The importance of the aesthetic component in food is not in doubt. First of all, we "eat with our eyes." And when the dish looks unattractive, then somehow you do not want to try it. This is especially true for salads and snacks. These dishes should be present at any meal. And it is they who set the tone for the whole feast. There are also meals, the format of which involves the presence of only light dishes - for example, receptions or cocktail parties. And in this case, the canapes and snacks should be elegant and original, and not be a regular cut. Decorating salads and all dishes is a whole art. And it is called carving. Of course, you can attract a specialist to prepare for the holiday. And many people do this when ordering a carving of wedding banquets. But why not try to take the first steps in comprehending this art yourself? You can practice at your home. So, let's start with the simplest - decorating appetizers and salads. You will find step-by-step instruction in this article.
Introduction to Carving
In fact, this art began with decorating vegetable dishes. Carving was born in densely populated Asia, where there was an acute shortage of food. Therefore, it was necessary to somehow decorate a meager meal. After all, vegetables are an excellent material for artistic cutting and creating sculptural forms. Thus, the most ordinary salad, if decorated, can go into the category of holiday dishes. What you need to know when taking the first steps in the carving craft? To decorate salads and slices, you need to use all the techniques of fine art and sculpting. But there are two separate approaches: we take a product and give it the necessary look, or we are looking for a suitable product for the form we need.
And until we have reached the level of skill to cut Venus de Milo from the vegetable marrow, we will give preference to the second approach to carving. The use of food colors and the original presentation of dishes will help us make snacks more beautiful.
The main requirement for decorating salads and slices
We always remember that we decorate food, and do not paint a portrait in oil. Therefore, all the elements of jewelry should be edible. And since they are also food products, they tend to deteriorate. This is especially true for salad dressing, where vegetables and herbs are often used. You must admit that yellowed dill and sluggish tomatoes, no matter how skillfully you spread them on a dish, will not add to his appetite, rather the opposite. And if you engage in artistic carving for vegetables, it is better to do on elastic and hard fruits than on rotted soft ones. The second decoration rule is as follows. Decorations should be combined to taste with the main course. For example, if there are mushrooms in the salad, you can put a whole mushroom on top. But here the caviar in this case will be inappropriate.
Shape means a lot
Sometimes it seems that ordinary salads are difficult to make fanciful. But let’s try to serve them not on the usual common plate, but somehow differently. For example, in portions, in a bowl. The edges of the dishes can be dipped in sauce and then in spices. Do you think that Caprese salad always looks predictable? Take a large tomato, cut it not to the bottom, "little book." Place slices of mozzarella between the tomato “pages”. Garnish this salad with green and purple basil leaves. If you are filling an appetizer with mayonnaise or sour cream, use a regular cardboard ring from the box of cake. This form will be useful for serving puff salads. It is important not only to forget to remove the cardboard, and to lay out the sides of the snack with a picket from green onions or to tie with a cucumber ring. Decoration of salads and slices also depends on the dish in which we serve them. But what if it is a zucchini boat? A fruit salad will look beautiful in a cup of orange peel.
Color game
Decoration of salads and slices suggests the presence of a pleasant eye gamut of shades. If we create a dish in which we use tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers, it is important that the last vegetable is yellow. Black circles of olives will give such a salad great depth and bulge. It’s good if we fill the dish with vegetable oil or vinaigrette. Such dressing will only enhance the brightness of colors. But what if the prescription salad needs to be seasoned with mayonnaise or sour cream? With the back of the knife, level the upper surface of the cooked dish. And, as on a white canvas, we create pictures. If you are just taking the first steps in carving, you can just sprinkle the salad with grated egg yolks or randomly sprinkle it with droplets of tomato sauce. Nut and sesame topping is also suitable. Cherry tomatoes or Korean carrots look beautiful on a white background. But the salad on top may not necessarily be sour cream. The traditional "fur coat" will be decorated with halves of cooked quail eggs.
Create color
If some are white, we can make them bright to create truly festive salads. Design ideas and recipes for such color transformations are quite numerous. For example, experiment with eggs. Cook them hard boiled. Crush the shell and roll a little across the table. Then put the eggs in food coloring. It could even be tea brewing. After 3-4 hours, peel the eggshells. They will become as if "marble". Absorbs all colors boiled rice. It is important that the dye is food grade. Beetroot gives pink color, tomato and carrot - reddish-orange, saffron - yellow, and red cabbage juice - blue. An excellent material for coloring is radish. If you cut this root crop into the thinnest plates unpeeled, you can get "pink petals" of various colors. You can also tint mayonnaise or sour cream.
