Make a dish beautiful enough for any table, festive or ordinary - one of the sciences in cooking. For decoration, first of all, not "umbrellas", skewers or other appliances, but edible ornaments are used. They are made from different products - from boiled colored vegetables to herbs and fruits. The location of products that are part of the dish - salads, fruit desserts - can also create a beautiful combination for a better design. Apply "mesh" mayonnaise or sweet sour cream, cream - and now the dish becomes more appetizing!
Instruments
The decorations used for decorating and serving are fairly simple, and for the most part come in the standard kitchen set of utensils. But professionals prefer a more complete set: special knives, scissors, Parisian potato spoons (round instruments with sharp edges), egg-cutter, knife for peel, devices for extracting and removing cores of fruit, metal molds and nozzles.
You may never need a pastry bag or syringe, but you can apply the brush more than once.
Serving rules and decorations
Combination
The basic rule is this: the dish and decoration to it should logically be combined with each other. As a rule, it is not difficult to determine the product for decoration, and the originality of the decoration is provided by the shape and appearance of sockets from vegetables or fruits. The usual potatoes in different forms (mushrooms, buttercups) or a beautifully carved slice of lemon (rose, butterfly) perfectly complement meat and even fish.
Simplicity
Often, the main dish is not "damaged" from excessive decoration, the number of jewelry is reduced. Usually the beautiful design of dishes - salads and fruits - is accompanied first of all by an aesthetically cooked or sliced main product, it is something to be flaunted, and not skilful rosettes of beets.
Location of elements
The decor of any dish requires a carefully thought-out composition. In general, a dish with decorations is much more attractive than without them. So if you want to diversify a dish, choose dishes that will not compete in beauty with your vignettes or butterflies from citrus.
Let there be a color!
The design rules require contrasting combinations: red and yellow pepper for pale dishes, green vegetable elements of leeks, cucumbers and parsley for dark ones. Orange carrots, scarlet tomatoes, beet juice, egg whites or even turnips - all this will find application on any table. In addition, some vegetables can be dyed brown: this is done by dressing the patrol.
Clarity of drawing
Ornaments are good if they are made with a confident hand. Accurate geometry, clearly traced elements will look more attractive than the motley company somehow broken vegetables. The lines of the cutouts look better, if they are smaller, but they are clearer. The conciseness of "colors" from beets is preferable to openwork, but not very neat rosettes. For this, we need molds for excavation and razor sharp knives.
A little trick: already before serving the dishes on the table, carefully inspect and, if necessary, wipe off unnecessary traces of cooking the edges of the plates.
Product base for the decorator
For a beautiful design of dishes - from salads to fruit desserts - you do not need so many products. Another thing is that sometimes you need to warn the guests which of the products are not meant for eating. Often, products for decoration are not prepared (use raw) - otherwise they lose shape, color, elasticity and other qualities necessary to the cook.
Hard potatoes or turnips (white flowers), raw beets (red flowers), the original sculpted forms of carrots are not always edible. Salad, bay leaf, mint and peel of cucumbers, sweet pepper - billets for stems of flowers and small decorative leaves. Lemons, oranges, melons and watermelons - billets for baskets and animals, sailboats and ... what your heart desires!
Spices
The taste and color, of course, no comrades, but one of the universal means to slightly change the taste and smell of the dish (and at the same time and color tint) are condiments. Spices as dyes - this is saffron, and curry, and paprika. Sauces tinted with tomato paste, and mayonnaise to fish and vegetables are painted with parsley juice, spinach leaves.