold it there. And if we need to adjust, you know, I'll give you a fresh glass. So like cut, the makeup artist comes in, they start touching up all of the people. Cut, you come in and you start touching up all of the food. Exactly. You said fake condensation and I want to know more about that. Is that spritzing it with water or it's something else?