Feast Your Eyes On These Delicious Works Of Edible Art
Food artists have found a home on Instagram. A select group of super talented chef-artists are posting pictures of their almost too good to eat creations. Beet juice has replaced red paint, icing has replaced clay, and smoothie bowls stand in for mixed media compositions. What these people can do with food is absolutely mesmerizing.
These pictures may even inspire you to try your hand at your own culinary creations. Even if you're not yet at the level of these chefs, adding a little color and style to your food is a great way to keep lunch interesting!
Satisfying Smoothie Bowl
@purelykaylie/Instagram
This smoothie bowl is all about the details. The heart-shaped dragonfruit pieces, geometrically cut kiwi, and frozen blueberries all add to its dreamy aesthetic. This gorgeous creation is also vegan and not too difficult to replicate.
@purelykaylie's Instagram page is full of divine creations like this one. It was super difficult to choose just one picture for this slideshow. Her smoothie cups make use of cut fruit pressed against the side of the glass for extra color and pattern. She also has a recipe book that includes over 75 vegan recipes available on her personal website.
Avocados Aren't Just For Guacamole
@gakugakugakugakugaku1/Twitter
This food artist and Instagram user practices Thai carving, a traditional Thai art that requires precision and meditation. Fruit carving has persisted as a respected art form in Thailand for centuries. It was originally used to decorate tables for the royal family.
Fruit carving was a skill taught to women in the royal Thai palace. The artist who carved the avocado in the photo above also carves apples, radishes, pumpkins, broccoli, and many other kinds of fruits and vegetables. In his Instagram bio, he says he hopes this art form will spread throughout the world.
Pies That Use Pi For Geometric Precision
@lokokitchen/Instagram
This pie made by self-taught baker Lauren Ko is a vegan black sesame tart with fruit kiwi, mango, and dragonfruit tangrams. Lauren's pie designs have been featured in Vogue and her colorful geometric style regularly inspires fellow bakers on Instagram, where she has amassed over 128,000 followers in the six months since she began @lokokitchen.
She uses strips of pie dough to create intricate crust patterns and designs. Lauren likes to experiment with different fruits, flavors, and crusts for unique and surprising pies. Perhaps her creations will inspire you to up your pie game.
Rainbow Bagels
@thebagelstore/Instagram
These rainbow bagels have become internet famous. The bakery had been churning out these colorful and delicious bagels for 20 years when a video of them went viral on Facebook. That video has been viewed over 65 million times. People started flocking to the Brooklyn bakery in droves. The shop got so busy that it had to close for ten days so the staff could gather their thoughts and figure out how best to serve their new customers.
You can now order Bagel Store bagels online from anywhere in the U.S. They come in different styles, flavors, and colors, and you can get them with different kinds of rainbow cream cheese. Read ahead for a chef who is folding rainbows into pasta.
Mario Macarons
@sweetspot.bymeli/Instagram
These Mario, Toad, and Luigi macarons are chocolate peanut butter flavor. Sweet Spot by Meli is a macaron baker and decorator from Sydney, Australia. This baker makes tons of adorable designs including adorable animals and characters from popular movies and TV shows.
French macarons are made by mixing beaten egg whites with sugar and almond flour. the mixture is then piped into smooth blobs and baked to form the shells of the macaron. To make cool designs, you can color the egg white mixture with food coloring and use a bunch of different piping nozzles.
Dyed Deviled Eggs
@my_lovers_kitchen/Instagram
These eggs have been pickled with beets to give them a magenta edge. To get perfectly pickled eggs at home, boil 4 cups of vinegar, half a cup of sugar, a pinch of salt, and two and a half cups of water in a large saucepan. Cut up a beet into small pieces and add it to the mix.
Simmer until the beet is soft, let cool, and then strain the brine into a glass jar. Add some peeled hardboiled eggs to the jar and then pop the whole thing in the fridge for two hours.
