Pretty food tastes better, and there’s a lot of things an amateur can do to upgrade the presentation of a home-cooked meal.

Bling on a Budget

The first fine dining experience I had at the double Michelin starred Sühring in Bangkok was nothing short of breathtaking. The fact that it’s the post with the highest word count on this blog is no coincidence. I’ve always said that pretty food tastes better, but they took it to a whole new level.

The professionals have access to tools, techniques and ingredients that are impractical or plain impossible for the home cook to emulate. Even so, nothing stops you from translating the spirit of fine dining and bringing that into the domestic kitchen. Kind of like a pair of fancy pants in a thrift store.

Tricks like these are cool to have for a budget friendly date night. A little wine, some nicely plated food, a great movie and some snacks, and we’re well on our way to a wonderful evening without having to pay for someone else’s overhead.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s post. My SO is out of town, so I have the kitchen to myself. Usually, I don’t bother cooking for myself and just get takeout. Incriminating, I know, coming from a food blogger. But I cook to live, not the other way round.

But today, I had some guacamole left over from making chicken fajitas, and some shrimp left over from hot pot (and if you haven’t heard, fresh shrimp does amazing things to hot pot).

I thought to myself, the green and the red would compliment each other well visually. Why not try make a meal out of whatever is already in the fridge, and make it look as good as I can?

By the way, I’m going through a phase where I weigh everything I eat because I’m currently on a cut. Knowing why I do it doesn’t stop me from feeling like I’m cosplaying as a drug dealer, though. Once I relearn how to guesstimate portion sizes by sight, I’ll go back to eating like a normie.

What a pleasant surprise, 100g of cooked shrimp is a nice portion size for my dinner for one. Let’s see how fancy this can go!

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 1

Experiments

Test 1 – Breaking Up Large Surfaces

First hit is free, consume in one bite. Here’s a side by side comparison of a shrimp-guac-cracker construction, with and without a crank of black pepper. Guacamole oxidation aside, there’s a difference in how the two versions look but I wouldn’t say one is objectively superior to the other.

The pepper breaks up the surface of the food and gives a visual cue of the taste, but if you want a clean presentation as well as the taste of pepper you could hide the pepper under the shrimp.

Test 2 – Creating Height

The paste-like consistency of the guacamole presents us with an interesting opportunity to stand the shrimp up on its base for some visual contrast.

The extra height is much more striking, in my opinion. The flat cracker on the right (no offence intended) looks like a comfy home-made snack, while the stood up shrimp seems more elevated (pardon the pun) and refined. Which is what I’m trying to do today. Height wins out.

Test 3 – Creating Angles

I noticed the soda cracker is square in shape, which presents yet more possible variations on the way I stand the shrimp up on it. I could have the shrimp parallel to the edges, or aligned to the diagonal going from corner to corner.

I don’t know about you, but diagonal shrimp looks more exciting and dynamic than the parallel shrimp. The angle almost makes it look like the sail on a ship, standing tall and proud, cutting through the wind.

Me and my over-active imagination, right? But tonight is for going all out. I’ll go back to brutal Laconic pragmatism afterwards.

Test 4 – Background Colour

The cutting board is black, which presents an opportunity to contrast a dark background colour against a light one. I have some plain white plates to make a direct comparison.

The case can be made for both, I think. The cracker gets lost in the whiteness but stands out against the cutting board. But the bright red of the shrimp really pops on the plate.

Since the shrimp is the most prominent part of the food, I’ll go with the white plate.

Test 5 – Centred vs Off-centre

The plate is about the right size for a single shrimp guac cracker. Does the cracker look better in the middle, or placed off to one side?

By itself, I’ll say the one that is centred. The balance might change if there were garnishes involved, though. Off-centre would look really nice with a smear of sauce, or some micro greens on one side.

If I garnish the plate with the cracker in the centre , I’d do something symmetrical and concentric to keep the balance.

Test 6 – Odd vs Even numbers

I don’t have anything to garnish the plate with, so let’s try fill out the negative space a bit. does the plate look better with three shrimp crackers or two?

Unless I had something cool to fit into the corner of the two cracker plate, I’d say three looks better than two. A lot of plating tutorials say that odd numbers are more aesthetically pleasing (although it’s disputed), and I consider myself convinced.

Test 7 – Spacing Things Out

I got hungry and started eating the pretty food, whereupon I discovered with great disappointment that the height of the stood up shrimp makes it impossible to fit in a reasonably sized mouth. But I’m too far down the rabbit hole now.

I tried things out on the rectangular plate to see how the dynamics change. The patterned background solves the earlier problem in test 4 where dark colours dull the shrimp and light colours hide the cracker base – the edge of the cracker breaks up the blue lines and gives a clear indication that something is there.

Even though there’s more surface area to work with compared to the round plate, it doesn’t change how many pieces fit. Lining four pieces up makes things look crowded, so much so that we’re back down to three.

Test 8 – Order vs Chaos

How much entropy should there be on the plate? Here are three progressive more chaotic platings from meat straight line, to intercalated line, to intercalating with a counter-conformist clown.

Middle looks better than left (although the neat line does have an aesthetic of its own), but right is way too much. There’s a sweet spot to how much to break patterns up.

Takeaways

I took a good two hours playing with my food and taking pictures, and as a result my dinner was taken gradually over a very long period of time. I’m surprisingly full, considering the portion size here. I guess satiety signals do take a while to hit home.

This is a case of taking a good thing too far – in the quest for making the prettiest food, the tall shrimp cracker became a minor pain in the ass to eat because I prioritised form over function. But there are still things I learned from this experience.

These are the things I will pay attention to, the next time I plate my food: contrasting the colours of the food against the plate, creating height and angles, considering negative space, using odd numbers, and controlled chaos.

That’s only for a special occasion, though. Although I do like to fancy things up a bit every now and then, my elegant itch has been more than thoroughly scratched. I’m happily going back to my pragmatic nuts-and-bolts meal prep for a good long while.

Keep browsing by categories, or by tags: