Kraft photo shoot

Little bit of a two part post for this one.  First off are some photos from the Grey Poupon competition.  The concept was to create a healthy fish recipe using grey Poupon mustard.  So the dish I ended up making was a honey mustard glazed Black Cod with a Barley and mushroom salad, pea puree, mustard seed compote and smoked yogurt.  Unfortunatley I dont have a photo of this dish from the event, but it looked great... I swear!

Speaking in front of the guest judges and audience explaining the inspiration and difficulties of the dish.

First place!

 The top four finalists with our awards.

The people who teach, inspire, guide, motivate, energize, and push me every single day even when they're 2,000 miles away...

-Michel Coatrieux

-Benjamin Browning

-Anna Marie Sosi

So one aspect to the competition was the opportunity to have my dish published in advertisements and trade magazines for Grey Poupon if the marketing pros liked it...fortunate for me they did.  So Right before leaving to Spain I was off to the kraft corporate facility where they do lots of work on marketing, R&D and testing in their test kitchen.

They day consisted of me overseeing that the dish stayed true to the direction I had in mind as the pros they had their did what they do best.  The team consisted of food stylists, an editing team, photographer and test kitchen cooks.

The team working on my dish in the Kraft Test kitchen.

Food stylist secret- brown your fish with a blow torch and paint stripper.

The photo booth set up for my dish.

After the dish was set up in the kitchen it would be tweaked in the photo booth.  Changing the shot by things as small as adding one cut piece of parsley and changing the angle of the plate by 1-2 degrees.

On the screen you can see the original image taken on the right and then what it looks like in the rough draft advertisement to the left.

A bit off from what the competition dish looked like, but this is for the camera magic!

So this looks good with one piece of sun dried tomato...now lets try two...yeah I liked it better with one.

The R&D test kitchen.  Yes those are giant bags of red and blue kool-aid and a half pan of mac and cheese.  Mass amounts of hours in the kitchen and tests taken to prove its the cheesiest.

The whole thing went from about 9 am till 3 p.m.  Overall it was a really cool experience and was defidently very interesting to see a different side to the food industry.  Be sure to keep an eye out for my dish!