How to decorate salads?

Family dinners, weekends and holidays in the circle of friends at a large covered table - a tradition that is widespread throughout the world. An indispensable dish on any holiday table is a salad. In the summer, the favorite is the simplest salad of sliced ​​vegetables, which in the spring had time to gain vitamins. How to serve salads to the table, so that they cause admiration not only for their taste characteristics, but also for decoration?

General rules of decorating

The main rule: the salad dressing should harmonize to taste with the main components of the recipe. Ideally, the decoration should be made up of the same ingredients that are included in the salad.

Exceptions are such decorations, which are easily removed from the salad and do not mix with it. For example, "mushrooms" from halves of a cucumber and a tomato or "flowers" from a boiled carrot. Usually such removable "decorations" are located in the center of the salad and stand out above its surface.

On some photos posted by the hostesses on the Internet, you can notice that even on meat salads, the central ornament is placed from strawberries or grape grains. Certainly, such decorations look bright and effective, but not always their use is appropriate. Therefore, before decorating a crab salad with a favorite composition of vegetables and fruits, you need to carefully check the ingredients of the decoration and replace those that can give juice and spoil the taste of the salad.

The second rule in the design: "figured" salads in the form of fish, snakes, crabs, etc. They are obtained only from salads with finely chopped products and an adhesive consistency.

How can I decorate salads?

How to decorate salads, will prompt fantasy. Crab salad can be laid out on a dish in the form of a fish with striped coloring from the "scales" of boiled eggs or rice and contrasting yellow corn. This salad will appeal not only to adults, but also to children.

Meat salad, a salad with beans and ham can be turned into a cake. For this, it is better to arrange the ingredients layer by layer, not mixing, each top layer should be slightly smaller in area than the previous one: so the "cake" does not crumble and keeps the shape. Refueling (usually a mayonnaise) a ready-made salad is covered as a cake with icing. A walnut, which is a part of the salad itself, can become an ornament. When served, the cake is cut into pieces and mixed already in a plate. Shrimp salad can be decorated in the form of a flower and decorated with shrimps, placing each on a separate petal, and in the center of the flower to arrange a "rose" from the lemon.

Great space for imagination gives salads, like all your favorite "Olivier", or "winter salad". How to decorate a winter salad so that none of the guests recognize the culinary masterpiece as a familiar dish? The first option is a figurative design. From a winter salad it will perfectly turn out the snowman with a nose-carrot and little eyes-peas. The second option is a cake, the surface of which will be completely covered with finely chopped herbs, decorated with peas and patterns from mayonnaise. In this cake, there is no need to arrange the ingredients layer by layer, the main thing is just to lay it in the form of a high circle on the dish and properly "disguise".

How to decorate a fruit salad?

Vegetable salads do not put almost no restrictions in the design, since they assume the use of a dressing, which "glues" the pieces of vegetables among themselves. But how to decorate a fruit salad, where basically all the ingredients are cut large, and there is no refueling from mayonnaise?

Fruit salads can also be decorated in the form of a figure. Since it is impossible to cut a salad from a common dish and distribute it by plates because of its friable consistency, the figure is flat and should be laid out on a platter for each guest separately. Of fruits, you can form a butterfly or a flower, the main thing to remember that clear contours in this case is very difficult to achieve, so the color design of the spots near the butterfly and the borders of the petals near the flower will be sufficiently blurred. Usually this option of decoration is suitable for those who decide how to decorate children's salads.

Adults like peeled halves of oranges or coconuts, which are laid out a salad. If you add a decoration for cocktails, the salad in coconuts will look like one of the popular drinks that are served in bars on hot Hawaiian shores.