- If you are the parent, friend, or guardian
of a vegan or vegetarian, please note
that this episode contains sensitive information
that is not appropriate for them to see,
or hear, or smell, or taste (laughs).
I'm a food stylist.
Consider me a makeup artist for food.
I take boring, everyday, average food,
and make it look amazing.
I'm gonna show you guys how I style my version
of a steakhouse plate.
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Okay, back to the action.
You've all seen it,
the infamous steakhouse commercial.
The Australian accent, the bloomin' onion, steaks galore.
Whether you eat there regularly or not,
all of that imagery pops into your head immediately
when you think of roadside steakhouse.
And what I mean when I say roadside steakhouse,
basically it's right off the interstate.
It's exactly where you wanna eat, other than Cracker Barrel,
when you're on a road trip.
You pass the billboard and you're like,
"Oh my God, that steak looks so good!
"Let's go, eat our bloomin' onion brains out!
"Or whatever, drink some beer, eat a steak, yee-haw."
I know you've had your eye on these thick-ass steaks sittin'
over here next to me, but that is actually the last thing
that we're gonna prepare today.
First thing that we're gonna do
is get everything else ready.
One of the most important things that they teach you
in culinary school is mise en place,
which means "everything in it's place".
It's very important to prep yourself out
so you're not scrambling and picking up the pieces
like behind yourself.
Everything's already ready for you.
At my steakhouse, we are going to be making
a grilled bone-in ribeye with a loaded baked potato,
and a green salad on the side.
So, I have just good ol' fashion russet potatoes.
We wanna look for like a true football-shaped potato.
Smooth edges, you don't wanna be too wonky.
And then these guys were washed,
because potatoes are dirty.
You should always wash them if you don't.
Then we're just gonna oil these guys,
and sprinkle 'em with kosher salt.
The oil on the outside of the potato gets the skin
like a little crispy, which is nice,
because you can eat the skin of a potato.
I don't know if anybody out there is a fan of that,
but I grew up eating the entire baked potato,
not just the inside of the potato.
And then of course, the salt adds a really nice texture
on the outside of the baked potato too.
So these are gonna go in a 400 degree oven
until they are just almost completely done.
I don't wanna overcook them because I want the skin
of the baked potato to be tight.
I don't want it to get soggy and wrinkly.
But I am gonna do a couple perforations on the top.
Now I'm gonna put these guys in the oven.
So I have two types of salad greens today.
I have romaine hearts.
This lettuce is going to be
a little bit more crunchy in texture.
The color is going to be like a lighter green.
The other lettuce mix I got is a spring mix,
which is delicious.
The greens are a little bit more tender,
but then it also comes with these purple lettuces.
A lot of the time when you see a styled image of a salad,
it won't have red or purple lettuces,
it'll probably just be green lettuces,
because they read so dark and it's really hard to see.
Sometimes they look unappetizing.
So I'm going to do a blend of romaine lettuce chopped,
and some of these green pieces of the spring mix.
In prepping the lettuces, I'm going to put them directly
into the ice bath, so that's going to hold them
in a really fresh way until we plate our salad.
So I'm gonna take my knife and go down the middle longways,
and then I'm just gonna go back and forth with my knife
in different directions.
I think I want the bulk of my salad
to be those extra crispy, crunchy pieces.
Thinking about eating that piece of lettuce
gives you the sensation of when you eat it.
Crunch is such an important thing to people
when eating food.
It triggers that feeling in your brain.
Hashtag, food psychology.
And now I'm gonna pick out some pieces from this spring mix
to put into our ice bath.
So like this piece of lettuce has a really lovely texture.
It's wavy, and pretty, and it has a great color.
So, we're gonna find some more pieces like that.
So, I'm gonna set this lettuce aside
until we're ready to style our salad bowl,
and start working on the other components
to our side salad.
So I have little grape tomatoes.
I really like using the individual tomatoes,
like a cherry tomato or a grape tomato.
They tend to be very bright in color.
So all tomatoes have an axis.
You've got the top of the tomato here,
and then of course you have your bottom of the tomato here.
So you think of that as like a pole
that runs through a tomato.
And then you have a skinny side,
and then you have a fat side.