Some ideas for serving salads and canapes
It seems - what is a sandwich? Bread, butter, some other products on top. Well, how to make canapes festive, buffet? Turn everything upside down! Let not the bread, but the cheese be the basis for the sandwich. We’ll shake the parmesan. Preheat a non-stick pan. Put cheese on it. When it melts, remove from heat and let cool for 2 minutes. We put the cheese pancake on a glass turned upside down. Press with a paper towel to remove excess fat. Warm cheese will take, solidifying, the shape of a glass. With such baskets, you can originalize salads, sandwiches, snacks. Spoon nuazetkoy (it is used to set ice cream balls), you can cut the sphere of melon, cottage cheese and other soft foods. Such balls will look beautiful in cheese plates. But they can be put in baskets of their shortcrust or puff pastry.
Unusual is the key to success
In order to attract the attention of guests to snacks, you just need to make them unusual.
Everyone is used to the fact that salad is a mixture of vegetables. Let's give up this tradition. The ingredients can be combined, but not mixed. Layer by layer? This is no longer original. An example of decoration of salads simply and beautifully can serve as "Sunflower". This appetizer requires corn and potato chips. The complexity of the filing lies in the fact that the last ingredient in a humid salad environment loses its crisp properties. So that the chips do not get wet, the housewives sprinkle them with the finished dish immediately before putting it on the table.
But you can do otherwise. We lay out all the ingredients of the salad inside the
culinary ring in layers. But we make sure that the kernels of sweet corn are on top. Remove the ring. From the green salad, we form the leaves that surround the sunflower flower. And from the chips we make the petals. In principle, many salads can be decorated in the form of a flower - a sunflower, chamomile, etc. For this, you can use grated egg whites and yolks, a mayonnaise grid cut into thin rings of olive.
Using thin records
If you are thinking about how to make slices and salads beautifully, but do not have the skills in carving vegetables, it is enough to chop them with very thin long slices. Firstly, such ribbons are quite plastic, and from them you can already knit whatever your heart desires. These fragments are necessary to create roses that look so impressive on the festive table. Secondly, it is easier for thin plates to give us the color we need. For cutting strips you need to take long vegetables - cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini. But also - especially in the case of slicing - you can use ham, sausages, cheeses. From such a ribbon, you can create shuttlecocks with which you can decorate the top of the salad, like a cake. They can be tied with canapes or sandwiches. Not enough skill to cut the ingredients into tissue paper? Greens can be attracted to allies. Tie a canapé with a green onion feather. If you cut the white part of the leek, then from the formed rings you can weave a chain.
Snack Ideas for Children's Holidays
Little gourmets are known to visit with the hope of desserts. But how to make them eat full-value food first? The appetite of little naughty people will be awakened by original and beautiful salads. Decorating holiday and children's tables requires a special approach. Here you can’t do with ordinary roses. And here we need to master the ability to cut vegetables. Take an unpeeled cucumber. We will make longitudinal cuts along its sides along the entire length and through the same distance. Remove the skin from them. Now cut the cucumber into slices of medium thickness across. Get the "gears". From carrots, if you make deep longitudinal cuts in it, orange "stars" will come out. On the surface of salads, you can put real pictures of such vegetables.
Children like everything unusual, and they will eat rice salad with great appetite if the cereal is bright blue. And this is achieved by the simple addition of red cabbage juice.
New Year feasts, anniversaries, romantic evenings
With a salad or a snack, you can once again emphasize the idea of ​​why the guests gathered. If this is a New Year's Eve, then a sprig of rosemary stuck in the dish, decorated with miniature mozzarella balls, will create an additional festive mood. If you are celebrating a birthday, then the salad can be laid out in numbers - how many years the birthday has been “bumped”. And for other occasions, decorating salads is not out of place. Original ideas will help the girl to open in her love for her. Maybe she will guess without words what a tomato cut out in the shape of a heart and pierced by a cheese arrow means? Canapes can be cut in the same way. A salad dressed with mayonnaise will look beautiful if you pour a little sweet paprika in the shape of a heart on its top.
Create volumetric images
You should not limit your imagination to drawing pictures in one plane. And if in childhood you did a good job with modeling clay, then why not apply the remaining skills to decorate salads? There are many options for such dishes. You can, for example, lay out a salad with a slide and give it the shape of a peacock's body. A bird’s tail should be made from cold cuts. As a working tool, you can use a confectionery syringe, which is stuffed with mayonnaise. For a children's holiday, a win-win option would be to create a desert island out of salad. We spread the dish itself on a background of blue rice with a slide. We do not cut a few feathers of green onions into thin strips to make “skirts”. We string three olives on a toothpick. Put a skirt of green onions on top. It turns out a palm tree. Set some trees in our salad island.