#inform-video-player-1 .inform-embed { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }
#inform-video-player-2 .inform-embed { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }
TRAVERSE CITY — Beryl Striewski didn’t start her career out shooting pictures of food. A commercial photographer since 1987, she specialized in people — portraits and individuals in their work environment — while living and working in Houston, Texas.
When she and her husband relocated to the Traverse City area in 2008, she thought she’d continue on that path. But a recession was on and Striewski found that particular well to be pretty dry. Taking a little time off, she began experimenting with capturing images of food and discovered she not only had the talent for it, but enjoyed the genre. She built a website featuring those photos and it’s been her specialty since. It’s also what led her to become the photographer for “The New Netflix Cookbook / 70 Recipes from Your TV to Your Table,” for which she doubled as the cook who actually prepared all of the recipes to be photographed.
Striewsky says her first food client was the Grand Traverse Pie Company.
“I had presented myself as an established food photographer, but at that point I was brand new,” she says. “They tried me based on my website … and said they wanted me to shoot 38 pies. So before I showed up the next week, I bought a bunch of pies — how do you shoot a pie?
“I learned in that week before I showed up there about plating a pie and what was the right angle, what kind of accoutrements could be around the pie and things like that. I will always pull out a little piece of fresh fruit, like if it’s a cherry pie, I make sure there’s a nice, big luscious cherry at the point of the pie. That kind of launched it.”
Striewski also loved that food was easier to manage as a photo subject than, say, a busy person who might be hard to schedule or a challenge to coach.
“Food is so much more simple,” she says. “It doesn’t move, and I love the design element of plates and flatware, cloth, fabrics, backgrounds.
“And I do a lot of the shooting at home. I have a very large dining room that gets converted into a studio when I need it to be a studio and I also utilize the kitchen. If I’m working with a chef, I go to their place.”
The Grand Traverse Resort and Spa eventually hired her, too, as did several area wineries and Cherry Republic, the latter for whom she’s done catalog shoots. Meanwhile, she began working with Carol Bobolts, a Michigan resident with her own firm named Red Herring Design who had relocated from New York to be based in Alpena. Bobolts continues to have employees and clients around the country, and first began hiring Striewski to shoot photos for an artisanal cheese magazine her company was designing called Culture.
“I think I worked with Beryl the first time when we did a holiday issue that had … cookies all made with cheese,” Bobolts recalls. “She’s amazing and so easy to work with.”
It also helped that if Bobolts wanted to be on-site for a photo shoot, it wasn’t that far for her to go from Alpena to Traverse City.
“I’ve just been working with her whenever I can,” she says, noting she’s subsequently hired Striewski for a variety of other cheese-related assignments.
When a publisher approached Bobolts to take on the Netflix-branded cookbook project, she turned to Striewski. The budget wasn’t large enough to cover extras like someone to prepare the recipes and a stylist, so Striewski, who likes to cook, did all of that herself. There are about 70 recipes tied in with various Netflix shows in the book, with about 35 including pictures.
That meant Striewski had to prepare such dishes as Queer Eye Guacamole Cups, Squid Game Steak Toasts, Santa Clarita Diet The Undead Meat Loaf, The Queen’s Gambit Checkerboard Cake, Narcos Michelada Chili Cocktail, Money Heist Melon & Royal Mint of Spain Salad and Midnight Mass Bleeding Angel Cake. She started around the end of 2022 and wrapped up shooting in February. The book debuted in October.
One recipe Striewski found to be pretty simple was a Stranger Things triple-decker waffle sundae made with Eggo waffles, whipped cream and M&Ms. Some were intricate and more complicated, she says, like that checkerboard cake.
“At first glance when I first learned I was going to have to do a checkerboard cake, I kind of freaked out,” Striewski says.
So she googled videos for how-to ideas and it turned out to be easy enough for a home cook to handle.
“It’s a real straightforward recipe taking a Sara Lee pound cake — a chocolate version and yellow version,” she says. “I couldn’t find a chocolate pound cake so I made one, but it was very simple and the instructions were really good. The recipe is easy to follow, you’re cutting it and how to piece things together. Then you use like a chocolate ganache frosting to hold everything together and it came out really nice.”
A hamburger cake prepared in the fashion of the “Is It Cake?” game show that’s all about putting chefs to the test to make a cake that is hard to distinguish from the genuine article was also a challenge.
“(The recipe) isn’t like something you see in the show that’s indistinguishable from a real hamburger,” Striewski says. “It’s not that fine-tuned.”
One of her favorites was the zombie meatloaf.
“It’s a really easy recipe to put together, and it’s healthy,” she says. “I used prosciutto to make a skin on the outside of the meatloaf and used sliced onions for eyeballs and crooked teeth. I posted it on Instagram because I thought it was so cute, and it came out really nice.”
Striewski stresses that she’s not a trained chef, but a decent home cook.
“I could manage all of these recipes,” she says. “And to my benefit, there’s a few drink recipes in there, so that really helped too.”
#inform-video-player-3 .inform-embed { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }
