It has been said that we eat with our eyes before we eat with our mouths. I would agree with this fact. Think about sitting in a restaurant... say a quaint corner cafe with candles on the table, wooden tables, and chandeliers dangling from the ceiling. The waitress walks by with a plate of crispy brown pizza with white cheese bubbling on top of a deep red tomato sauce and a hint of green basil flaked over the entire pie. Snap goes your menu, it's done, the decision is made, you want whatever that person is having... It's true, somehow our eyes interact with our mouth and stomach, collaborating and conversing to bring us the most perfect sustenance at the perfect moment.
In food as art, stewarding department gave us 2 boxes full of produce, fruit, tofu, and lots of other food items. The goal of the class was not create something that TASTED delicious, but to create something that LOOKED delicious. We created an appetizer, entree, and dessert, plated it how we thought it should look, and then presented each course to the class and our chef. After discussion, Chef Alex would recreate the dish, using what we put on the plate, each time transforming the food into something that looked AMAZING to eat - even though I knew what it really was. I learned that the key elements of visual appeal are height, color, simplicity, and not adding unnecessary components or confusing garnishes. As we grow as chefs, we will develop style and preference, I think that my philosophy on the visual appearance of food is to let the food speak for itself.
After food is art, we had a sequence of salad classes - tossed salads and composed salads. I love salad, I was extremely excited about this class. Chef Jay Weinstein taught our class, which was especially fun because of his style of teaching. In his classes, we are assigned our dishes, given a certain amount of time to prepare, and then at the end have a discussion and then a family style dinner. For tossed salads, I made a warm radicchio and dandelion salad with garlic, tamari dressing. After sauteing the garlic in olive oil, I momentarily wilted the greens and then quickly removed them from the heat, deglazed with tamari liquid, and then poured the warm dressing over the greens. This was an extremely simple but effective salad - bursting with color and flavor from the blend of greens and purples of the lettuces, the bitterness of the radicchio, the pungency of the garlic, and the sweet and saltiness of the tamari.
We also made a vegan caesar salad that was delicious...
There were lots of other delicious salads... and this was only salad 1.
To be continued...
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