Original and beautiful decoration of salads and cuts: ideas and recommendations

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

The importance of the aesthetic component in food is beyond doubt. First of all, we “eat with our eyes”. And when the dish looks unattractive, then you somehow don’t want to try it. This is especially true for salads and appetizers. These dishes should be present at any meal. And it is they who set the tone for the whole feast. There are also such meals, the format of which involves the presence of only light dishes - for example, buffets or cocktail parties. And in this case, canapes and snacks should be elegant and original, and not be ordinary cuts. Decorating salads and all dishes is an art. And it's called carving. Of course, you can involve a specialist in preparing for the holiday. And many people do just that, ordering carving 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 a 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 festive dishes. What you need to know when taking the first steps in the craft of carving? To decorate salads and cuts, you need to use all the techniques of fine art and sculptural modeling. But there are two separate approaches: we take the product and give it the desired look, or we look for the right product for the shape we need.

And while we have not reached the level of skill to carve the Venus de Milo from a zucchini, we will give preference to the second approach to carving. The use of food coloring and the original presentation of dishes will help us to make snacks more beautiful.

The main requirement for decorating salads and cuts

Always remember that we are decorating food, not painting an oil portrait. Therefore, all elements of decorations must be edible. And since they are also food products, they tend to spoil. This is especially true for decorating salads, where vegetables and herbs are often used. Agree that yellowed dill and sluggish tomatoes, no matter how skillfully you arrange them on a dish, will not add appetizingness to it, rather the opposite. And if you engage in artistic carving onvegetables, it is better to do this on elastic and hard fruits than on rotten soft ones. The second decorating rule is as follows. Decorations should match the taste of the main course. For example, if there are mushrooms in the salad, you can put a whole champignon on top. But caviar in this case would be inappropriate.

Shape means a lot

Sometimes it seems that ordinary salads are difficult to make artsy. But let's try to serve them not in the usual common plate, but somehow differently. For example, in portions, in bowls. 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 base, "book". Insert the mozzarella slices between the tomato "pages". Garnish this salad with green and purple basil leaves. If you are dressing the appetizer with mayonnaise or sour cream, use a regular cardboard ring from a cake box. This form will also be useful for serving layered salads. It is only important not to forget to remove the cardboard, and lay out the sides of the snack with a palisade of green onions or tie with a cucumber ring. The decoration of salads and cuts also depends on the dish in which we serve them. What if it was a zucchini boat? And a fruit salad would look beautiful in a cup of orange peel.

Color play

Decoration of salads and cuts suggests the presence of a range of shades that are pleasing to the eye. If we are creating a dish in which we use tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers, it is important that the last vegetable isyellow color. Black circles of olives will give this salad great depth and bulge. Well, if we season the dish with vegetable oil or vinaigrette. Such dressing will only enhance the brightness of the colors. But what if the recipe salad needs to be seasoned with mayonnaise or sour cream? With the back of a knife, smooth the top surface of the cooked dish. And, as on a white canvas, we create paintings. If you are just taking the first steps in carving, you can simply sprinkle the salad with grated egg yolks or sprinkle it randomly with drops of tomato sauce. A walnut or sesame topping will work too. 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 boiled quail eggs.

Creating a color

If any are white, we can brighten them up to create truly festive salads. Design ideas and recipes for such color transformations are quite numerous. For example, let's experiment with eggs. Let's weld them up. Crush the shell and roll a little on the table. Then put the eggs in food coloring. It could even be tea leaves. After 3-4 hours, peel the eggs from the shell. They will become as if "marble". Perfectly absorbs all colors of boiled rice. It is important that the dye is food grade. Beets are pink, tomatoes and carrots are reddish-orange, saffron is yellow, and red cabbage juice is blue. An excellent material for coloring is radish. If this root cropcut into thin slices unpeeled, you can get "pink petals" of various colors. You can also tint with mayonnaise or sour cream.

