Pickled Eggs

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

Pickled eggs (in German: Soleier) is not only a good usage of hardboiled eggs but more little salty treats.The recipe is very easy and you can adjust it to your own ideas. Take the recipe as a kind of blue print for your own pickled eggs. The salty eggs go well together with a sweet and spicy chutney.


Pickled Eggs
(ingredients given for 1 litre)

40g salt
4 bay leaves
1 tablespoon black pepper corns
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon juniper berries
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
6 cloves

You have to adjust ingredients and hardboiled eggs to your own needs. The amount of salt water depends on the size of your preserving jar.

The number of hardboiled eggs depends on the size of your preserving jar. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes. Let cool down and crack the shell (but do not remove the shells). This will give the salt water the chance to penetrate the eggs much better.

Prepare your preserving jar(s). Clean them and fill them with hot water. Remove water. Carefully put the hardboiled eggs into the preserving jar(s). Add the spices and the herbs.

Bring water with the salt to a boil so that the salt disolves completly. Add as much of the hot salt water to the eggs in the jar. The eggs should be covered completely with the salt water. Close the preserving jar. Let stand for 24 hours before you serve them. You can store the pickled eggs for a few day in the salt water.

Serve them with your favorite chutney, sauce or dip. You could also try tabasco sauce or just mustard.

Curd Doughnuts with Cranberries

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

During the time of Carnival you will find all different kinds of doughnuts in Germany. Big ones, small ones, filed ones and with all different flavors. These one here are different in their own way: there is curd in the dough. Curd (German: Quark) is very special. It adds such a nice fresh note, something between jogurt and a cream cheese. Cranberries in the dough are not typical for German but they go so well together with the flavor of the curd.

Carnival season in Germany starts on 11th of November at exactly 11.11am each year (called the 5th season) and ends with Ash Wednesday (Aschermittwoch). The high season for Carnival in Germany starts thursday before ash wednesday called Alt-Weiber-Donnerstag (Old Hag's day). On sunday the street carnival has in many cities of the rhine region a first highlight with parades in the quarters of the cities. In Cologne and Bonn they are called Veedelszoch and it is must to participate in the parade of your own quarter. On carnival monday there are the big parades in the cities. Famous is the carnival monday parade in Cologne, which is one of the biggest ones in Germany.
I have to apologize: I live in Bonn (near Cologne), so my opinion might be influenced in some way.
You can find some more information on Cologne Carnival on Wikipedia. Or you might like to visit the information presented by the City of Cologne.


Curd Doughnuts with Cranberries
(35-40)
250g Curd
3 eggs (medium size)
60g sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar
1 dash salt
50ml sunflower oil
2 tablespoons raspberry fruit brandy
250g all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
40g dried cranberries (chopped)

150g sugar mixed with
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon powder
in a bowl for dusting the fried doughnuts

oil for deep frying


Mix eggs, sugar, vanilla sugar and salt until creamy. Add the curd and mix until blended. Add sunflower oil and mix until blended. Add fruit brandy and mix until blended.

Mix flour, baking powder and chopped cranberries. Add to the egg mixture and mix just until blended. Do not overmix.

Heat oil for deep frying in a suited pot. Carefully put walnut sized pieces of dough into the oil and fry them for 2-4 minutes from each side or until slightly golden. The doughnuts will double in size during frying.

Take the doughnuts out with a slotted spoon and dry on kitchen paper. While still warm roll the doughnuts in the sugar cinnamon mixture.

They are best when they are still warm. Serve them the same day.

Post Processing in my Food Photography

I'm frequently asked, if I do post process my digital photos. Of cause I do! It is part of the whole photography process. For me "post processing" is the part which is comparable to "film development & print" in analog photography. Post processing is the fine tuning in digital food photography and for me integral part of it.

In the following I will give a brief overview about the post processing steps in my photography.



