Food Plating and Presentation: Importance, Technique and Guide

First we notice the decoration of food, then the taste of it.

Constructive and profound plating raises both the feeling and taste of your food.

If you’re eating food that’s been plated beautifully, you’ll be more attracted to the dish than if it were just a big mound of mashed potatoes. The same is true for advertising. We eat with our eyes first, so if the food is not pleasing to look at then we are unlikely to even try it.

If you are holing a food service business or if you regularly serve foods in front of your home guest, you know that food plating and presentation is one of the most important things that you need to ensure in order to enhance the beauty of your dining table.

The presentation of your food also expresses your elegance.

Nevertheless, plating is often ignored by chefs who are either too active or more concerned with the taste of their dishes. Centering on demonstration also provides chefs to showcase their creations and demonstrate to guests that they’re getting their importance.

While there aren’t any concrete rules when it comes to “correct” plating, there are several important conceptions to remember for food plating and presentation as you make and present your dish in both restaurants and homes.

This article will broadly describe the importance of food plating and presentation. Then it will describe the traditional and modern food presentation techniques and guide on the food plating.

Food Plating and Presentation: The Art of Food Presentation

Food plating and presentation is the science and art of modifying, processing, setting, arranging, or embellishing food to enhance its aesthetic appeal. There is no hard and fast rule for this. But there are some concepts that many people follow.

Importance of Food Presentation

Did you experience that before the food ever contracts your tongue you’ve already tasted it?

That might sound preposterous, but we visually try our food long before we ever try it in our mouths.

You can see a server holding your plate to your table to begin determining how the meal will taste set on how the food appears. In easier terms, this optical tasting experience comes down to great or bad food displays.

If the food appears mouth-watering, you’re more likely to desire to try it and delight it when you do.

Almost all the chefs know the importance of food presentation. In fact, the presentation of a dish is just as essential as the taste. Food must look great and be visually attractive for us to desire to eat it.

In fact, lovely food can be better than simple food as the optical expectation makes our mouths water and our stomachs turn as being empty, rising the fall of saliva, gastric and pancreatic juices creating the food simpler to digest and take up all the nutrients.

So much of what we opt to eat is based on outlook. Like we look at a part of a buttery chocolate chip cookie and we can nearly taste it earlier we touch it.

How to Plate Food Beautifully

It’s great to offer a variety of flavors and grains on your plate to make it mouth-watering—and most dishes welfare from a shot of color, too.

You don’t have to precede taking brown foods entirely, but you’d be astonished what a shower of young and clear herbs and dust of salt and pepper can make to awake up the visual aspect of food.

Other matters to hold your eyes on flawlessness and parallel lines.

Despite what you might believe, these are the oppositions of a pleasant and regular looking plate. Correct setting and light rounds and pieces can look bad, so don’t fuss too much trying to get your diced veggies just right.

Rather, let points guide you: Instead of making one-inch cubes, follow the food’s regular, natural and steady curves.

When it comes to making food from platter to plate, big spoons with wide, shallow bowls are your best player. They’re not only faultless for smooching over sauces or gravy, but they’re also important for fluffy dollops of slashed or sour cream.

Differently, let foods come naturally and try not to noise with them too much. Remember, food plating and presentation is an art project that’s ultimately meant for eating.

Simple Food Presentation Tips: Modern Food Plating Techniques and Styles

Before starting the plating work, fix the focal point by understanding how it will look or sketch a diagram. The focal point needs to be the spotlight of the plate and where people look first. Shining or flashing colors, height, and food arrangement support to highlight items.

Normally, our eyes scrutinize a food plate like a picture, from the bottom left to the top right. Photographers utilize this idea for their photoshoot. This idea is commonly known as the rule-of-thirds, that splits a picture into three portions both horizontally and vertically and leverage the crossing lines as focal points.

The array of the subject or content should be someplace at any of these focal points and commonly off-center. This guide can also be leveraged when the allocation of the quantity of food on the dinner plate.

That is the common rule, which means not more than two-thirds of the plate should be occupied with food, therefore, the other one-third of the plate should be blank space.

