Premise
You will learn a way to create a cucumber flower with 12 petals on it. It's a little bit of a challenge for your knife skills, but it won't be too hard. Also, cucumber is easier to slice than other vegetables. Try your food art with this idea.
YOU WILL NEED
- A chef knife
- A paring knife
- A chopping board
- A cucumber
- Two bamboo sticks or toothpicks
Practice
1-1 Prepare cucumber petals
Get a 15 – 18 cm long cucumber. After that, remove a little bit end off, as we will need to use the end section for making the flower base.
Remove the outside of the plastic wrap and give the cucumber skin a good wash. After that, start cutting through at the biggest diameter then start slicing it with as thin as you can.
Keep cutting the cucumber and try to keep a full circle while you are slicing it. You might make lots of broken circles, that’s why we need to slice lots of them. In the end, we will only choose the full circle and thinner ones to use. Be aware, you will need to keep the end of the cucumber with about 3 to 3.5 cm long for the flower base.
Finally, take out all broken circles and the thicker ones. We only want the best 12 cucumber slices. Stack them in a row with a space of a radius from each other on a chopping board.
1-2 Roll sliced cucumbers up
Start rolling from the rightmost end. In order to create a small size roll in the centre of the flower, try to make the first sliced cucumber as tight a roll as you can. Keep rolling it up tightly. If you feel the sliced cucumbers are hard to roll, you are able to soak them into salty water for a couple of minutes first to soften them. It will be much easier to roll them.
Use both hands and fingers to roll it together and avoid the roll spreading out while you are rolling it. Therefore, don’t roll it too quickly and check the petals are positioning equally in the roll.
1-3 Pin them together
Once the 12 petals flower have been rolled in a coil, use a bamboo stick to pierce it through horizontally. In a 90 degrees angle, put in another bamboo stick or toothpick to make the coil stable.
Picture-8 will be the result that you should have so far.
1-4 Making a flower base
When you have finished all the sliced petals, you should have a cucumber section with 3 to 3.5 cm left. Trim a section parallel from both sides. After that, use the edge finish of a paring knife to carve a groove on the big diameter side about 1.5 to 2 cm deep.
You will need to check the depth and diameter of your cucumber flower while you are carving the groove. Make sure the 12 petal flower is able to fit in the cucumber base correctly.
1-5 Organize petals
Once the cucumber base has been done, place the entire cucumber flower into the base.
Remove the two bamboo sticks and extend the flower petals gently from outside toward to inside.
Organize the outside petals to extend wider than inside petals, also check the petals are separated equally.