Rainbow Pasta
@saltyseatle/Instagram
This Instagram page is run by Seattle chef Linda Miller Nicholson. She is an internationally-recognized pasta powerhouse, whose work has been featured in Saveur, Good Housekeeping, and Business Insider. She has made pasta art for Katy Perry, Mario Batali and the cast of The Chew, and with Harry Connick Jr, she also has a cookbook that will be coming out soon and she hosts pasta making workshops.
The book will have more than 30 recipes for different colors of dough (both sheeted & rolled). Each dough color is made from vegetables, herbs, and superfoods, not artificial dyes. Read ahead for a famous painting recreated with toast and cheese.
Let Me See That Sushi Roll
@atsumitatsumi/Instagram
These decorative sushi rolls are made by wrapping rice and other ingredients in nori, or dried seaweed. Those wrapped pieces are then wrapped in more rice and more nori before the whole log is sliced to reveal the final pattern. Rice can be dyed with ingredients like raspberries, beets, and cabbage to create more colorful patterns.
The tulips in the photo above are made from cucumbers and tomago, a Japanese omelet made by folding over the eggs as they cook to form a series of thin layers. The girl's hair in the photo is most likely colored with soy sauce.
A Wolf Of A Cake
@cococakeland/Instagram
This adorable wolf cake was made by Vancouver baker and blogger Lyndsay Sung. She is a self-taught cake decorator and she was named Yahoo!'s Food Blogger of the Year in 2015. Lyndsay shares beautiful cakes, original cake tutorials, party DIYs and dessert recipes on her website. Her cakes have been featured in Teen Vogue and Oprah.com.
In 2015, she wrote a blog post about her experience with breast cancer and illustrated her story with photos of two breast cakes. Lyndsay finished cancer treatment in May 2016 and is now feeling happy and healthy.
American Gothic On Toast
@idafrosk/Instagram
Ida Skivenes is a food artist and blogger based in Olso, Norway. Her cookbook, Eat Your Art Out, was published in August 2013. On her personal website, Ida says that food art has become a creative outlet for her to play with healthy ingredients and her favorite meal, breakfast.
She is inspired by funny wordplay, the shape of an ingredient, modern art, cartoons, films or other people's food art she sees online— and she always eats her creations after she's done photographing them. She likes to make meals that are both tasty and beautiful. Read on for some cookies that could pass for a full American breakfast.
Dumplings For Days
@ellenmariebennet/Instagram
Founder and CEO of Hedley & Bennet Aprons shared this photo of Brandon Jew's colorful dumplings originally featured on Bon Appétit. Brandon Jew is a chef who works in San Fransisco's Chinatown. His cooking combines San Fransisco's grow-it-yourself ethos and focuses on fresh ingredients with traditional Chinese fare.
The dumplings in the photo above are made from scratch and filled with intense flavor. There's no artificial food coloring in these babies. Jew uses natural dyes like beet juice, red tofu, and charcoal. These dumplings look so good together that I think I'd need to eat one of each color.
Pretty Pumpkin Soup
@healthylittlevittles/Instagram
Can we talk about how the parmesan breaded artichoke in this bowl of pumpkin soup takes this food from pretty to a goshdarn work of art? Seriously, why is nature so good at symmetry and repetition? This photo was posted by vegan chef Gina Fontana. Her blog, Healthy Little Vittles, focuses on gluten-free, vegan, and mostly plant-based recipes that take 30 minutes or less to prepare.
Gina's pumpkin soup is topped with pomegranate, crispy chickpeas, toasted pumpkin seeds, and cashew cream. It's delicious, nutritious, and gorgeous to look at.
An Unbalanced Breakfast
/u/ooogy/Reddit
Reddit user /u/ooogy posted these breakfast shaped sugar cookies on /r/food in 2017 and the post now has almost 50 thousand upvotes. This home baker has been making and decorating cookies since 2015. He has posted pictures of his early creations next to his newer ones to show how much his skills have improved over time.
He mixes meringue powder, vanilla, icing sugar, and water to get a perfectly smooth royal icing for decorating. He says that these cookies are all vanilla flavor, but if you're looking to recreate these, you could always put some orange extract in the orange cookies. I don't think bacon extract is a thing though... Read ahead for a monstrous pie crust.
