How Our Test Kitchen Turned an Oil Painting Into a Veggie Burger

Guidelines are a good thing when you’re working on a new recipe. Without them, it’s easy to feel paralysis in the face of so much possibility.

Here at Bon Appétit, guidelines for the food team are usually things like “recipes for salmon,” “one pot dinners” or “dishes inspired by recent travels.” They’re prompts to get our wheels turning, culinary umbrellas we can ideate underneath. But every so often, the denizens of the test kitchen receive a story premise that blows up our usual process (in a good way!). In the May installment of the magazine, our art and design issue, such a feature presented itself, entitled “Bite at the Museum.”

Have you ever looked at an abstract impressionist painting and tried to figure out what food it could represent? Until recently, I would have said, “Me neither!” But that was the ask—that we treat contemporary works of art as the jumping off points for new recipes, and work backward to develop dishes that look as close to the original paintings as possible.

Of course, the hardest work in achieving these gorgeously copycat photos fell to the food and prop stylists and photographer (Michelle Gatton, Christine Keely, and Heami Lee, respectively), who meticulously arranged each ingredient, surface, and light to best emulate the art. In the test kitchen, our job was to translate the works into food to begin with, keeping seasonality, make-ability, and personal perspectives in mind. Here’s how we got there: