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How To Make A Carrot Leaf -- Vegetable Carving Art
Welcome back to another cooking video, I'm Chef Devaux and I'm going to teach you guys
how to make this beautiful little carrot garnish. It's a leaf carved out of carrot, it takes
quite a little bit of effort to make but it looks just stunning, whether you fill this
next to your sushi as garnish or whether you just chuck this into a salad and surprise
your guests with miniature carved leaves out of carrots, or just add them with your steak
and chip dinner. These will just elevate your cooking to a different level, so let's get
straight into making these. Let's go. Alright so you begin by taking you
carrot and just cutting a nice block of it. Alright, so you start with a carrot block
about 5cm long, and you want to cut just outside of the core, so just outside of this ring
that divides the core from the outer layer of the carrot, and you do this so you get
a nice smooth surface. You see, like this, it's nice and smooth. If I was to cut in between
the core you get lines and dividers and then that will show up on your leaf, you don't
want that. Now you want to cut a block about 1cm thick,
that's 2/5th of an inch, and then you want to cut this specific pattern, and it looks
a little like a gold fish pattern. Pretty basic, but it's the beginnings of a leaf.
So there you go, now all these little extra pieces of carrot, don't worry you can use
them inside a sauce recipe, for example a carrot sauce that I made before, a video link
just appeared on the top left corner of the screen.
Alright, now to carve the leaf what you want to do is just carve a line through the middle
at a slight curve and this will be the vein of the leaf. You do this by first cutting
one straight cut into it and then another cut at 45° angle which will join into it,
and basically you just pull it out. Now, to carve a sort of zigzag pattern, what
you do is you press in your knife and then you pull out and then you move it forward
at a 45° angle you join to the other cut you just made, and then where the second cut
started you push down again and then you move out and do another 45° angle cut and going
it together. And then you just keep doing the same pattern until you've covered the
entire leaf. Once you've cut this zigzag pattern what you
want to do now is lay it down a cutting board and you just want to join up the top end of
your zigzags with the central vein you cut out a second ago. Once you've connected that
you want to do some very precise cuts going at about 40° angle down and joining up to
the cut you just made, it will make it look more 3D.
Once you've carved about the 45° to 30° angle slices that make the leaf look more
three-dimensional you're basically done, now you have the option of doing the leaf on the
other side, the same pattern, but really because I lay it down flat on a plate most of the
time, I don't bother doing the other side of the carrot. But you can do that and then
you could use it in say salad or something where you have them and toss them inside something,
then you can see both sides of the leaf, which would be awesome.
Alright so now you've finished carving your carrots into beautiful little leaf patterns,
you should cook them a little bit so they are a little bit more tender and more edible,
and obviously add a little bit of flavor. So what I like to do is just add them to some
Dashi Stock. The Dashi Stock is a great way to add flavor to these carrots for any seafood
dish like sushi or fish or any kind of fish dish, but if you want to use them for poultry
or steak you can just use chicken stock or beef stock instead.
I hope you all enjoyed this video, how to make these beautiful little carrot leafs and
I urge you all to give this a try at home, even if it's just with your standard every
day roast chicken or steak and chips, add these carrots as boiled carrots instead of
the normal boiled carrots, or you could add these inside of pea soup. Imagine the bright
green color of the pea soup with these carrot leaf islands, just the contrasting colors
between the bright green and the bright orange will blow your mind alone. So give that a
try, that's an awesome idea. Now, if you guys want to see more videos related
to this one, for example the leafs made out of cucumber then click on the link right now,
you can check that out. If you want to see more of my videos then check out what is available
on the right, and if you're not subscribed to my channel you can subscribe right now
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I really don't know how it works, so yeah. Well good luck and see you guys next week.
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