Plating Presentation (Sauces)

welcome to Escoffier online this is chef Thomas today at 9:30 with plate presentation I talked a little bit about the plating layout food selections and so forth so the very basics of plate presentation we get a lot of students they ask us all the time so chef Thomas how can I do this better or is this appropriate so we're going to talk about all those little nuances you need to think about for plate presentation a little bit later also going to show you a little demo about the sourcing of plates very basic things again but just something very simple you can actually make notes about and also then up really applied to all your plates even for our assignments I also want to remind you that we have a couple more days left for our raffle so you better get your assignments in and I hope you're going to win this fantastic professional KitchenAid mixer so let's get going first things if you want to write these things down that would be great I give you the basics now for plate presentation every chef starts with a lot of research for the plates and I have behind me a bunch of books this goes from working the plate to the Escoffier cookbook to simple spectacular and garnished books there's many many books they take a lot of time to explain proper plate presentation so what are the basics which you can pull out of almost every single book besides beautiful pictures as well so here are the basics first of all you have to think about which kind of food you're actually selecting so what's actually on your plate with this food selection meaning maybe it's a recipe maybe it's something a caterer you want to do as a caterer maybe it's something you have on a menu for your customers so you have to first look at your food selection with the food selection you're going to look at cooking methods do you have our cooking methods represented in these food selections do you have grilling what does grill marks do grill marks make a nice brown color nice even lines how about steaming steaming keeps the product very fresh increase bright colors how about sauteing sauteing brings a nice caramelization on most of the proteins it also caramelizes fruits and vegetables so boiling keeps the product very bland same color as it is so there's a different cooking methods with the food products which can actually influence how this product is going to look like on your plate so this is the first step what is your dish what is the product and what are the cooking methods so what you want to avoid is a plate where you have grilled asparagus with a grilled salmon steak with grilled potatoes you will have a vegetable a starch and protein but it would be all the same techniques meaning very similar color palates there okay next thing after I think about the food selection and the cooking methods I'm also looking at color shape texture so the color shape and the texture of those food items think about asparagus long and green very crisp think about a potato maybe it's a boiled potato it's very soft it's brown with the red potato maybe has some red in there so we can also cut protein in different shapes we can do chicken strips we can do pork chops we can do pork loins and cut them in little salpicones little steaks so there's different shapes we can think of think about pasta and rice and mashed potatoes are mashed anything items you can actually shape to make different forms on your plains plates you can put them in a coffee cup or you can put them in a team bow you can put them in a water glass and form them in a little oval ring maybe in a teardrop shaped ring so there are so many different things you can think about shape and texture the texture is something which we can apply also with cooking methods remember when I talked about the grilling and the sauteing but other than that which other ways can we add texture well with the dish itself right so with the product we have maybe a salsa which is very chunky we have maybe a smooth sauce we have something crisp on top as garnish there's so many different ways we can add texture to the plate very important for the layout of the whole plate is that we achieve balance balance is something very important on a plate we have a big plate we don't want to have the food sitting all over the place we want to have it centralized in the middle of the plate meaning a balanced center it was always be good to also create height in a plate and that means I want to layer things maybe the potatoes and the vegetables grouped together and then the protein leaning on them so we want to create balance and centering on the plate but we also want to produce height that does not mean I just first off to get on a big pile that works for some dishes but not for all but we want a layer and layering is a very very important factor in our business and now under all these things the food selection the layout balancing the plate the color cooking methods the shape and the texture one thing strikes me is most important is of course the seasoning you can make the most wonderful plate there if it doesn't taste well if it doesn't smell good you won't sell it and so do never ever forget that seasoning is a big part of plate presentation as well doesn't mean I have to see the salt and I have to see the pepper but you definitely have a big contribution to the overall look of the plate if it's seasoned well okay let's talk a little bit more about layout in the balance and how the flow of lines goes so I'm going to take a plate here and actually show you this what I mean I made some raspberry sauce so a strong line would actually be something like which has some curve why this works is because our eye actually follows this curve these are actually considered strong lines weak lines actually lines they go straight so that would be something like this that's actually a weak line here right next to it a straight line is a weak line it's kind of odd to think about but if you really think how your eye goes oh I actually follows the red line with dots more than the straight line so this is what the difference is between us sauce uses force strong and weak lines so I would have brought a couple pictures in also for the sourcing technique and the first one is actually the mirror technique for a steak and what a mirror does is a mirror is actually sauce all around the bottom of the mirror of the plate so we put maybe two ounces of sauce on there and then we kind of move the plate around and have that sauce go over the bottom of the plate we then put the product on top in this case it's a steak the garnish on top and this makes a very nice presentation this almost looks like it's gelatinized sauce but I can assure you this is actually a nice probably Demi glass so the next picture we're talking about drizzling this would be a little rack of lamb with some with a starch right next to it and the plate looks kind of messy but this is also a style a lot of shifts love is just drizzling the plate this might be a balsamic reduction and to show kind of to focus the eye back to the starch into the rack of lamb another way to drizzle is also for baking and pastry students there is a picture with the chocolate and raspberry I think it was a cheesecake oh this will yeah this one that is actually just a drizzle on the plate again looks very messy but if you think about putting a