White Balance / Color Balance
Although I check the white balance frequently throughout a shooting using a grey card and manual white balance of my camera, there are cases where a little correction is needed or where I would like to emphasize a certain color mood.
I check every of my photos for white balance, even if the white balance doesn't need to be adjusted. It has become a routine operation for me in post processing. And with that routine I have trained over time my eye for slight variations in color mood, color hues and white balance.
To do this properly a color calibrated monitor is essential. A detailed thread on this topic can be found in the Food Photography Club of Flickr (Tips, Tricks & Opinions: Monitor Calibration).
A good white balance is always based on a proper setting of the white balance of your camera. When you have a digital SLR use the manual setting(s) and follow the manual. For manual white balance you will need a grey card (or when you don't have one a white sheet of paper instead) as reference for the manual white balance setting. If you don't have a digital SLR or your camera is just offering some pre-settings, use the one which comes closest to a neutal white. If you can't decide which setting works best on the little LCD screen of your camera, try different pre-settings. So you have different choices for the post processing later. For post processing it is very helpful to have something "white" in the photo as reference for your white balance adjustments. I often have used a very small piece of white paper and placed it somewhere in the photo where I could easily clone it out later after I have adjusted the white balance.
If you are interested in some more information, I suggest the following links:

• The "true" color - about white balance and color mood
• Tips, Tricks and Opinions: White Balance and Color Cast
• For Beginners: White Balance, the basics and how to handle it easily

"Sharpening"
A properly focussed photo is the basis of a good photo. With "sharpening" or "re-sharpening" I do not mean to sharpen an otherwise blurry photo and to repair it in some way. I would suggest to do it the hard way: DELETE every blurry photo. The worst thing that could happen to me is to rouine a good composition by wrong focussing and to get a blurry photo.

With a perfect focussed photo you can go into the further steps of post processing which are doing more or less the same as you know them from analog photography when you develop your films or doing prints in the darkroom. I don't want to get in the more technical details here, but in film photography the chemical processes involved enhance the sharpness of photos. A phenomenon which is often described as "unsharp maskening" and makes use of differences in toning of neighbour areas of your negative or during print development. Software products like photoshop are offering a digital tool to mimic this effect called unsharp maskening. It can be found in the filter section under the different sharpening tools.
For food photography I like the tool "highpass filter" often more, because it seems to enhance the overall contrasts and dimensionality of the photo. Especially for photos, where you need just a slight sharpening this works great. You will find it in the filter section under other filters.
In photos where I have large colored areas which should not be sharpened and other areas with fine structures which should be sharpened I also use the unsharp maskening method in the luminance channel of the photo. For this you have to switch from RGB-mode to the LAB-mode first. Then select the LAB-brigthness from channel section of your photo. After doing this you use a slight soft-focus of a- and b-channels (Gauss effect). With that you get good defintion in the fine structures without sharpening the colored areas too much.
For my post processing I often use the high pass filter with a pixel radius less than 5. The luminance method is more complex and you need some more fine tuning here. I often start with a setting for the unsharp maskening of the luminance of pixel radius of 1.0, a strength of 200% and a threshold of 2. For the soft-focus effect according to Gauss I start with 0.5 pixel radius for a- and b-channel.

Although I have used the expression sharpening in this section, one has the say, that it is not a sharpening (in the wordest true sense) but a method to enhance the contrast in your photo so that they appear "sharper". What I have said so far is based on my experiences for digital uses. For hard print you could use the same tools, but the tools are used differently.

Is there a case, where sharpening of a photo is a must? Yes. Any time you reduce image size in pixels or reduce data to make image smaller in storage size, you should re-resharpen your photos to maintain their status in sharpness. All my photos of medium size I posted here or on flickr are re-sharpened after size reduction.



Retouching
Sometimes, when I have overseen a mark, fleck or stain, I try to clone it out. I have to admit, that I do this only for very small areas, where it can easily be done. The reason: I'm too lazy to spend too much time for this kind of post processing. And you can do it much easier, when you plan your shooting and do the arrangements very carefully. But accidents can happen and when it can easily be done, I do it.



Other
Sometimes I play around with contrasts, gamma values or color saturations. But I have to say, that I don't use them frequently. Or when I use them I use them very carefully. Changes to the original levels seldom exceed 5%. And when I used them in post processing a variation in contrast, gamma values or saturation was part of the whole process. Example: When I would like to have enhanced contrast but can not get the effect by lighting, exposure and aperture I take into account if I could get that effect by post processing.



