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.