plain piece of cheesecake right on top of it this is actually going to show tremendous be up from that plate now a lot of restaurants have white plates so a little bit of color on the bottom of the plate there's always wander to the food now the next picture we have here is actually how to sauce there's a picture of steak where the chef holds actually partner this is very common thing chefs do they have the sauce pad right next to it they use a spoon other techniques would be to put it actually in a little creamer container or even as seen chefs use especially at competitions and on hot lines thermals like coffee thermos where they pour the sauce right onto the plate this is a very common thing to do where you just basically make a line around the food after it's plated so this would be sourcing after it's plated the last picture here now is a swirl on a salad so we have covered pretty much every single every single menu item here swimming from a little bit from steaks two lamb two deserts and now to the salad but the salad has a really nice color already and we see here that that very simple drizzle on the bottom again again it was first dressed and then it was plated so don't forget that you have to kind of think of what comes first the sauce or your product because otherwise it's not going to look as pretty okay so I want to show you now how this is actually done a little bit more in detail we're going to talk about tools here and the most simple tools are squeeze bottles and these squeeze bottles you can buy them in retinol at the grocery store you can actually use them for ketchup and mustard the most commonly known the nice thing about these squeeze bottles are actually the tips can be cut in different sizes so I can keep them rather thin for a very smooth strain sauces maybe even ganache to pipe over cookies or onto a plate and then I can also cut it much bigger for maybe plating a plate with with a puddle or with a with a mirror full of sauce so these are really awesome because I can also take them apart and clean them very well for those of you who work in the industry make sure that these always get cleaned every single day there should be plastic on top and covered so that there's no nothing going in there this is actually a little bit more fancy this actually has a holder for the cap so that when you pipe it doesn't fall in to your piping so very good other tools you can actually also get a little pipette this is for something very delicate there's a really small pin pets you can actually get those at hobby stores here in Illinois it's like Hobby Lobby and joins they have those plenty what they do is they hold maybe an ounce of liquid and they're very very small for very petite plating so after the tools now we're going to go to show you a little bit how this actually also works in real life I have a plate here and we're going to do something like the drizzle with saw before right we have a mango sauce here so I'm going to cap it I'm going to shake it up good and this one is a little bit thicker so I'm going to make lines are going to be very strong and I have a little bit of raspberry sauce this one is rather thin so I can generate with a thinner and a thicker sauce effects like where I can let it run towards it and the thickest sauce actually makes a nice barrier shaking always works it actually smooths out the sauce so that would be a very strong line we have a very strong yellow line there's not a lot of fufu around it so another way to do this the drizzle was very very impressive right but drizzle actually really just works like this that's pretty much it so this sauce is very thin so therefore we have a lot more Romans but now just imagine that Ernie's played around just put some chocolate over it that is really a drizzle now again this works really well when I do it first and then plate the product on top if the product is around and I do a drizzle then the sauce is going to go over the place all right we also can do plate drawings especially if a thicker sauce like the mango sauce this works really well let's say we have a dessert coming up and now we have a teardrop shape now if we want to go again crazy with color I can actually feel a deal we'll be careful to not too much so we actually can border all kinds of different colors and make this stand out then so this sauce would stand out with the desert red right here so this works very well as well okay then the last thing I'm going to show you especially on big plates or round plates like this is when you produce little dots you've probably seen this is very very easy so all I have to do is put a little pressure on there stay right where I put the dot in first don't move around and gradually make the dot go smaller and smaller very very simple very beautiful again it could be a salad right here could be a little amuse-bouche a greeting from the kitchen so very different techniques for sauces now how does this impact actually our plates have and I have here two more pictures for you of the same product this is actually a cheesecake and we have one cheesecake which has dots and one which has drizzles so the dots here are made with a spoon this seems to be caramel sauce very clean-cut very beautiful I always prefer a squeeze bottle it's a little bit easier to handle and in the second picture for the same cheesecake is a drizzle and the drizzle cheesecake do we still have that okay so here's the cheesecake which is drizzled so we have the cheesecake with the could be a blueberry sauce reduced could also be a little bit of balsamic vinegar that works that are actually really well for cheesecakes and this is not a big difference this was drizzled over the product so for sums so for some people that looks messy for others that is really the art of beautiful plating so with that said the tools are very simple very cheap the squeeze bottles you can get almost everywhere in the stores I can also order the small P pets for very intricate plating which is usually not so unnecessary unless you go maybe for culinary competition sauce making itself very very simple we have ganache recipes in a baking pastry program we have the demi-glace on in our culinary program so there's already some sauces some principles in our programs just follow those the sauces don't have to be piping hot when you pay them when you play them obviously there's other techniques how I can keep that hot now play around with the lift the plating presentation itself think about those couple items I have told you at the beginning food selection very important the layout the balance then you have the color shape texture the cooking methods you're going to be applying to and last but not least the seasoning if you have any questions please feel free to always call us or email us play around with those small bits of information the sourcing is definitely one thing I would like to see more on student plates and if you have any questions please email us and call us as always

Channel: Escoffier Home Gourmet

Views: 516,767

Rating: 4.6749916 out of 5

Keywords: Plating, plating techniques, plate presentation, how to plate food, plating with sauces, plating tips, plating presentation, food plating techniques, sauces, Food Presentation, Sauces (Type Of Dish)

Id: OtT4tr7WSD0

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Thu May 01 2014