So you're cutting the tomato in half, hamburger-style,
through where the stem would be,
and it gives you exposed seeds.
So, if I cut it hot dog ways,
which is through the skinny side,
it looks like this.
Not to say that this doesn't look appetizing,
but this looks better, doesn't it?
Doesn't it?
In order to maintain these,
I will cover them with a damp paper towel.
So, this is just a regular English cucumber.
The skins on these are normally really a dark green,
just really pretty.
With this one, we're gonna do like a little triangle.
Slice it half, and then slice it in half again.
So you could do a little piece like this,
which is definitely more of a bite-size piece.
We have our onion, our red onion,
and to get a consistent size of a round on this onion slice,
I'm gonna use a mandolin.
Sometimes when I slice an onion
just with my knife on a cutting board
and try and get rounds, they're a little wonky.
Okay, I had to get a bigger mandolin,
'cause my other one wasn't big enough for this onion.
(snips)
Oh yeah, that's great!
So, we have some good slices of onion here.
You can see the thickness is very consistent
all the way around.
The first thing I notice is that this round
is probably a little bit too big for our salad
that we're building, so really what I'm gonna do
is just take a couple of the outer rings off,
and keep these smaller inner rings.
So, last thing for our salad
that we're prepping for are croutons.
Bagged croutons, like from the grocery store,
all look the same.
But, one thing that gives them a little bit of a difference
is if you find one that has a crust edge.
It actually gives it a little bit more of a visual interest,
and it actually kind of makes them look homemade.
Okay, the very last thing we are going to beezout,
is our green onion slices for our baked potato.
I like to look for something that's sort of in between this
and a chive, but a very thin green onion
is just really appealing.
It gives you a really nice slice.
If you happened to watch the episode where I styled ramen,
I talked about using the green part of the green onion.
That is the part of the green onion
that is most recognizable, and obviously gives you
the brightest color.
And we're just doing round slices.
So now I'm just gonna set all this aside.
Our potatoes are ready!
So they are soft to the touch,
just a little bit of give,
but they're not too cooked.
So, I'm just gonna set those behind me,
and let them kinda cool down so they're decent enough
to touch and whatnot.
Now it's time to talk about the main attraction
for this whole situation,
which are these big-ass, juicy steaks.
So, these are bone-in ribeyes.
They are sliced about an inch and a half thick.
We've got the exposed rib bone here,
which is like a really signature look.
So, one thing that we have done
in order to prep these steaks for grilling,
is they have sat out and come pretty much up
to room temperature.
And letting them sit out in the open air,
helps with caramelization.
If I was to salt and pepper the outside
of the steak before I grill it,
there's a good chance that the salt will stick
to the grill.
It creates a barrier between the meat and the hot surface.
I want the actual meat of the steak to touch the grill.
I like to cook my grilled steaks for food photography
on a cast iron griddle pan.
I have this really awesome double griddle,
which I love, I use all the time.
The grill marks come out really nice,
and also the cast iron element of it allows the steak
to sear simultaneously as it's being grilled.
I'm gonna put the side that's been exposed
to the air down onto the grill first.
I let my griddle preheat for probably like 10 or 15 minutes.
You want your grill grates to get really, really hot.
That is how that reaction happens and creates grill marks.
So, it's really important to really fight the urge
to peek at your steak while it's grilling.
This is the moment where that caramelization is happening.
The contact of the flesh of the steak to the hot surface,
the more you disturb it, the less likely it is
to have those really prominent, beautiful colors.
I think I'm ready to check it out
and see what we got goin' on.
All right, one part done.
So you can see here,
it has that really prominent grill mark,
but then it also has
like a really beautiful brown caramelization.
Now I'm gonna go back and flip it,
so that I'm creating that crosshatch.
Now that the griddle has built up a little bit of grease
from the steaks cooking, it's even more caramelized.
When grilling steaks in this fashion,
especially when there's not a covered heat environment
for them to be in, you end up
with the side of the steak looking raw.
And especially with the fat on these ribeye steaks,
it's just not very appealing
and it doesn't look very appetizing.
So, what I'm gonna do is take my torch
and just sort of sear the outside of the steak.
