Hot Take: Play With Your Food!
Skalawag Productions
We help Food & Beverage brands create high quality, consistent content for all their platforms.
The best tip I can give for food styling is to play with your food, like all the time! Touch it. Smell it. Ask how something was prepared. By doing this, you will start to build "texture memory" Food styling is all about dimensions, textures and colors: You’re telling a story through the food, so texture memory with food styling is essential.
What I mean by texture memory is, if I'm styling something that's salty like fries (YUM) I will use flaky salt as a texture element that will read well on camera and get the viewer salivating. So, let's say you need to char broccoli but don't have a grill at the shoot - get creative and dig into your texture memory as a source for inspiration: Perfectly charred broccoli may TASTE fantastic, but not look good on camera.
In order to SHOW that perfect char - blanch the broccoli JUST until the bright green appears, and then finish it off with a blow torch (my FAVORITE tool). This tells the story of perfectly charred broccoli and gets the viewer salivating - even though that camera-ready broccoli wouldn't taste as great as it looks ;)
The bottom line is: KEEP playing with your food! What textures tell the story of that first-bite moment?