Elements of food plating and presentation: factors, components and plates

Food plating is all about practice but you know, there are some essential elements of food plating that go beyond the practice. These essentials can enhance your food presentation ideas. This article will be all about the elements of food plating that will cover the different aspects of food plating, elements of food plating as well as the importance of food presentation. It will also have some essential pictures in order to demonstrate the whole thing.

If you consider food plating as a whole, you can say it has mainly three components. Namely, the plate, arrangement and the food served.

The plate is one of the most essential food plating components. When you serve your food on a gorgeous dinner plate it will enhance the beauty of your food. There, you should always serve food on an eye-catchy dinner plate. Say for example, when you sever the dark food on a white dinner plate or the light-colored food on a black square dinner plate. Then the question that comes, is how to decorate food. To answer this question, you need to rely on the arrangement component of the food. The arrangement of the food is all about how the items are placed on the plate. The arrangement also covers some portion of the food served components. The last component of the food presentation is serving food. You need to serve the food on the well-designed plate and well plated in order to make a perfect food plating. Remember the art of food presentation is all about creativity and practice.

How to decorate food in a nutshell

It should be kept in mind before presenting any food that food should not be hurriedly placed on the plate. It must emit elegance and should appear in a way that the cook or the kitchen staff took enough care of it. Not only the big restaurant, but the small restaurant and home cook should also know the importance of food presentation and food plating and presentation techniques.

6 simple basic factors of food presentation that you need to know

Factors of food presentation incorporate six basic components that you need to follow in order to make a great food presentation. The components are as under:

Substructure

Making a structure means, designing the plating in our own imagination. You need to draw a framework only for food plating but also for all other types of design. You can use some well-designed templates for structuring your plating. Creative food presentation ideas come from good frameworks.

Simplicity

Simplicity is only the thing that can bring elegance. So, you need to present your food in a simplistic way. You should not over-garnish the plate or place too many items on it. You should also keep some white space on the dinner plate. Though you have all the elements of food plating covered, you can element one or two to create white space. It will not happen though, as all the frameworks include white spacing in it.

Equilibrium

You should maintain a balance when you decorate a plate. The food components should be placed with a balance. Say for example, you should place the sauce, meat, or vegetable in a balanced way not using the sauce, or meat or rice unequally.

Proportion

Putting different items with specific proportions is all about proportion. Say, for example, try not to put a big carrot or heavy meat or fish piece on the plate. Therefore, put items with specific proportions to the plate.

Ingredient

You should not focus on the ingredients in the plate. You can garnish with the key ingredient first. For garnishing the food, you should make the priority of the food. Based on the priority, you should decorate it.

External items

Besides the main elements of food plating, you need to consider several factors of food presentation. Say, for example, candlelight beside the dinner plate on the dinner table can enhance the beauty of your dish. Placing spoons and knives perfectly beside the plate can also help you to garnishment of your dish.

Factors of food presentation

A dinner plate needs to contain the senses and draw the food in a way that it looks like a painting. There are lots of elements of food plating you need to consider during preparing the food. The plaining of the food should be made in a way that it makes equilibrium to the tastes, textures, colors, and cooking methods. Twist the items to fetch a sentiency of harmony and composition. The food plating at home and at the restaurant is kind of the same. When you plate food at home or restaurant, you need to consider different aspects of food plating. The process of plating also depends on the techniques that the chef uses as well as placing the ingredients, tools and so on.

Key Item

The main food is generally known as the key item. It should be placed just on the focal point. Main element of food plating is generally called the key item. On a mouth-watering dish, such as meat, fish, or poultry that requires slaughtering skills, section control, and cooking techniques of the highest quality, to obtain the preferred results that are essential to the best plate presentation. Vegetables usually spotlight pasta, risotto, grains, and legumes that need to be served immediately after cooking as these bring mouth water when they are fresh. Appetizers like soups, salads, charcuterie, and crunches need to be served with proper care and precision for utmost optical impact. Attractive garnishment of fresh, crisp, colorful salad with soups served with the proper consistency and adornments, are important factors of food presentation for the opening of the meal. Desserts, as the last phase of the dining experience, should include clean, rich, and sweet flavors with textural diversity including cookies, crusts and garnishes, slight color variation from the use of herbs, fruits, nuts and sauces, and visual appeal. dessert plating techniques are really diversified than the other food plating techniques. Appetizers, the book opening dish and desserts the book closing dish that needs to have one single focal point or several, in which case the creative food presentation ideas will achieve the best results.

