Plan Ahead and Prep Early

If you are planning a few pieces for a buffet or a single piece to garnish a meal it helps to do a lot of the work the day before. Shop at least two days before your event so that you can concentrate on the decorating work. All the flowers can be carved and left over night in ice water. In fact, most will improve overnight by opening up to look more like real flowers. This is especially true of scallions, leek flowers, onion flowers and radish roses. I have on many an occasion carved the flowers even two days before with no loss in quality as long as the flowers are kept in water in a refrigerator.

Big turnips flowers can be left in water with food color to create the orange, red, blue and yellow flowers seen in the photos on this blog. Before use they should be drained then lightly rinsed and drained well again to remove excess color. You will probably want to handle these with plastic gloves on to avoid dying your fingers all colors.

Leaves made of leaks and scallions are also best cut the day before as they will develop a more natural curl overnight as well.
Bowls and vases made from hard pumpkins or calabash can be carved the day before and wrapped in plastic wrap until needed. Small vases made with acorn squash will keep particularly well overnight. All hard vegetables used in this way can be rubbed with a light coat of cooking oil before use to give a nice shine and a fresh look.
Softer items like watermelon should be carved the day needed as they don't hold up as well and give up a lot of juice.

The flowers can be arranged an hour or two before use and should if possible be kept in a refrigerator until use as well. Once removed from the fridge it helps to occasionally spray them lightly with water to keep them fresh. Not that they look really bad if allowed to dry, sometimes they look quite interesting even the next day after use!

Carving Designs Onto the Face of A Large Squash

The large size carving sets that are available come with various cookie cutter type templates for carving designs onto the face of a pumpkin or calabash type squash. These metal shapes can be gently tapped into the face of the melon or squash used to a depth of about 1/4". This can be accomplished using the back of a large chef's knife or a light mallet of some sort. After the template is sunk into the vegetable one can begin to remove the "meat" of the vegetable around it. The picture above shows the result of using a double happiness template. Digging between the tighter parts of the design requires a little care and the use of the smaller knives and chisels included in the carving set but if the template is kept in place until the cutting is almost complete no real damage to the design is likely to happen.

This image shows yet another Asian design made using a template cutter from the larger carving set. These sets also contain a wonderful selection of "chisels" in many shapes and sizes allowing a limitless amount of creative freedom and experimentation. 

To accomplish a similar result without purchasing such a carving set a free hand design can be cut into the face of the vegetable and this can be carved simply with the paring knife and/or bird's beak knife recommended on the tools page. The image below depicts my first ever freehand design. You can see that one does not have to be an accomplished artist  to achieve decent results when doing this work. People see only the big picture when presented by a buffet and are not judging the details. This has been observed many times by myself when folks have been around the food table for quite some time and suddenly realize that the flowers in the centerpiece are not flowers at all but carved vegetables and even then they find it hard to believe that most of them are simply turnips!

In this image the "petals" of the flowers were made using a small melon ball cutter twisted around but not allowed to go too deep. Everything else was carved using the paring knife freehand. Other tools used in this image were a channel knife and one fluted chisel for the edging around the design.

More Pictures to Whet Your Appetite II

Tools You May Want

The tools used to carve vegetables are fairly simple and inexpensive. Although you can spend about $130 on a full set of Asian carving tools like I did you can get by on just a couple of garnishing tools and a good paring knife.

The paring knife is important and you will need a good one with a strong but thin sharp blade that retains it's edge well. For my tastes this means a German, Swiss or good Japanese brand. A knife with a 3 to 4 inch blade would work well. Another useful knife is the bird's beak knife which looks like this.

Other useful tools include scoops for hollowing squash, pumpkins and calabash to make bowls and vases etc. Melon ballers are very useful for different things and garnishing tools like channel knives and V shaped vegetable decorating tools are very handy. There is a handy list of items available at Amazon.com to the right of this column, there are various tools available there as well as in many other places both on the web and in physical stores. This is by no means a complete list, there is tons of other things available in all of these places. You may well have some useful tools already around your kitchen that you can use to get started.

 

This last item is a set of useful tools also available, look for garnishing tool sets to find this.

More Pictures to Whet Your Appetite

People Eat With Their Eyes First

I have said this a million times if I have said it once. If food is presented well, if it looks exciting, attractive and colorful folks will naturally find it appealing and appetizing. They will quickly perceive the food offered as fresh and tasty, dive in and enjoy every mouthful. I have worked in numerous levels of the professional food arena, especially areas where often times budgets are very tight. Frequently we could not afford to purchase crystal bowls, silver platters or other expensive containers for salads and other items so I carved bowls out of pumpkins and calabash squash. Tables were decorated by vases of flowers carved from turnips, radishes, scallions and other vegetables that we had in stock in the kitchen. I had no experience at this. It was not taught at school when I attended culinary school in England and most chefs just don't have the time to teach younger people how to do this sort of thing even if they do know themselves. So I winged it. So can you! This is the point of this blog. To inspire you to try it out for yourself. I cannot aspire to teach you how to do this. Techniques are perfected by trial, error and practice. I can and will give you some tips here and there and I can show you the tools I used and guide you towards some books on the subject but it would be up to you to give it a go and practice until the skills become natural, which should happen quickly enough. I am no great expert at this and there are many people, especially some Asian people, who have skills that are totally fantastic. There are many books that will show you the work of these folks and inspire you. I only hope to get you interested so that maybe you'll go out and look for these books and more information. There are many great books on this subject at Amazon and a few can be found in my recommendation widget to the left of these posts and many many more can be found by searching the web in general. All of the photos on this blog depict work that I did for various events over a number of years, of it was very well received at the time and proved to be time well spent. My next post will contain more pictures to get your "appetite" going........