Gereneral discussions on post processing
Here are two links to threads on post processing you might be interested in to read:

• Tips, Tricks and Opinions: Post Processing
• Photo Manipulation and Purism

Cream of White Turnip Soup

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

White Turnip (German: Speiserübe, Mairübchen, Teltower Rübchen, French: Navet) were a very common vegetable in past. They were discovered again here in German and you now can get the different varieties again. The taste of White turnips remind a bit of cabbage turnip (Kohlrabi) and radish with a delicate sweet touch. Together with potatoes they make a nice and easy to make Cream of White Turnip Soup.

Cream of White Turnip Soup
(4-6 servings)

500g white turnips
400g floury potatoes
1 leek
4 tablespoons butter
800ml vegetable broth
100g Creme Fraiche (sour creme)
salt and pepper to taste
nutmet to taste
For garnish: Pumpkin seed oil (or walnut oil)

Peel white turnips and potatoes and cut into pieces. Clean leek and cut into rings (use only the white part). Heat butter in a suited pot and add turnips, potatoes and leek and cook for a minute or two but don't let brown. Add the vegetable broth and a bit of salt. Let cook until the vegetables are soft (depending on size this will need between 15 to minutes). When vegetables are soft puree the vegetables with a hand blender. Mix in the Creme Fraich but do not let cook again. If the soup is too thick add some water. Add salt and pepper to taste. At last add some nutmeg powder.
Garnish the soup with a few drops of pumpkin seed oil (you can also use other oils like walnut oil or even truffle oil).
For some greenery you can use the green part of the leek. Cut it into small rings and blanch them for a few seconds, so that they get soft) Add some leek rings on top of the soup.
Serve with some white bread.

You can serve it in smaller cups for a nice starter soup (then you will have around 6 servings) or in larger bowls (around 4 servings)

An apple a day...

... keeps the doctor away, I know. But it is also giving me the chance to talk about food photography and conceptional ideas. I have bought two different apple varieties on our local market (Belle de Boskoop, Braeburn). I started with a still using Boskoop apples.



(1)

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

The basic idea was to use a random looking arrangement of Boskoop apples, but using one single center apple as the focal point. From the apples I used one which combines the most typical characteristics of the batch. Around this center apple I arrange different ones showing different chrarctristics, e.g. different color (a deep red or bright red in upper right, a green one in upper left or an orange one in lower left). To make the single center apple the dominant point in this photo, no other apple is touching this one and around it is some free space. And I used a very shallow Depth of Field (80mm/f 2.8 tilt-shift lens, with an extreme tilting of about 10° to reduce Depth of field even more).



(2)

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

In this second shot I used a slightly lower angle and a closer view to emphazise the ascending diagonal line more. Although this diagonal is also used in the upper one, the tighter cropping and lower angle is forcing it more. Especially because the three apples in upper left making a line in same direction. And the three apple cropped on far right are doing the same. Although I didn't change the arrangement, the effect is bgetting obvious here by just two little changes.



(3)

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

In this photo, using Braeburn Apples, I have used a similar idea, but varied it. First, the apples are looking more or less the same. But the center (single) apple is used too. I used a slightly wider Depth of Field (and no tilting) at 70mm/F 3.5. I wanted a very bright impression so I used a fill light from lower left and from left side with the main light (natural light from a window) from upper right. The apple in lower right gets another fill light from lower right to reduce shadows here.
Composition wise I have used the descending diagonal line here mainly created by the only two apples which are not cropped. The upper right I filled with apples, so that they build a kind of triangular shape, where the diagonal line is one side. At first there was no apple in lower left. I introduced one to break an otherwise too stiff composition.



(4)

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

Here I have forced the diagonal line as the main element. The line is created by the two apples like in the other and the apples in upper left and lower right corner. But the two apples behind the line are now emphazising the diagonal again. This is mainly do to the fact that I have removed the other apple in uupper right and the one on left side. And I changed the lighting. Just a very reduced fill light from lower left, the apples in upper left were shaded a bit, so that the center apple is the brightes spot in this photo. The effect is enhanced, because of the focal plain being on this apple. And you can see here the effect of the fill light on lower right apple. Whereas the apple is showing shadows here, in the former one the shadows are reduced obviousely. With a more hard light from upper right as compared to the smooth light before, there are some good shadows which are supporting the diagonal line.


So with two apple varieties and different ideas you can vary your composition and play with different elements in your photo: color, element characteristics (color, structure, shape), light, arrangment, angle, depth of field. Sometimes not much is required to change the composition and the effect it will have on the viewer.

