Presentation School: Food Rings

Food rings are a fun way to present food that can be easily built upon.  You can try and do it with a cup, a bowl or a ramekin if you are pressed to ... but it tends to be difficult to compress food enough to hold it together, and then get it out.  The other option is to use a food ring with a press.

Shells got me one of these as a gift a while back and it got lost behind some things until we found it the other day and decided to have some fun with it.

The first thing to do is prepare whatever food it is that you want to shape, in this example I used black beans and rice.  I place the ring into the middle of the plate and spooned in rice until I had filled the ring up (caution that a metal ring can/will get hot depending on what you put in it so you might want a towel handy).

Next I placed the press on top of the food in the ring and pressed down lightly to make sure the rice was packed and would hold together.

Very gently then I slid the ring up and past the food press (be careful not to apply too much downward force while you're doing this or you'll cause the base to spread out where the ring has been moved away)/

 Once done you have a perfect ring (above) that you can plate around like the fish and veggies (below).  Give it a try and enjoy!