Supporting Elements

Colorful fruits and vegetables help the main dish to be get garnished. The colorful shades of the supporting elements blended with the main and the side dishes provide an excellent outlook on the food. The precious cut of fruits helps to make a visual impact on the main dish. The supporting elements provide texture and height to the main dish.  Moreover, it also brings a variation in the food taste.

Sauces and garnishment of the food plate

Sauces stick with the main and the supporting elements. It makes a connection between two components. Moreover, the texture, color, and consistency of the sauce enhance the beauty of the plate.  When you blend to sauces, it will also bring a combination and multiple colors to the plate. Garnishment provides a finishing the plate. You should choose items the resonate and match each other. Say, for example, the blue color does perfectly with purple. In order to grasp the sense of color, you are recommended to do a course on basic colorings.

Dinnerware plates section

We often talk about the plates including dinner plates, bread plate, salad plate or even bowl when we serve foods. Plate plays a critical role in creating creative food presentation ideas. It is also a part and parcel of the dinnerware presentation. We have reviews on the best dinnerware sets, best white dinner plate sets, and black square dinnerware sets. You can go through the review. Anyways, being one of the important elements of food plating and presentation, dinner plates have several components that play a critical role in your dinner presentation. The components that we should focus on the dinnerware plate are style, size, and color.

Style of the dinner plates

Carefully consider the choice of your audience. Actually, different people like different styles and shape of plates. Style of dinnerware plates also portrays the standard. Say for an example, the formal restaurants use ceramic or porcelain dinner pieces that brings elegance to the dinner table. While, the casual restaurant uses melamine or stoneware dinner pieces. For home, you can leverage porcelain or stoneware. For outdoor plating people use dinner plates made up with bamboo or any other recyclable materials. Dinner plates come up with different shapes, like square, rectangular and round. Different chefs have different preference for shapes. Moreover, some foods get more garnished on different shapes of plates.

Size of the plates

Size of the dinner plate is also an important factor for food plating. Dinner plates with all size do not fit for food garnishment and presenting food. Heady meal should be served on a big (12 inch) dinner plates. Usually, the standard restaurants serve food on that, while some local or non-branded restaurants serve on the 7 or8 inch appetizer plate. One of the other things that you should notice is that small plates do not have enough white space when you serve the heavy meal on it. Similarly, when you serve little food on a bid dinnerplate, it will look odd.

Color of the plates:

Plate’s color, one of the most principal factor we should consider before the presentation of the food. Different color portrays different background to the food. The high classic and the top-rated chefs prefer the white dinner plate. While the young hunk or restaurants for the young stars serve on black colored dinner plates. Some traditional restaurants serve on a traditional mixed designed and elegant dinner plate. There are some best practices.

The greenish vegetables and salad should be served on a green plate. Buffy foods like pasta, chaw mine , chicken and potato should be served on a brown or black dinner plate. Radish food like tomato, beef, pork and sauce should be served on the white dinner plate. yellowish foods like eggs, corn, and curries should be plated on blue dinner plates. Usually the food with high contrast looks good on the white dinner plates and low contrast looks good on colorful dinner plates

Essential Tools for food plating

Tools are on of the important factor for food plating. Usually the chefs commonly need Plating Tongs, Wooden Spoon, Handheld Citrus Juicer, Oven Mitts, Salt & Pepper Grinders, Spatula, Microplane, Knife, Wire Skimmer, Saw Tooth, Comb, Dusting wand.

Conclusion

Elements of food plating and presentation are changing day by day as well as the techniques are also changing. Hopefully this blog help you gather some knowledge on the elements and the factors of food plating.