That way it's cooked all the way around.
There's no raw pieces stickin' out.
And just like that, we're done with the steaks.
While those bad boys cool down a little bit,
we're gonna build our salad.
I drained all the cold water off of the lettuce.
So you definitely want the lettuce to stand alone.
You wanna see really nice textures.
So now we're gonna do our tomatoes.
And then you wanna see some that are the cut side,
and then you wanna see some where it's that bright red skin.
And then, our cucumber.
And it's sort of the same, I wanna see this dark green skin
on the outside of the cucumber,
but then also have a couple
where you're seeing the lighter green of the inside.
So then we're gonna do our croutons.
Cheese, and I just have
like already shredded cheddar cheese.
And then, our onion rings.
And we're just gonna put these guys right on top,
just like a steakhouse salad, right?
Our salad is done.
I'm gonna hand this off to my assistant
for him to put it on set for me.
Don't (bleep) it up.
Okay, and now we're gonna build our baked potato.
I think this one's my favorite.
It has just a really nice shape.
The skin held together really nicely.
It's cooked, it looks cooked,
but it's not too overdone.
So, I'm gonna show you
how a food stylist builds a baked potato
to make it look like it does in an advertisement.
You start by basically cutting the top off of the potato.
Like, literally, off.
It's almost like rated-R version,
you're scalping the potato.
And now here is basically your shell of your baked potato.
So I'm gonna take a spoon, and I'm just gonna scoop
just a little bit of the filling out.
And now, I'm gonna take one of my other potatoes
that has been cooked, and I'm going to also scoop
the inside out of this one.
So you're basically just taking a little extra meat out
of another cooked potato to fill it into your beauty potato.
So, I'm just gonna take my spoon and smooth out the top
of the sour cream.
And then, take a little dollop out.
This is cheese that we've shredded ourselves.
I think that pre-shredded cheese
doesn't necessarily melt as well.
Then bacon.
This was bacon that we cooked ourself.
I don't really like to use precooked bacon.
I like to pick out my own.
I have an oven that's hot from baking the potatoes,
so I'm actually gonna just put this potato
in the oven and let the cheese kind of get a little melty.
So, say bye to the potato.
Bye potato, we love you, we'll see you later.
Back to our steaks, which are just absolutely gorgeous.
I am going to pick this one as our beauty.
The grill marks are so nice and pretty,
and then it also has this just beautiful caramelization
on the top of it.
And then you can see on the sides here
where I showed you that I torched it.
Also, undercooking meat for food photography
is really important.
The integrity of the steak itself stays the same
if you undercook it.
If you watch the episode I did on the Whopper,
then you know that you can fake grill marks
with inedible things like shoe polish,
but that is not what we're doing today,
'cause we were gonna eat these bad boys.
I have a metal skewer, and my handy-dandy trusty torch.
And so, if there is ever a grill mark
that didn't come through all the way,
that needs to be a little bit more prominent,
you can take a metal skewer, get it really, really hot,
and you're basically going to sear the steak
with that hot skewer, where you want your grill mark
to show back up.
I'm going over some of the grill marks
that are already there.
Just to sort of reinforce them, enhance them a little bit.
All right, we're ready to finish this bad boy off.
All right guys, this is our roadside steakhouse photo setup.
It's very minimal, but that's exactly what we're goin' for,
because the food is the focus point of this setup,
especially that gorgeous steak that we've got.
In order to make our steak look extra juicy,
and also to help it hold up
under all of these camera lights,
I'm just gonna brush it with a little bit of vegetable oil.
This is obviously completely edible.
It adds shine and moisture to the steak,
and it helps our camera pick up
all those beautiful, glistening highlights
on top of the steak.
And as you can see, our cheese got perfectly melty
on our baked potato.
And now I'm gonna add the green onions.
(scoffs) Come on!
I really like the way melted butter on a steak looks,
so we're gonna add some to this guy.
And a little bit of parsley garnish.
All right, and you can't have steak without beer.
All right guys, well my beauty photo set
of a roadside steakhouse situation is ready to go.
So I'm gonna let our photographer take
a couple quick beauty images for us.
Make sure to comment below and tell me what you thought
about this video.
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