Plating for Newbies

I've fallen in love with a lot of the plating the community has done here and was wondering if anyone can recommend a resource to become as proficient. Also, Are there fundamentals you use? What is your thought process? Do you take inspiration from anything? What advice would you give to a novice?

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grant

We will be doing a course on plating but I will start to sprinkle in some tips as we move along.

Johan_Edstrom_5586

Awesome!

Johan_Edstrom_5586

Image searching for Ugly foods is pretty funny.

com-chefsteps

So far, I've gotten the most from: Cooking to the Image by Elaine Sikorski - I really appreciated her taking the same dish and plating it in different styles, all of which you'll recognize. She covers, at least, Classical, Nouvelle, BUFF*, and "technoemotional" styles - maybe a couple more.

I was bored and annoyed by Food Presentation Secrets by Hobday and Denbury - a lot of garnishing ideas like wrapping green beans in a little chive string to make a packet, but not much else.

I felt these two went over my head - for "fine dining" presentations such as these, I found I needed to use their exact recipes to replicate their presentation (e.g. you need the exact right thickness sauce to make it look right on the plate). This made it difficult to apply these techniques in other dishes. My other complaints of these two books were that they included impressive techniques (like making 3D chocolate spirals) that benefit from being taught in person, and would be very frustrating to trial-and-error at home without a coach.

Plating for Gold by Tish Boyle
Culinary Artistry by Dornenburg and Paige

Matthew_Snyder_68770

One thing to note as regards saucing; many techniques (dragging, for example) very much are dependent upon sauce viscosity. So that's to be expected that you may need to approximate the sauce in the recipe.

An easy way I ofund to practice is to get some yellow mustard and use water to achieve the various thicknesses you are seeing in the recipes.

Johan_Edstrom_5586

Or ketchup as ren has pointed out