A Fork Is All You Need To Give Dishes An Aesthetic Appeal
Aspiring at-home chefs don't need special training or exceptional artistic talent to plate aesthetically pleasing dishes. Armed with a bit of culinary creativity, your silverware drawer may become one of your most valuable assets when it comes to designing presentations of meals that could be found at Michelin-starred establishments. Wielding a humble kitchen utensil can help you make interesting patterns and intentional-looking textures as you set out to place ingredients onto plates with confidence and ease.
A fork can be used as a kind of culinary stencil, offering an appropriately-themed design to dishes that call for a bit of pizzaz. While peanut butter cookies are commonly seen with fork marks on the surface of each treat (the grid-like pattern helps create a flatter, more even surface for baking), dragging a fork through saucy, creamy, and thicker ingredients can result in purposeful smears across plates that can elevate even simple presentations of food.
Bringing creativity into the kitchen
Forks are often used to create even indentations in the edges of pie crust, seal mincemeat or fruit-filled tarts, and score dough that is ready to be baked, but the prongs of a fork can also be used to draw criss-cross patterns into mashed potatoes, dollops of purée, and thick creams. The width of the kitchen utensil can help measure out even spaces between ingredients, and the tines and the points of the utensil can be used to create texture, interesting patterns, and unique designs on plates.
Use forks to twirl even portions of pasta onto dishes, and consider using the edge of a fork to create whimsical patterns with sauces, drizzle controlled layers of balsamic vinegar on top of dishes, and place even dots of Greek yogurt onto a plate's perimeter. More intricately designed handles of forks can be lightly pressed into cookie and pie dough to create uniform patterns. Once you begin experimenting with using utensils in the presentation of your dishes, you may never look at your silverware drawer in the same way again.