Culinary carving is the art of decorating dishes with a knife and hands, artistic cutting of products. Everyday recipes look much more attractive with it.
You can master the carving skill on your own without taking courses from professional chefs. There are special knives for working with fruits, but at first you can get by with one well-sharpened knife made of high-quality steel, with a sharp tip. To make vegetable structures more stable, they are cut into very thin rings and plates.
Paper towels are a good help in the work, as the quickly released juice contributes to the slipping of the cut elements and the loss of shape. The thin cuts are first placed on a paper towel and waited for all excess moisture to be absorbed. The most important skill that you need to master for carving in the first place is cutting vegetables very thinly, no more than 2 mm or even thinner. At the same time, the pulp is the most plastic, it breaks and bursts less.
It is worth paying attention not only to fresh, but also to pickled, pickled and pickled cucumbers, which, in comparison with fresh ones, are even more plastic and obedient.
A beautiful rose-shaped flower can be formed from cucumber plates. The rose comes out voluminous from the elongated twisted leaves and looks attractive in combination with any products. For the preparatory stage, the vegetable is cut into thin slices along the fibers and laid out on a paper towel so that the juice is absorbed. After a few minutes, the plates on the towel must be turned over, the towel, if necessary, changed.
It is necessary to lay out toothpicks next to the field of work, preparing them, freeing them from individual packaging, if required. The first plate of cucumber is rolled up into a tube. When the first sheet is folded, the second is tucked inside it, between the tip and the wall. The junction is clamped with the finger of the left hand, at the same time, the cucumber strip is twisted again with the right hand, creating the volume of the petal, and folded around the formed core. Do the same with a couple of strips, holding the core with your free hand.
The resulting structure must be fixed, and this is what toothpicks are needed for. The rose is pierced through crosswise, put on a dish, it acquires stability due to toothpicks and lower petals. You can decorate vegetable, fish or meat cuts with such cucumber flowers; on the surface of salads, such elements also look harmonious.
The same technique can be used with other vegetables and fruits, such as tomatoes or carrots, beets, radishes, and radishes.
It is even easier to collect a flower from cucumber slices, and the only difference is in the method of cutting. The larger the cucumber is chosen for this assembly option, the more voluminous the flower will turn out. The cucumber is cut across the fibers, the circles are laid out on a paper towel, turning over until all excess juice is absorbed. To form a flower, a strip is collected from overlapping circles.
The resulting strip is folded into a tube, and the circles will fold themselves, forming the shape of a flower. The structure is fixed with two toothpicks crosswise, and stability on flat surfaces is achieved by cutting off the lower part of the circles. At the rounded ends, the rose will fall to one side. In this way, large and small elements can be made and their height can be adjusted by cutting more or less their edges.