Eliminate the rim when you create a buffer zone of half-inch of space from the rim to the flat of the plate. Work with proportion, geometry, and ordering of the foods.

Leverage color exposure to bring optical impact and attentiveness to the plate.

Even numbers are a bit boring. Odd numbers are more charming to the eyes; therefore 3 pieces carrot is better than four.

Keep it in mind that to place the elements of the plate in symmetry to each other to balance the display.

Set the focal points, rows, and efflux, as you share space to each element. You should not make the plate busy; blank space will boost the focal point. Present the foods simply on the plate without too much noise or engagement.

Important concept: “Functionality” and “Practicality” for food plating and presentation

Food plating begins with the important concept; fundamentals of “functionality” and “practicality”. Keep it in mind that the dish needs to be effortlessly congregated on an engaging night. The imaginativeness of a plate presentation is only viable to the extent of the standard of the food and the expertness of the cook.

• The food must be made and used toppings properly with a light, natural and appetizing appearance.
• Veggies should be cut in a way that it looks clean, light and consistent and keep their natural colors up.
• The sauces need to maintain proper consistency, and meats must be dark and cooked perfectly.

The fundamentals for plating begin with presenting foods on plates that come up with the right temperature. That means hot dishes on pre-heated plates and the cold dishes on chilled plates.

Easy techniques like fluffing greens salad or overlapping pieces of meat are easy ways to produce height. Utilize sauces to sum up color vibes to the dish.

Adornment should be relevant to the plate. It will help you to throw over the use of whole twigs of rosemary.

Spices and natural herbs on the border of the plate should be voided, still, the tactful use of finely sliced herbs that are relevant to the food are good for bringing color to the plate.

Make a focal point, and frame the plate based on that focal point. Produce variety in patterns, grains, colors, and taste. Use shapes when appropriate but try to eliminate too many abstract and fine shapes that can make the plate look like it was disarrayed with a cookie cutter.

Odd numbers fetch singularity and concordance to the plate and attract the surrounding elements. Height creates stage play like a statue, creating the plate a three-dimensional feel.

Before the plate is served to the guest, it has to be analyzed and cleaned as needed for extra food and blobs. Use gently acidulated water with lemon or vinegar and a light, lint-free fabric to wipe the plate.

The kitchen also takes the obligation of “how the plate is served to the guest”. In kitchens’ words, this is known as the 6 o’clock plate situation or the border of the plate placed closest to the guest.

Traditional Food Plating and Presentation Techniques

Though the food plating and presentation techniques have modified a lot, and we are calling it “modern food plating techniques”, the basic or the fundamentals remain the same. We have modified some traditional food plating and presentation techniques rather than fully changing those in order to make modern food plating techniques.

Conventional plating showcases the food unfussy by utilizing a clock face as a templet. The important focal point needs to be served from 4 to 8 o’clock.

The starch should be placed from 9 to 10 o’clock and the veggies should be placed from 2 to 3 o’clock.

As we are displaying according to clocks, this is also known as clock method plating.

The sauce needs to be placed either beneath or above the main item. This ordinary display of dishes can be workable if the components are well proportionate.

Leverage the rule-of-thirds theory, overlapping the ingredients, and the plate as a background to structure it. Increase altitude by knowing the meat or fish on the rice or bread.

Present The Foods with Perpendicular and Parallel Lines

Robust, fine lines that are perpendicular, parallel, or beaked, offer clean and consistent dimension to the dining plate. Lines can be created by the placement of bread or rice, meat or fish, veggies, sauces, salad.

Patterns come out by the repetition of these lines, and variety is presented through the crossing or overlapping these lines.

The sameness of the recurring lines is disrupted by the incorporation of other food patterns and cautiously placed garnishes.

Curves, Swirls, and Swooshes Technique for Food Plating and Presentation

Curves, swooshes, and swirls attenuate strong angular lines of the plate providing them liquidity and gesture in the visual aspect.

Sauces and strains are usually leveraged to produce curves. They may be placed side by side with other plating designs along with horizontal lines.

They may also be superimposed to sum up elevation and dimension to the plate. Few styles of curves use an eccentric method that makes tensity and making the diner’s attention to them.

