- Hi, my name is Santos Loo.
I'm an LA based food stylist and today,
I'm gonna show you how I style
a barbecue bacon cheeseburger with creamy slaw.
When I'm thinking about this burger,
I'm thinking about the bottom to the top,
and I'm also thinking about the angle of the camera.
In this case, we're gonna shoot the burger at eye level.
When I build this burger, I've run it through my head,
not exaggerating, probably 300 times.
For this burger, I'm gonna use a brioche bun.
I love using brioche bun because it's already glamorous.
All I need to do is give it a nice toast,
making sure that it's golden.
I like to use a cast iron skillet because it gives me
more even heat so I'm not gonna have parts of the bun
that are more toasted than the other part.
Once the bun is down, I rotate the bun
just to ensure that I get even toasting.
I constantly check the bun and I like to press
the edges of the bun as it toasts,
just to make sure that it's making contact with the pan.
Once the bottom bun is nicely toasted on the inside,
roll it around just a little bit on the edges.
So I'm not looking for necessarily an even browning,
just a little bit here and there.
I think that'll give it a nice touch in the end.
Now it's time for the bacon.
I chose a thick cut maple bacon
because ultimately this burger is gonna be pretty stacked
and I want you to be able to see the bacon immediately.
Start the pan on a medium, low heat.
If the pan were on too high heat,
the bacon will just fry and overcook quickly.
When cooking this bacon, I like not to put it
on the pan flat.
Nestle it in the pan in a way so that it curls.
When I put it on the burger,
these curves that are gonna give the burger volume.
And it's also gonna create shelves
for the slaw to hang on to and rest on.
As I'm turning the bacon over,
I'm allowing all these natural curls to happen,
helping it happen by lifting it if I have to.
Once the bacon is done, I'm just gonna set it aside
and get ready to cook the patties.
Lightly coat the cast iron pan
with a little bit of vegetable oil.
Too much oil is gonna fry my meat,
a blend of 80-20, which means 80% lean beef to 20% fat.
This blend is going to yield a patty that has more texture.
I like to use my fingers to press the meat
from the center to the outside using my thumb and my finger.
It doesn't necessarily have to be perfect,
but it should be round.
Any cracks that I see right now,
I wanna make sure to pinch those together
because as it cooks, the crack will just split more.
Form the patties so that it is about a half inch bigger
than the bun itself.
This is gonna shrink a little bit, but not very much.
The cooked patty should stick out a quarter inch or so.
I like to press the edges of the patty
to make sure that I get contact.
My approach is to first sear it on a flat cast iron skill.
I'm then going to transfer it onto a grill pan
and give it those nice grill marks.
And then just carefully and gently sear the edges.
The edges are important because
that's what you're gonna see.
Now I'm heating my cast iron grill pan.
A meat that is fried is going to look too crusty.
A meat that is seared is going to yield
a deeper brown color.
Grease the ridges just the little bit with vegetable oil.
And once the pan starts to smoke,
I'm gonna take my burger patty
and I'm going to press it into the marks.
Firm, but gentle.
I don't want to move this around too much
because I want the marks to be clear and bold.
See these little crevices in here.
That's really nice.
All right, these burger patties
are looking really good right now.
Later, if I have to cut this in half,
I know that it's gonna be a juicy, medium-well done burger.
I have the standard slaw ingredients,
cabbage, carrot, and some green onions.
Now for the cabbage, I've selected green and purple,
just to add that touch of color.
Whenever I'm working with cabbage,
I like to peel away the first layer or two
to reveal the more fresher crispier interior.
When it comes time to slice cabbage for a slaw,
the lengthwise sliced cabbage yields
a better product for this recipe.
It's lighter and as you can see here,
it's gonna provide me a lot of volume.
When preparing anything for a food styling job.
I'm always thinking two or three steps ahead.
So I know that this creamy dressing
that I'm gonna fold into the salad
is gonna weigh the vegetables down
and so if I can cut the cabbage in a way,
which gives me volume, it's going to help prevent that.
When cooking food, I get into a zone
and I begin to think several steps ahead,
because this is gonna pay off later.
The next vegetable I'm gonna prepare is the carrots.
I'm just gonna simply cut these
into two to three inch long segments,
and then thinly slice these into planks,
back the planks together.
I wanna cut these super thin so that they give me volume.
And here we go with the scallion.
I'm gonna cut these as thinly as I can
just as I did the carrots and the cabbage.
The end product is gonna look so, so good.
Now all my veggies are prepped.
I'm gonna set these aside
and prepare the cole slaw dressing.
For this dressing, I have the usual suspects.
I have, of course, the mayo.
I'm gonna add a little bit of yellow mustard for tang.
I love using smoked paprika in this
because it's going to give the overall dressing
a nice of rose color.
