The Tweezer Times

Magazine publisher Haymarket Group, Ltd. has recently combined three of its titles, Chocolatier, Frozen Desserts and Pastry Arts & Design, into a new bimonthly “super-magazine” it’s calling Dessert Professional.Aimed at pastry professionals, but also of interest to the serious food amateur, Dessert Professional incorporates features, tips, techniques and recipes for all sorts of sweet goods.

Dessert Professional is also sponsoring a Web presence, www.dessertprofessional.com, which offers those in the pastry and confectionery fields a place to build an online community.

For information on subscriptions to Dessert Professional, call (386) 246-0139.

By Hugh Robert
Reprinted from The Republican (Thursday, August 28, 2008)

An enduring - but true - cliché is that we eat with our eyes. Since the first test of a dish’s ability to satisfy is whether or not it looks good, food presentation has long been the obsession of every restaurant chef worthy of the title.

Contemporary food presentation practices represent the culmination of contradictory ideas.

Up though the 1970s, “presentation” meant “garnishes”; it was the heyday of parsley sprigs and radish roses.

In the 1980s chefs discovered “verticality” as a presentation dimension, stacking elements of the dish into teetering towers.

“Dusting” plates came into vogue in the 1990s, with every square centimeter of the dish covered with minced, powdered and chopped elements.

Today, the fad in presentation is in the dishware itself, which now comes in strange shapes and dramatic colors designed to have visual punch.

All of these traditions co-mingle today, but the real secret of effective food presentation is simple, clean and uncluttered. Food, after all, should look like food, not be stacked, sprinkled and arranged until nearly unrecognizable.

Editor’s note: Today anything goes in the return to real food, with a more casual attitude and individual artistic expression. Future plates are sure to shrink with concerns about nutrition, the environment, and more “responsible” eating. Back to the basics?