Cooking Heals

Boy, another difficult encounter.

Food presentation for Chinese dishes typically involves intricate garnishing and complicated arrangement. The visuals of the dish is just as important as the taste, the food should always taste as good as they look, and vice versa.

I have a potential food styling project for Chinese dishes coming up next week, for Leo Burnett Malaysia, for a cooking oil brand. Realizing that it’s high time for me to come up with more ideas for food garnishing, I started searching and viewing for fruits and vegetable carving videos on youtube. My jaw dropped when I saw how the carving was done so effortlessly with such stunning craftsmanship and amazing results. I knew it was not going to be easy for me, as I’ve never really carved a fruit or vegetable, only done simple garnishing.

I suddenly remembered yesterday that on my trip to Koh Samui during Christmas holidays in 2008, I bought a set of fruits and vegetable carving set at a roadside stall, but never used it until now.

So I went out yesterday evening and bought a small packet of radishes hoping to use my set of tools from Koh Samui to carve them into flowers. Failed, terribly. Blame it on the radishes, as they were too small and were very hard to control. Next, I tried carving a rose out of a turnip, using just a paring knife. The results? Bearable, but hardly presentable. So this morning, I went out to get some biggest carrots I could find in the market, and bought a new Zwilling tourne knife (commonly known as peeling knife, a tourne knife has a pointed tip that curves downward sometimes upward and side to side, something like this). However, I ended up only using my existing paring knife and the results turned out much better, but there’s still a big room for improvement.

I think the biggest difficultly lies in how to hold and use the carving knife properly and skillfully. Also, I kept worrying that I would cut my fingers as the knife was pretty sharp. Carving fruits and vegetables is a very intricate and difficult skill to master, but once you master it, it’s a whole new world out there! I am thinking maybe I should always keep a container with some carrots and my paring knife so that I can practise whenever I have time to kill! Just hoping that nobody would think I’m a psycho!

Note on photography and lighting: As I finished carving the carrot roses pretty late in the evening, there was barely any sunlight and I was lazy to set up my proper studio lights, so I only used a Lowel Ego table light, the main purpose was just to document the results hehe…