Chef Jamie Simpson of the Culinary Vegetable Institute agrees with that philosophy and compares the empty plate to a blank page. “Is an empty plate a blank canvas or a blank page?” he asks. “Are chefs painters or storytellers? Do their culinary compositions flow from a palette or a pen?”
In either case, the ingredients of the dish—how they’re chosen, prepared, and presented—provide the artistic components needed for a delightfully satisfying and visually appealing—even stunning—dish.
Key Elements of a Dish
The flavor is most important to the chefs we talk to (and we’re happy to report that our regeneratively farmed vegetables, microgreens, fresh herbs, and more are chock full of flavor and nutrition alike).
Other important elements, ones that help you paint your own unique canvas, are the sizes, shapes, and colors of your ingredients. As Executive Chef Zane Holmquist from Stein Eriksen Lodge shared in a post about our sorrel, “The varieties in size are fantastic, and the varieties in color are fun.” In other words, the sorrel palette is diversely beautiful.
Chef Jamie points out the importance of balance when creating and plating a dish. This includes the culinary techniques used and the following: “Balance can also be in colors or flavors—flavors of high acidic notes, and deep, dark, charred, alkaline notes. It can be a balance of color—greens, blues, purples, pinks, yellows—whatever. And if there’s a certain amount of pastel to color, then that level of pastel can be applied to other elements in the dish, which is really fun. Usually achievable by just adding milk or cream.”
Here’s an insight into gorgeous plating from another chef—Bradley Kilgore—who participated on a panel at Roots 2017 titled “The Art of the Meal: Ingenious New Plating Ideas.” On that day, Chef Bradley told Jamie that he thinks of his dishes as edible mosaics, edible pieces of art, and forward-thinking presentations that are sometimes interactive experiences for his guests. Food preparation, he explained, can also be like poetry, where you use ingredients to create your ink to provide the flavor and presentation you want.
Creative Plating Techniques
Just like a piece of art on a canvas, culinary artistry can be minimalistic with plenty of white space or more complex, perhaps based on shapes. It can also tell a story, such as when Jamie created a sea urchin ice cream dish that gave the appearance of a creature crawling along the floor of the ocean.
Why is so much time and attention being given to plating and presentation? Here’s Jamie’s explanation. “If an ingredient is precious, then I believe you should treat it that way. Don’t just consider it a garnish.”
Here’s more:
Choosing Exactly the Right Ingredients
The ingredients needed to create a piece of culinary artistry will vary by the dish, which in turn often varies by season. To help with your winter dishes, we’ve created the Winter Festival Blend. Why “Festival? The Winter Festival Blend is a celebration of time, place, and what is in season as we walk through the garden now. This delicious mixture of seasonal leaves comes in various intriguing shapes, textures, and colors. More specifically, this versatile blend contains equal parts of:
Creation of the Winter Festival Blend
This blend of deliciously edible leaves was imagined by Chef Jamie. He started by reminiscing about the marvelous flavor profiles of late fall and winter—from braised meats to game, preserved fruits, brown butter, spices, and much more. He then created a list of regeneratively farmed ingredients from The Chef’s Garden that would complement those seasonal items.
Naturally, that list was too long. So, he whittled it down and ultimately decided to create a blend of leaves that offered the flavors and visual beauty of the season.
“I would use this leaf sampler,” he said, “in a variety of ways. All of the ingredients, for example, can be lightly steamed, fried crispy, dried, dressed—or just served deliciously raw. In fact, other than desserts, I can’t think of a single seasonal dish that this mix doesn’t lend itself to. I can imagine pulling one of each kind of leaf from the package and gently dressing them. Or, bringing all of them together to contribute to a single dish.”
Restaurants can also use this blend in the kitchen in a different way. Chefs can taste-test each leaf to find the perfect complement for individual dishes on the winter menu.
The mixed beet blush, for example, adds sweet, rich, hearty, earthy flavors to dishes while adding a pleasantly crisp layer of texture. Plus, these slender leaves provide intriguing opportunities to paint your canvas, coming in eye-catching colors, including bright yellow with hot pink veins, magenta, gold, and light pink and yellow.
Farm-fresh spinach is one of our signature crops, and we offer numerous deliciously sweet varieties. Our kale is hearty, flavorful, and crunchy—ideal for winter dishes—and our exotic variety comes in multiple hues: deep purple, emerald green, and a milky lavender. Our hibiscus leaves? They have a striking red hue shaped like a Japanese maple leaf, adding tart touches to creative dishes and visual contrast on the plate.
The Chef and Farmer Concept®
At The Chef’s Garden, we are here to be your personal farmer. We will grow virtually anything for you that your creativity inspires, including delicious and nutritious crops that also provide the paint for your canvas.
We are genuinely proud of the deep and authentic relationships we have developed with the chefs we have worked with. We are relentlessly devoted to delivering to a chef precisely what he or she requires.
Innovation is a guiding principle at the farm. We are continuously developing new product sizes, colors, textures, and flavors for you to taste that we hope will galvanize your imagination, spark a fresh idea, and keep your guests marveling at the dishes you serve in your restaurant. We are also always on the lookout for heirloom vegetables sourced the world over that are unique, extraordinary, and have an enticing story to tell.
We invite you to try our new Winter Festival Blend and choose what other farm-fresh crops will be the foundation of your culinary artistry.