Developing your own style of presenting food 

Ok, don’t get me wrong, I love good food presentation, 

we eat from our eyes first,  food needs to look appealing for us to eat,

but I have a few things I don’t like about food presentation. 

Here they are: 

I think shows like MasterChef have spoiled food presentation. 

Many of the things presented looked so good to so many people, but the reality of that type of presentation was that if you tried to plate up food like that, by the time you sit down to eat, your food is going to be stone cold.

Yes, looks amazing, but headed for the compost bin!! 

Or it has been handled so much that you don’t feel like consuming it at all.

What happens when you try to teach someone exactly how to plate something up – they try to replicate it and it doesn’t look like the original one, and then you start comparing and you feel like you are not too crash hot at plating up. And some people give themselves a hard time and feel shit about it, basically.  Ye I have been there too. 

I don’t possess really good fine motor skills – when I try to do something petite, my fingers turn into thumbs or even toes and get all confused about what they have to do 

This is why, in the vegan chef training I instruct people to develop their own style of plating up.

Tips on presenting food 

Of course there are some guidelines, because certain things do look better than others and some people do have very good fine motor skills and can work quickly with their hands. 

Here are some tips on making your food look good.

1. Choose the right coloured bowl or plate for the dish.  The other day in a cooking session, I chose my usual black dinner bowl – it has a low edge and is quite flat, so works well for so many things, but as I was showing a client how I plate things up and I put the black rice in then the seaweed it looked like I had an empty plate as there was no contrast. A white or green bowl would have been better.

2. Think about contrasting colours 

At first, always plate up on a white plate – once you have mastered presenting your food on a white plate, everything else is super easy.

3. Choose the right sized bowl or plate. You don’t want to cram a lot of food in a small bowl. Negative space looks great, but too much negative space makes it look like you are being stingy with the food.

4. Apply the rule of thirds, like you do in photography, to plating up.  Sure, you can place food bang straight in the centre of the plate. That looks fabulous and you can divide your plate into thirds horizontally and vertically and plate up on the intersections.  

5. That is why food plated up on the left or right side of a plate often looks sensational. 

6. Place moist foods like sauces, pestos and hummus down first. This way you can use them to stick other ingredients to.

7. If you have a lot of different components to a meal, place in bites of flavour. If you have hummus, roast pumpkin, pickled zucchini, mini falafels, you could plate a small portion of each of those together on the plate, then continue that pattern.

8. You can use the back of your spoon to create a smear of sauce on your plate, then place the other ingredients down.

9. You can use a squeezy bottle for sauces, to create patterns and dots with sauce, which is a lovely, fun thing to do.

10. Think about garnishes, herbs, micro greens, sprouts, fruit segments, crushed nuts and edible flowers and add these on with tweezers as you can get more precise with where they go.

Tools for food presentation

My must-have plating up tools in the kitchen are; 

offset spatula the medium size

tweezers 

squeezy bottle 

the back of a spoon 

piping bag and star tip 

pastry brush to make nice designs with sauces 

food ring

Recipe 

Creamy mashed potato 

I am sharing this recipe as I feel, when plating up mash potato, there is so much you can do with the presentation. You can use an ice cream scoop and have 3 scoops of mash.

You can put it in the centre of the plate, make a moat out of it so it can hold all of the other components of the meal.

You can put it in a food ring and make a stack of it.

You can smear it on the plate with the back of the spoon.

6 medium potatoes peeled and cubed

1/3 cup Vegan cream cheese 

¼ cup soy milk or a bit at a time until you get the mash as smooth as you can. (You can warm it up so the potatoes don’t go cold

Salt and white pepper to taste 

Cook the potatoes in salted water, then mash them with a potato masher or, for super smooth potato, a potato ricer.

Mix in the cream cheese, salt and pepper and then add a little bit of milk at a time till you get it to smooth silky and yummy consistency.

FCT 

Have a biodegradable paper towel on hand to remove any smudges of sauce or food off the plate.