Encyclopedie du Chocolat

  On March 3rd, 2011, my new book, Encyclopédie du Chocolat, was honored with the “Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Best Chocolate Book of the Year” before an audience of 1,200 people at Folies Bergère. When I work on a cookbook I am intensely focused on capturing not just each recipe but also the ethereal moment within each recipe. I attempt to capture the emotion and raw energy that radiate from a just-completed work of food art. This is a photo I have pulled from my archives all the way back in June 2010. The image you see here was not included in the book because there was no space for it, but for me it is one of my favorites among more than 20,000 images that I captured for this book. It is absolutely a finished cake while at the same time being completely raw with glowing light filtering through the daggers of thin chocolate. Thanks go to Frederic Bau, my co-author and the creator of L’Ecole du Grand Chocolat Valrhona. I am sharing with you one of my last frames during the process of shooting this 416-page book and it embodies everything that I try to capture when photographing. Enjoy.   Technical details – Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 100mm Macro Lens, ISO 100, F 3.2, Shutter Speed 1/15 second. For more photography by Clay McLachlan: Beyond the Bread Basket: Recipes for Appetizers, Main Courses, and Desserts by Eric Kayser, Clay McLachlan, and Yair Yosefi  French Cooking: Classic Recipes and Techniquesby Hubert Delorme, Vincent Boue, Clay McLachlan, and Paul BocuseEric Kayser’s New French Recipes by Eric Kayser, Yair Yosefi, and Clay McLachlan