Food plating tips

As we continue this fabulous food blogging journey, we are learning as we go! We have lots to learn and we are very excited to be sharing this journey with you, our lovely readers!

We spent the weekend in Brittany at our friends’ wedding – celebrating their love and union. Today, we are at home resting and studying food plating. (We will be sharing some of our photos from Brittany as well some Brittany-inspired recipes this week in honor of our friends’ gorgeously romantic country wedding. We can’t wait to share these upcoming posts with you!)

Food plating is the art of presenting food in a beautiful and appealing way. There are so many different ways to present food and we are having a lot of fun learning about different styles.

 

The food plating tips we’ve learned so far :

1. You need gorgeous food. Food needs to be fresh and a beautiful plate combines different colors and textures.

2. Your choice of plate or bowl is important. Some professionals prefer white dishes as they feel that white really allows your food to pop. Others praise the virtues of colorful dishes as a way to add color and decoration to your meal. We like both!

3. Add rice, mashed vegetables and sauces first. These often serve as a bed for food.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten, The Art of Plating

4. Add your protein. Sauces and less solid foods can help to hold protein in place (for example, if you put your protein on a plate of rice).

5. Once you’ve added your protein, add a final layer of sauce!

6. You need the proper tools to decorate your plate :

• Professional food tower presentation rings : for shaping rice and other foods.
• Squeeze tubes for beautifully decorating your plate with sauces and syrups.
• Small offset spatula for making lines with sauce on the plate.
• A large metal spoon for decorating with sauce.
• Kitchen tweezers for placing smaller foods.

Food Plating Facebook Page

7. Respect the color wheel. Colors that go together in art or in fashion will also go together on your plate.

8. Odd numbers look more appealing to our eye than even numbers (think 5 gorgeous dots of cream on your plate rather than)!

Some great online resources we found about food plating :

Fast Codesign. This page will teach you how to food plate like a 3 star Michelin Chef!

Institute of Culinary Education : YouTube Channel. You can watch hundreds of wonderful videos that teach you different food plating techniques.

Sexy Food Plating by Helen Rennie : YouTube Channel. Helen Rennie is fabulous and her videos are full of super food plating tips!

The Art of Plating. This site is amazing! The food plating photos are gorgeous and will inspire you to try many new and different techniques at home. We were really “wowed” by this site!

Food Plating Facebook Page. Nearly 40K people agree that this Facebook page features several different food plating ideas to delight and inspire you.

@chefjacqueslamerde on Instagram. Finally, for a laugh, we suggest you check out Jacques La Merde, an Instagram chef who though it would be fun to plate Junk food like high end cuisine. It’s pretty silly and really made us laugh!

Our favorite book to learn about food plating :

Working the Plate : The Art of Food Presentation
by Christopher Styler

Our creation of the day :

We took all of the information we learned today and created the following dish : duck orange revisited with an orange terriyaki glaze (recipe coming soon! 🙂 ).

We took into account the following food plating tips :

1. Use circle to place the salad in the middle.
2. We create a turnip mousse and used a squeeze bottle to add it on top of the salad and on the sides of the duck skewers.
3. To add color, we used orange, green and Brown.
4. We used the cooking tweezers to place the ingredients on the plate.
5. We used 5 carrot cubes and 3 turnip scoops per plat (odd numbers!).
6. We used a spoon to create our line of terrikyaki sauce.

Now it’s your turn. Please share your food plating tips with us!

We know that some of our readers have gorgeous cooking blogs of their own. We would love to hear from you! Please share your tips to create a beautiful plate of food!