Some ideas for serving salads and canapes

It seems - well, what is a sandwich? Bread, butter, some other products on top. Well, how to make a canape festive, buffet? Let's turn everything upside down! Let the basis for the sandwich be not bread, but cheese. Let's rub the parmesan. Heat up a non-stick frying pan. Let's put some cheese on it. When it melts, remove from heat and cool for 2 minutes. Transfer the cheese pancake to an upside down glass. Press down with a paper towel to remove excess oil. The warm cheese will solidify into a glass. With such baskets, you can decorate salads, sandwiches, snacks in an original way. With a noisette spoon (it is used to set ice cream with balls), you can cut out spheres from melon, cottage cheese and other soft foods. Such balls will look beautiful in cheese plates. But they can also be placed in baskets of their shortbread or puff pastry.

Unusualness 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 a salad is a mixture of vegetables. Let's break this tradition. Ingredients can be combined, but not mixed. Layered? It's not original anymore. An example of decorating salads simply and beautifully can be "Sunflower". This snack requires corn and potato chips. The complexity of serving also lies in the fact that the last ingredientin a humid environment, lettuce loses its crunchy properties. To prevent the chips from getting soggy, housewives sprinkle them on the finished dish just before putting it on the table.

But you can do otherwise. Put all the salad ingredients inside the culinary ring in layers. But we do so that the grains of sweet corn are on top. We take off the ring. From green lettuce we form leaves that surround the sunflower flower. And from the chips we make petals. In principle, many salads can be decorated in the form of a flower - a sunflower, chamomile, etc. To do this, you can use grated egg whites and yolks, mayonnaise net, olives cut into thin rings.

Using thin plates

If you are thinking about how to decorate cuts and salads beautifully, but do not have skills in artistic carving of vegetables, it will be enough to chop them into 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 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 around canapes or sandwiches. Don't have the knack to cut ingredients the thickness of tissue paper? Greens canattract allies. Tie the canape with a green onion feather. If you cut the white part of the stem of a leek, then you can weave a chain from the resulting rings.

Snack ideas for kids parties

It is known that little gourmets go to visit with the hope of desserts. But how do you get them to eat a whole meal first? The appetite of little capricious people will be awakened by originally designed and beautiful salads. Decorating holiday and children's tables requires a special approach. Here you can't get by with ordinary roses. And here we need to master the ability to cut vegetables. Take an unpeeled cucumber. Let's make longitudinal cuts on its sides along the entire length and through the same distance. Let's peel them off. Now cut the cucumber into slices of medium thickness across. Get gears. From the carrot, 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 love anything unusual, and they will devour rice salad with great appetite if the grits are bright blue. And this is achieved by simply adding the juice of red cabbage.

Christmas feasts, anniversaries, romantic evenings

A salad or an appetizer can once again emphasize the idea of \u200b\u200bwhat the guests gathered for. If this is a New Year's Eve, then a sprig of rosemary stuck in a dish, decorated with miniature mozzarella balls, will create an additional festivemood. If you are celebrating a birthday, then the salad can be laid out with a figure - how old the birthday boy has “knocked”. And for other occasions, it will be useful to decorate salads. Original ideas will help the girl open up in her love for her. Maybe she will guess without words what the tomato, cut in the shape of a heart and pierced with a cheese arrow, means? In the same way, you can cut canapes. A salad dressed with mayonnaise will look beautiful if a little sweet paprika is poured over its top into a heart-shaped shape.

Creating three-dimensional images

Don't limit your imagination to drawing pictures in one plane. And if you were good at plasticine modeling as a child, then why not use the remaining skills to decorate salads? There are many options for such dishes. You can, for example, lay out a salad in a slide and give it the shape of a peacock's body. And the tail of the bird is made from cold cuts. As a working tool, you can use a confectionery syringe, which you can fill with mayonnaise. For a children's holiday, a win-win option would be to create a desert island from a salad. The dish itself is laid out in a slide on a background of blue rice. We cut a few green onion feathers into thin strips that are not completely thin to make “skirts”. Thread three olives onto a toothpick. Place a green onion skirt on top. It turns out a palm tree. Installing some trees in our lettuce island.