Developing a Dish

We've all been to that dinner party. The one where one half of the host couple is out of sight most of the evening, emerging only to bark an order at the poor partner—who is only trying to keep the guests entertained and distracted from **whatever disaster is clearly going down in the kitchen**. And we've been the one in the kitchen, too, sweating our way through each course, swearing loudly because the sauce is burning on the stove and there are no clean spoons to stir it with, cursing the clock as our guests stand around awkwardly, overdoing it on wine as the evening wears on and still no food has materialized. 

This is the last thing you want to happen when you're **debuting [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/developing-your-dish an awesome dish] you've worked so hard to master**. And an in-the-weeds evening can be avoided, provided you're ready to exercise some discipline and care. For starters, you're going to need to practice your dish several times before service, so that you know how to best arrange your mise en place and work station. You'll want to remove any unnecessary clutter from your counters. Decorative fruit baskets, coffee grinders, picture frames—get those out of there. Finally, plan on cleaning as you go. (Pro tip: pay the neighbor kid to wash dishes and help prep). **Cooking clean is the single best way to up your kitchen skills and ensure a successful event**. Read on to learn everything you need to know to successfully execute your dish, then send out the invites. It's time to wow your nearest and dearest.

Note: This content is part of our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/projects/design-a-dish/landing#/ Design a Dish] project, which used [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/scallops-with-nasturtium-plum-peanuts-and-lime Nick's Nasti Salad Soup] as a case study for how to create a composed plate. You'll find notes on how we executed the dish for a recent dinner party in italics below.

Plating and Serving

Anything can inspire a dish. A painting, a comfort-food craving, a slab of **purple-red tuna belly sparkling behind the counter** at the seafood shop. This lily pad–invoking creation was inspired by nasturtium, a peppery plant with edible red, orange, and yellow blossoms. 

Funny thing about nasturtium: You’ll find it prettily packaged at high-end farmers’ markets, sure. But as any dedicated urban forager will tell you, **it also grows wild—and wildly**. Nasturtium plants (which we lovingly call “nastis”) spring up in the forlorn grass patches that line parking lots or hide beneath underpasses. They pop up in untended gardens and public parks. When we started looking around Seattle, we saw these prodigious plants everywhere, often in places that have little in common with the well-scrubbed produce section of your local Whole Foods. 

This irony—that such scrappy, hardy greens are treated like precious delicacies by tweezer-toting chefs—also inspired the recipe. Because as elegant and haute as it appears, this dish is easy, fast, and surprisingly versatile. Scallops at the supermarket look sketchy? Use hamachi or albacore tuna instead. Plums out of season? Sub in apricots or another durable stone fruit. There are all sorts of variations you can use for this particular plating, which is why we included it in our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/projects/design-a-dish/landing#/ Design a Dish] project. If you’re new to creating composed dishes, you can **use it as a primer, testing how small variations change the texture and flavor contrast, as well as the overall look.** Once you’ve tried this one a few ways, work through the steps to create your own original dish—or, hey, don’t. There’s nothing wrong with following this recipe to a T. It certainly made our guests happy, and isn’t that, in the end, what it’s all about anyway?

NOTE: We served this dish as part of our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/tasting-menu-spring **Tasting Menu: Spring**] feature, where we rolled out a 14-course tasting menu one dish at a time. Here are the details for this dish:

**Our menu description:** Watercress. Sweet scallop. Plum. Red peanut. 
 
**But really, what’s in there?** All of the above, plus palm seeds, pickled onions, argan oil, and fresh lime juice. 
 
**Plating suggestion:** Square bowls, if you got ’em 
 
**Pair with:** 2013 Fiano di Avellino Vadiaperti
 
**Wine note:** We chose an incredibly delicious southern Italian white from Fiano di Avellino in the Campania region. Can’t find it? Ask your favorite wineseller for something with floral aromatics and a subtly round texture, or just list off the dish ingredients and let her pick something out.

Example Dish: Nick’s Nasti Salad Soup

When it comes to creating original dishes, inspiration can hit at any time. A pretty patch of forest, a textile catalogue, a painting in a museum—you never know what will **catch your eye and plant the seed for novel combinations of flavors and textures**. But ambitious chefs are also always keeping an eye on what each other are up to, and regularly feed their brains with the beautiful coffee-table tomes of the culinary book world.

We scoured our onsite library for the books we often turn to during dish development. Invest in one or two—or check them out from your local library—for a quick way to jumpstart the creative process. And of course, we'd love to hear about the books that inspire you in the comments.

Books That Inspire: Plating

Discussion

Design & Serve Your Very Own Masterpiece

Ambitious cooks are a restless bunch—the better we get, the more challenges we seek. When you’ve reached the point at which you can masterfully replicate great recipes at home—anticipating timing issues, controlling temperatures, making confident corrections when problems arise—it’s time to start designing your own dishes. Here, we share the steps that we use to create dazzling and delicious composed plates. We offer up the recipe for one of our own successes—a flavor-packed, texture-driven soup/salad hybrid we served at a recent dinner. Re-creating the recipe at home will provide essential practice; as you prepare it, you’ll think about how each component came to be part of the unified whole and how the steps we outline might apply to your own original creation. Once you’ve worked through the project, you’ll be all set to break out on your own, developing a dish to amaze and delight your nearest and dearest. Be sure to share photos in the discussion—we can’t wait to see what you come up with.

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