At the end of 2018 I had the opportunity to work with a very exciting startup company based in Israel and the USA. Lumen is innovating in a fascinating area, technology and nutrition. Their team created a small device, that analyses your breath in real time and gives you feedback on the state of your metabolism. The feedback appears on your phone in the form of food recommendations, tailored to your specific body and helps you loose weight and improve performance without any guesswork. I was tasked to shoot over 200 dishes designed by the Lumen scientists to help achieve your personal goals. The idea was to inspire people to take control of what they eat using beautiful images, simple recipes and good ingredients. Lumen has so far raised close to 2m dollars directly from people through a crowdfunding campaign. Their product will hit the market later this year and I expect that it will be with a bang.
This is the first time I formally publish a recipe in a magazine. For me it is a manifestation of moving from thinking with my eyes about how food appears in front of a camera, to thinking with my mouth about how something can taste. I never thought my first published recipe will be of cookies. If you know me, you know that I am not into sweets and not much of a baker. But I do have a soft spot for cookies and for tahini so it made sense combining them.
For that I must say thanks to two fantastic women I recently met. The first one, Elena Silcock originally from London, is a chef, baker, food writer and stylist that used to work for BBC Good Food. We met recently and started working on a food popup called Breaking Bread. After I briefed her on the dessert I was after, she suggested we make a shortbread that could go nicely with turkish coffee at the end of the meal we are planning. The idea developed into this recipe, which is just as much hers as it is mine if not more. The second lady I would like to thank is Louisa Lorang. She is a true Danish food mogul who gave me the opportunity to publish this recipe in her beautiful online publication Lorang&Co. In addition it was the best occasion to announce the official ticket sale for Breaking Bread.
Follow the link to learn more or buy a ticket for Breaking Bread. It will take place at Apollo Bar on the 9th of November.
At the end of 2017, I decided to pursue a long time passion and turn my love for cooking into a more serious aspect in my professional life. I have been involved in cooking through my work as a food photographer and stylist for many years but never as the mind behind the food. Since I moved to Denmark in 2011, I was driven to explore and reconnect to my culinary roots from Israel. I suppose I was a little nostalgic and food was a way to connect and share it with people. I was watching the Israeli cuisine form into something beautiful, unique and coherent at the same time that the Scandinavian cuisine was modernising and reinventing itself. Both the Israeli and Scandinavian cuisines exploded world wide thanks to super talented people deeply dedicated to understanding where they came from. Living in Denmark I found my self in the middle of this avalanche of gorgeous food, representing so well these two very different societies. Slowly and without initially noticing I created my own strange little world where those two very different cuisines co existed side by side without clashing. Maybe it happened because I was free to experiment without any rulebooks, outside the restaurant business and far away from purists and critical mouthes. I managed to discover that yes smoked mackerel can be eaten with tahini. I have now cooked for many Scandinavians, who allowed me with their open-mindedness and curiosity to feed them with dishes and combinations I could never imagine before living in Denmark. In turn it made me curious about their culture and I became a better food creator since. I now feel comfortable sharing this knowledge with the Danish public in the form of a popup restaurant in the Autumn of 2018, followed by a recipe book that I am hoping to launch in 2019. Dates will be announced as soon as possible…
Mid November 2017, with some time to kill and an urge to do something a little different I decided to do a Christmas shoot. Initially I wanted to do a festive shoot that I could sell at Stocksy, where I am a contributing member. Somehow it turned into a nice little collaboration with Copenhagen based goldsmith and jeweller Stinne Holm. We managed to kill two birds with one stone. She got some strange Christmas content with her gorgeous jewellery and i got some stuff for Stocksy.
A while back, I was lucky enough to meet the head baker for Reviva & Celia. When he found out I was a food photographer he invited me to take pictures behind the scenes in one of the best bakeries I had the pleasure to sample. The work of a baker is one of hard labour and long hours. I was on set ready to shoot at 05:00AM just to find out the bakers have already been at it for a while. I was always fascinated by baking and this was a wonderful opportunity to see how its done at the highest level. Reviva & Celia located in Tel Aviv is a household name in Israel, synonym with delicious food and warm hospitality. It was established in 1988 by three talented ladies and quickly revolutionised the world of baking in Israel. Introducing the local market to wonderful French pastry and a variety of other baked goods and food.