Let's add a couple of dashes of vinegar.
And I also like to add honey.
Sometimes recipes like this call for sugar,
but I instead like to use honey
because it'll also give the dressing a thickness.
Let's look at how the dressing clings to the whisk.
Imagine the whisk being pieces of cabbage.
This is looking really good.
It's coating the whisk and it's dripping,
but it's not running off of it.
Now that we have all of our prep done,
it's finally time to build this bacon barbecue cheeseburger.
Flavor-wise, this burger is gonna be fantastic,
but my priority is, is a visual one.
The first thing that I ask is how is the food being shot?
In this case, the burger is being shot at eye-level.
I am designing this burger to that angle.
70% of it is probably game plan and 30%,
I'm just gonna leave up to the moment.
I'm gonna improvise.
It's what's gonna make this burger special.
Let's give this been a little bit of shine.
We gave it color.
Now it's time to highlight that color.
And I'm simply gonna do this
by touching it here and there
with a little bit of vegetable oil, not too much.
I don't wanna grease this bun down,
but I definitely wanna highlight some of those
beautiful toasted areas.
I picked the barbecue sauce that was on the red side,
as opposed to a brown barbecue sauce.
When the burger Patty is placed on top,
the sauce is going to gently fall
over the edge of the bun.
I'm also going to add a little bit of sauce
underneath one side of the bun,
just to make it look like the sauce fell over the bun.
I just think it looks really nice.
A burger like this has to have pickles.
These are what's called bread and butter pickles.
Wanna pick out the ones that are not perfectly round,
but that have a more organic shape to them.
And I like to pull them off so that they hang over the bun,
just a little bit and I love the green color
of these pickles too.
I noticed that the shelf stable pickles
are not as bright as these.
Here's the burger patty that we seared
with the really nice grill marks.
I'm just going to brush a little bit of oil
on to sides and around the edges.
All right, here's the cheddar cheese,
how I place this cheese is very important
because once I melt the cheese, the cheese
is stuck to the meat, and there are many ways
to melt cheese on a burger patty when food styling.
I like to use a heat gun because I feel
it just gives me more control.
I wanna make sure to melt the hard edges of the cheese
so that they become more round and begin
to cog that meat just a little bit.
Now the cheese is melted on the patty.
I have to make sure that I put
this exposed part of the burger
facing the front of the camera.
The burger patty is the star of the show.
Oh, that looks really good.
The next part of this is the bacon.
The bacon, just like the beef patty,
just needs a little bit of love.
Brushing it with oil makes it look like it was just cooked.
The next thing that goes on now is the slaw.
I'm simply just gonna dollop some of this dressing
directly on to the vegetables and mix them with my hand.
I feel that this is going to give me more control.
And then what I like to do is just gently massage the sauce
into the slaw and then build a mound that I like.
Before I add the slaw, I need to prep the top bun.
And so just like I did with the bottom bun,
I am going to add a little bit of oil
to some of the toasted areas around the edge
and then I'm going to spread some barbecue sauce
on it as well.
The one thing that I know
about a bacon barbecue cheeseburger
is that it's supposed to be a little bit messy.
And so that is part of my goal is to have
a little bit of drippage,
a little bit of sauce on the plate.
Like, that's all good.
Just like in the arcade rooms where the crane
comes over and tries to grab that toy,
I'm gonna gently grab a handful of the slaw,
carefully place it onto the burger.
And now all I need to do is just give some of these
stray pieces of cabbage some direction.
Okay now it's time to add the top of the bun.
Now, once this is down, it's down.
There's no turning back from here.
Here we go.
Oh, that feels really good.
So as I'm putting this bun down,
I don't want to smash all of that volume
that I created in the slaw.
I wanna just sort of nestle this sauce into the slaw
because this burger's all about height.
I've allowed the food to speak.
If the sauce wants to come over the bun
and spill onto the plate, that's great
because that's what sauce does.
If the cheese wants to melt a little bit
too far down the meat, that's great too,
because that's what cheese does.
And so I feel that my job as a food stylist
is to help the food do what it wants to do.
Whenever I finished styling food,
the first thing that comes to mind is
how is the audience gonna read this?
Is it gonna be, I want to eat this?
For me, what makes a successful styled food
that needs to define the recipe,
I need to at it and immediately be able to say
that looks like what I was supposed to make.
There's a feeling that I can't really describe.
This feeling has to do with subconsciously
comparing it to millions of images I've seen of burgers,
thousands of burgers that I've eaten
and then hundreds of burgers that I've actually styled.
And then all of that just sort of comes together
as I'm staring at this burger that I just made.
When I look at it, I can just know it's good,
or it's not.
- [Man] Oh yes!
(upbeat music)