...on the process
Between the first two photos and the last two photos was a time of one week, where I thought about how to change the setting or what to make different. The main idea was how to structure the photo (arrange the apples). In the first two I was using the ascending diagonal line, but the "many" apples cover the diagonal line a bit. In the last two I have tried to make this line more obvious. I also like the differences between the two diagonal line and how viewer's react to it. The diagonal line from lower left to upper right (ascending line) create a feeling of going upwards, going away into the back, moving away. The diagonal line from upper left to lower right (descending) is often associated with a movement towards the viewer, going downward. Often this line has an "inviting" character and in food photography it could be associated with "serving something to the viewer". I think especially in the 3rd shot with the brighter apple in focus this is to recognize (at least for me)


If you like this, you may like this one too:

Brussel Sprouts Curry

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010


This is a more unusual combination in a vegetable curry: brussel sprouts in a combination with small red beans (Azuki Beans). The sharpness of the curry is complemented by the sweetness of dried apricots. Mango Chutney adds another certain sweet sharpness. Use your favorite curry as mild or as hot as you like it. You could also increase the amount of curry to your liking.



Brussel Sprouts Curry
(serves 4)

900g brussel sprouts
80g Adzuki Beans (Azuki Beans, small red beans)
50g dried apricots (quartered)
1 onion (cut into small pieces)
2 tablespoons Ghee
2 tablepoons curry powder
400mL vegetable broth
1 cinnamon stick (5cm long)
2 tablespoons mango chutney
100g yogurt
salt and pepper to taste

Let soak Azuki Beans in water overnight. Next day: pour into a sieve. Set aside.

Clean brussel sprouts (remove outer leaves, cut the stems crosswise). Cook brussel sprouts for about 5 minutes in boiling salt water. Pour into a sieve and rinse brussels sprouts with cold water. Set aside.

Heat Ghee in a suited pot and add onions and coook until translucent. Add curry powder and cook for about one minute. Add broth and Azuki Beans and cook for 45 minutes. Add brussel sprouts and cinnamon and let cook for another 15 minutes or until brussel sprouts are soft. Add apricots, mango chutney and yogurt and let cook on low heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with rice or bread.





© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

Lamb Mincemeat Curry

© All rights reserved, Thorsten Kraska, 2010

This Lamb Mincemeat Curry is not made with a commercial curry powder. Fresh black cardamom, fennel, cloves and cinnamon make this curry and the spices fill the air during cooking. Raisins add a sweet touch. And with red chili and ginger you can make it as hot as you like it. The dish is completed with mint jogurt and some fresh bread or rice. Found the recipe a while ago in a monthly food journal and adaptit to my liking


Lamb Mincemeat Curry with Mint Jogurt
(serves 4)
900g Lamb Mincemeat
6 small onions (should make around 200g)
2 carrots
1 piece fresh ginger (50g)
2 red chiles (less, if you like it mild; more, if you like it hot)
500mL vegetable stock
300mL - 500mL water
12 black cardamom pods
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon grounded cloves
1 teaspoon cinnamon powder
6 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons tomato puree
50g raisins
salt
6-8 sprigs fresh mint (peppermint)
greek jogurt (10% fat)
bread

Open the black cardomom pods, remove the seeds and ground them in a mortar with a pistil. Ground the fennel seeds. Add grounded cloves and cinnamon and set aside. Cut onions, carrots and fresh ginger into small pieces. Cut chiles into rings (if you don't like it too hot, remove the seeds).

Preheat oil in a suited pot. Add lamb mincemeat and roast until slightly browned. Add spices and roast for another minute with mincemeat. Add onions, carrots, chiles and ginger and cook for another minute or two.

Add tomato puree and mix into mincemeat mixture. Add vegetable stock and 300 mL water. Mix and dissolve the pan drippings. Add two sprigs mint and salt to taste. Let cook on low heat for 75 minutes. You may add more water if the curry is getting too dry. After 75 minutes add the raisins and let cook for another 15 minutes.

Chop some mint sprigs and add them to jogurt. As rule of thumb use the leaves of two sprigs for 150g yogurt. Mix yogurt and add salt to taste. Set aside.

Before serving season the curry to taste with salt and pepper. Add chopped mint leaves to garnish the curry. Serve the curry in a bowl with the yogurt on the side and some bread. If you like you can serve the curry also with cooked rice.