More Than What's For Dinner

Of all the wonderful aspects of culinary art, the one that gets the least love is often savoury meals. So often we see them written off as happy snaps of what's for dinner, but they are so much more than that.

I'm not sure what it is about the savoury that gets shunned so quickly. A dish can be incredibly complex and highly skilled, but it won't get oohed and ahhed at as much as a quick batch of cookies or cupcakes. Maybe we're all dessert lovers at heart? Or maybe we see main meals as more common place? Either way, when we dismiss it we're all missing out on a world of skill and creativity.

A lot of the food presented takes many years of honing the skills needed to achieve it. From basic kitchen skills and knife handling, to learning how to cook the ingredients themselves, to then being able to experiment and modify dishes. The food is plated, styled and set up ready to be photographed. Everything from the dish it's served on to the colour of a placemat or the positioning of cutlery is given careful consideration. The photography that follows is an art in of itself, and takes skill and experience to know how to get the lighting and settings right. When a culinary artist shares their work on dA, the viewer can't taste or smell it, so the artist then has to harness their skill as a photographer so they can make you crave their food using visuals alone. It's a multi-disciplinary art, and there are many skilled deviants who excel at it.

Here's a celebration of some mouth-watering savoury creations from just some of these deviants.