Let’s cite another example, a curve is the golden ratio, a spiral pattern that is obtained in nature, including snail shells, lemons, and sunflowers, and leveraged in art and architecture.

Stacked Plating Technique for Food Presentation

Stacked plating is known as one of the most modern food plating techniques. This plating technique fetches altitude and drama to the presentation of the dish by layering the elements in a perpendicular fashion. Elements of the dish can be superimposed either free-form or with mold, but to try to eschew the cookie-cutter effect, change the components to make separate shapes and colors.

The focal point of the stack needs to be eccentric, usually to the left-hand side, with incorporated adornment and sauces to produce diversity and intensity in the presentation.

Crunchy textures can be included in the lower part, in the form of pastry or veggies, or as an adornment, as like vegetable chips or crisps. Simple textures, strains of root veggies, bringing a base, and double as a backbone to reinforce the most important item.

Divorce circular or square geometrical shapes with veggies, rice, pasta, bread or other items. Sauces help to pull the dish together.

Try not to use the bull’s-eye effect (The bulls-eye effect explains concentric domains of the same value around known data points. Source: gis.stackexchange.com) when piling by including garnished ingredients cut into different shapes or leverage a saucing technique that splits the circular shape.

Triad Plating Technique for Food Presentation

Triad plating is also a renowned modern food plating technique for food presentation. Triad is suitable for small plates and tasters.

Triads are another method for plating where odd numbers and negative space are used. A plate of the triad can include an occasional item made on three different styles.

It can also include items with hot and cold temperatures. It is also a chance for a chef to present several creative coupling and preparations.

Triad plating can be made in a linear sequential fashion, a triangular pattern, or even a free form style.

Deconstructed Plating Technique for Food Presentation

The notion of deconstruction re-imagines the components of food in a new light. At the time of presenting a deconstructed dish, it must hold the flavors and textures of the original food, while producing a connection to the modern version.

Deconstruction is not only the serving separate components of food on a single plate; rather an integrated method is woven throughout the plate.

Sweets are good alternatives for the deconstructed method; for example, a blueberry shortcake can be broken down and revivified as a blueberry sorbet, dehydrated shortcake crumbles, crème Fraiche sauce, and fresh blueberry.

Freestyle Plating Techniques for Food Presentation

The formal arbitrariness of freestyle plating gives a random yet natural look, however, it still needs idea and preparation utilizing alike optical formulas of composition.

Freestyle plating, sometimes known as natural, gives acceptance to the theory of “what produces together goes together”.

This method utilizes a compact design that is more flexible. Freestyle plating, like the deconstructed technique, can be leveraged to make a more fluid method for food layout and design. 

Wood, slate or stone plates are used in this food plating technique to bring a natural element to the presentation.

Guidelines for Food Plating in a Nutshell

We know without proper guideline it is difficult to implement anything. So we are going to discuss several key factors that are highly important for food plating.

1. Choose the Perfect Plate

Choosing the right plate is one of the key factors to do better in food plating and presentation. You cannot present your food nicely on an ugly dinnerplate after using so many food plating techniques.

Depending on the decoration of your place and table, use the best dinnerware sets. You can also try to use the white dinner plate as the food looks good on it. Or the black dinnerware sets, because some foods match black backgrounds.

2. Perfectly place your ingredients

Your items are your soldiers. You need to leverage them in order to make a superb dinner food plating. Try to use any of the modern food plating techniques, including deconstruction food plating technique, triad food plating technique, stacked food plating technique and so on.

If those don’t work for you, use classic clock plating method. It won’t fail you.

3. Focus on the cleanliness of the plate

Edge cleaned and perfectly washed plates can enhance up to forty percent of the attractiveness of the food. We should always try to clean up the edge of the plate before serving it.

Also use good placemats for better decoration.

4. Play with the liquid/sauce to enhance the art beauty

You can draw so many arts on the plate with the sauces that can enhance the beauty of the food.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final words

Art and science are all about experiment and practice. As food plating and presentation is the combination of arts and science, you need to do more experiments and practice to be a good food plating specialist of food presenter.