CULINARY ARTSThe Elements and Principles of Culinary Arts

What are culinary arts?

Culinary arts is just the fancy way of saying cooking. Cooking is just heating food so that it is ready to be eaten by humans.

The Elements of Culinary ArtsColor

Taste

Flavours

Texture

Aroma

Style

Plating

ColorColor is not the most important element in culinary arts, but is still vital to have in your dishes. Color is one of the things that makes your dish look good. Some chefs even add food coloring to their dishes to make it look appetizing, even though they know it isn’t healthy. Color also shows how delicious it is. For example if you have bright red raspberries in front of you and dull green spinach, you’re obviously going to want to eat the raspberries.

Taste

Taste is the most vital element in culinary arts. This is because you want to make your food taste GOOD. If you make your food taste good, your audience will like it and want to have more. Spices and herbs are helpful in dishes to help balance the dish and make the dish more interesting and less plain.

Flavours

Flavours are found in types of sauce. This is related to the previous element discussed - taste. You want flavours like sweet, sour, spicy/piquant, bitter and salty. You don’t want a plain old dish on the table, you want dishes with flavour and something that makes it special.

Texture

Texture is an important element. You want to have at least crunchiness, crispness, tenderness, chewiness or some kind of texture in your food. You want to have something that mashes with the taste. For example spring rolls are crispy and it goes well with the ingredients inside. You also typically do not want a mushy texture because that’s unappetizing for most people.

AromaAroma is also necessary to have in your dish. For example if you go into a restaurant and it smells really good, you’ll probably want to order many things because you’re possibly having a good appetite. Aroma also attracts makes you think that the food tastes better than it really is, so a high-class chef would use lots of MSG in his food if he enters a competition. Some chefs know great combinations of spices and ingredients and can make great aromas without any chemicals.

StyleStyle is very important for chefs. In other words, it’s how they serve their dish to their customers. When some chefs make cakes, they make them into cool shapes like flowers if it’s Valentine’s Day. When you make salads, you should also serve it in a style. Same colored leaves on top of each other in layers, tomato and corn on side with a decoration of dressing in whatever shape you like should impress your audience.

Plating

Plating is the principle of the element style. It’s basically how you put things on the table. It’s also what type of plates you use. So for soup you would use a bowl but for pork ribs covered in hints of garlic you would serve it in a large circular bowl on top of each other.

The Principles of Culinary Arts

Balance

Pattern

Contrast

Emphasis

Unity

Variety

BalanceBalance is the main key point in culinary arts. You have to have a balance of ingredients to make your food taste GOOD. The most important element (taste) is involved in this. You have to include spices, sauce, and more. You have to balance the ingredients in the dish. For example you don’t want pork in sweet sauce on one side of the plate and pork in sour sauce on the other side, you want lots of pork with sweet and sour sauce all over the meat.

Pattern

Pattern is a really important principle in cooking. You might think how is pattern related to cooking? Well, you should have a kind of pattern in cooking your dish. For example you could be cooking a steak and you season it with salt and pepper, then you season the other side with salt and pepper as well to make it taste better.

Contrast

It’s good to have a good contrast of all the ingredients you put in to your dish. You don’t want plain tasting food, you want interesting flavours in your dish so you must make sure you have a big contrast of ingredients - This is the key to a good dish.

Emphasis

Emphasis is something that makes your dish really tasty. You have to emphasize what you thing is most important in the dish and make it bring out the flavours of it.

Variety

You want a variety of ingredients in every single dish, as I mentioned before. You also want a variety of styles in presenting your dish. Variety really gives the flavour to cooking and also gives ALOT of aroma out.

Unity

Unity is just putting everything (the elements) together. This is what makes the entire dish great and yummy. Unity is the last principle you would need.

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Hope You Liked My Presentation!

I hope you liked my presentation about culinary arts and I hope you learnt something new.

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