Goldfish In My Consommé
@redhongyi/Instagram
Ok, so this is the coolest food item I have ever seen. Red Hong Yi is an artist who creates art using everyday materials to transform our understanding of objects and image-making.
The goldfish in this translucent appetizer are made of pickled ginger. Their eyeballs are made from Chinese century eggs, which are preserved duck eggs that turn black and gelatinous because of a chemical reaction. The grass is made of dill and the jelly is made of chicken consomme and gelatine. Red Hong Yi says that this creation was inspired by Riusuke Fulahori's goldfish art with resin.
Psychadelic Yogurt Bowl
@nourishing.andreea/Instagram
Andreea is a mother and home cook from Romania who posts photos of breakfast foods like smoothie bowls and pancakes regularly. She achieved the bright colors in this breakfast bowl by adding blue spirulina powder and some beetroot powder to plain yogurt.
Andreea typically posts pictures of healthy and plant-based foods. Plain yogurt is packed with nutrients like calcium, vitamin B-12, vitamin B-2, potassium, and magnesium. It's also full of probiotics, which are good bacteria that promote healthy digestion. Adding color and style to your food makes eating healthy way more exciting.
Release The Kraken!
/u/GypsyWitch05/Reddit
This pie with a unique top crust now has over 56 thousand upvotes on Reddit. Reddit user GypsyWitch05 has confirmed that the pie has a blueberry cream cheese filling with, of course, Kraken Rum. She used blackberries for the Kraken's eyes and the pie crust is just plain old pie crust from a 1940's cookbook that used to belong to her grandmother.
This pie looked pretty good after it came out of the oven, too. I hope this pie inspires you to make your own monstrous pie crust creations. How about a Godzilla pie crust? Or a Big Foot pie crust? Read on for a beloved Pixar character made out of grilled salmon.
Cookies For Any Occasion
@smart_cookie_rnd/Instagram
Tatiana, the cookie artist behind Smart cookie rnd, is inspired by watercolor drawings and illustrations. She likes to try her hand at unusual cookie designs and recreations of famous works of art. She makes cookie sets for every occasion, including cats, medicine, gardening, and Star Wars. The photo above showcases her "girly" cookie set.
Tatiana paints her designs straight onto the cookies using diluted food coloring. Good thing she takes lots of pictures of her creations— now you can eat them and have them live on forever on Instagram.
Rice Is Nice
@peaceloving_pax/Instagram
Instagram user @peaceloving_pax is a doctor who makes adorable food creations on the side. I couldn't pick just one cute rice creature, so here is a compilation of @peaceloving_pax's top photos of 2017. The little rice Pikachu in a Totoro suit holding a seaweed umbrella is probably the star of the show here, but the Psyduck and colored toasts are a close second.
How anyone has time to save lives and make rice Pokemon is beyond me. If this whole medicine thing doesn't work out maybe @peaceloving_pax can heal our souls by posting cute food pictures full time.
Wall-E Seafood
@leesamantha/Instagram
Lee Samantha is a mother and food artist from Malaysia who began styling food to help her eldest daughter start to eat independently. She started posting her creations to Instagram in 2011. Now Samantha has nearly 1 million followers on social media and her beautiful plating is inspiring people around the world.
Samantha likes to work with bright, fresh ingredients like fruit, vegetables, poultry, and fish. Wall-E's body in the photo above is made from a grilled fillet of salmon. She doesn't use a lot of fancy tools and she likes to minimize food waste.
Tide Pods You Can Eat Guilt-Free
@saltyseatle/Instagram
Ok, I'm including another Linda Miller Nicholson creation because it's too good not to share. Why eat gross and toxic Tide Pods when you can have delicious Tide Pod shaped ravioli? This pasta is filled with butternut squash and ricotta cheese— which is way tastier than laundry detergent.
Skip out on dangerous trends for wholesome pasta making and beautiful food photography. Let these photos inspire you and impress your guests at your next dinner party. Maybe if all food looked as appetizing as Tide Pods, nobody would feel the need to chew on compact detergent.
