Inspired Bites: Unexpected Ideas for Entertaining from Pinch Food Design

INTRODUCTION

GET PINCHED

Pinch (our definition):

1. A small addition of an ingredient that makes an entire dish better: A pinch of saffron makes bouillabaisse yellow and flowery.

2. A playful yet provocative squeeze between the thumb and finger meant to arouse awareness in the recipient.

3. A turn of phrase evoking a memory of an unbelievable event: Pinch me; was that a dream?

This book is first and foremost an inspiration manual. Instead of telling readers there’s only one way to do things, we want to show there are no constraints. There’s no right way to serve an hors d’oeuvre or to entertain graciously. With this book, we hope party hosts feel free to start thinking creatively about how they present food at home. We want to help them venture beyond the kitchen and step away from the table. And most of all, we want everyone to have a good time.

Pinch Food Design was built on the idea of happy surprises and memorable moments. The word itself—pinch—conjures up a sense of provocation (a little squeeze that makes you say oooh!), a jolt that snaps you out of a reverie, or a small but important cooking instruction. Adding a pinch of something to a recipe, like a nonna might do with her favorite sauce, makes the entire dish taste so much better.

We have nothing against conventional catering and event design—it was what we lived, breathed, slept, and ate for decades, working at top-tier restaurants and production companies in New York City. But when we met in 2005, the words food design—placing equal weight on the food itself and the way it’s served, creating a mouthwatering and visually stunning presentation—were a pairing we had yet to consider. Each of us was firmly ensconced in our roles: Bob as a chef and TJ as a designer. We had no idea how pivotal our relationship to each other was going to be.

Our backgrounds overlapped more than we initially thought. Bob’s dad was a second-generation furniture store owner, and TJ grew up in a French-food-centric household. Through our roots, we had an appreciation for each other’s craft. Not only that, but we both grew up in families who used food as the centerpiece of their community, where eating, cooking, and sharing food were central to a welcoming environment.

As we worked together more closely, we realized how much fun we had talking about the same dish from two different perspectives—not opposite, but like the lenses of a 3-D camera, just a few degrees apart. As we tried to one-up each other over ways to present something as simple as sliced salami, we influenced one another—Bob started thinking about how to design and assemble each bite to make it more functional, and TJ began considering ways to present each food based on its shape and composition. We saw the creative possibilities of a partnership, and Pinch Food Design was born.

Having worked in the catering and entertaining industry for decades, neither of us wanted to be part of just another catering company—we wanted to revolutionize catering. When we founded Pinch, we followed through on our mission to reinvent the way parties looked and felt, to change the way guests thought about parties, and to give them the same thrilling experiences they were getting from groundbreaking restaurants all over the world—as well as experiences that restaurants could never pull off. It’s the dual perspective, the ability to see through the other’s eyes, that’s a crucial part of the Pinch philosophy. Looking at exceptional food from a different vantage point—whether physically staring up at pizzas hanging from hooks, watching beignets slide into a pool of honey, or just seeing a familiar dish presented in a new form—makes you not just hungry but also curious.

That curiosity extends through each page of this book. Here, we offer a revolutionary approach to entertaining that throws the same old dips and frozen mini quiches out the window. Instead, fun, inventive, and sophisticated recipes and serving options abound—all of which look incredible and professional but are completely approachable for the home cook. We’ve tailored our recipes to serve small cocktail gatherings and sit-down dinners for twelve or fewer people, with detailed instructions gleaned from our years of experience. We know it’s more fun to be part of the action, so we’ve detailed how to prep a number of components in advance so you can still enjoy your own party.

In keeping with our vision, which places equal importance on food and design, this book also encourages the home cook to consider creative ways of presenting food beyond standard serving trays. DIY projects in each chapter explain how to re-create some of our signature serving pieces and elements at home and offer ideas for reusing and adapting simple household items for display and presentation. In the chapters that follow, feel free to either adopt our recommended presentation tactics, especially when you are hosting a more elaborate event, or just simply make the food for a casual gathering.

Some Italians might eat a form of macaroni and sauce almost every day, but because there are hundreds of different pasta shapes, every meal feels different. Though they’re all made with flour and water, pastas offer infinite inspiration with their textural and visual variations. In the same vein, you don’t have to use obscure ingredients or over-the-top preparations at your parties—you can serve your favorite meat loaf, if you want! But the minute you mix it up, by serving your familiar favorites on a cluster of lamp shades instead of the same old platters, or by adding an element of spontaneity, like making your guests squeeze their own dipping sauces from bags hanging overhead, suddenly the regular repertoire becomes exciting and new.

And we see that excitement from our guests when they immediately whip out their phones to take pictures of our food as they walk into the room—already excited by what we’ve presented—then close their eyes in blissful satisfaction when they take a bite. That’s the ultimate return on investment: seeing the exhilaration and connection on our guests’ faces. With this book, we’re bringing the same sense of surprise and wonder to smaller-scale gatherings, so we can change how people entertain at home as well. You don’t need to be at a multimillion-dollar event or a destination wedding to experience new and creative presentations: We can help you accomplish all of this in your own kitchen with your own equipment.

The act of cooking and entertaining, no matter if it’s four people around your dining room table, twenty people in your backyard, or two hundred people in a reception hall, is intimate at its core. Though we don’t personally know most of the people we’ve served at our events, we’ve touched their lives. It’s an amazing feeling to look around a party and realize how many people we’ve affected. Our end goal is to help people experience togetherness and have meaningful memories, and we hope that with this book we can help more people do just that.

But let’s not get too emotional. After all, it’s a party! Let’s have some fun.

THE PUNCH WALL IS AN INTERACTIVE DRINKS STATION THAT ELIMINATES THE NEED FOR A BARTENDER. GUESTS PLUCK GLASSES HANGING FROM THE WALL AND SQUEEZE THE COCKTAIL OF THEIR CHOICE INTO THEM WITH OVERSIZE BASTERS.

COCKTAILS AND BAR SNACKS

GETTING THE PARTY STARTED

We’re incredibly grateful that handcrafted cocktails and mixology are reaching a wider audience. With the inclusion of vegetables and herbs in so many high-end specialty cocktails these days, bartenders are thinking like chefs, and vice versa. This inclusive thinking, where lines are blurred and expectations are turned upside down, is a crucial part of the Pinch way of looking at food and drink.

However, while it would be fabulous to have our bartenders custom-craft each drink to order, no guest wants to wait more than a minute to get a drink in hand. So we returned to the drawing board again and again, streamlining recipes that were too complicated in order to make pre-batched drinks that can be assembled in advance, but still taste like they were shaken and stirred fresh for each partygoer. Our simple, minimal-ingredient cocktails, like the ones you’ll find in this chapter, are the result of familiar flavors that we’ve tinkered with and adjusted along the way. We believe a great party drink is something you can drink all night—it stimulates the senses, but doesn’t compete with the food; it has a personality, enhancing the overall flavor experience.

Because we serve hundreds of people every five minutes, the drinks have to be able to come out quickly; for the home bartender and host, the pressure isn’t as nerve-racking, but having batches of drinks at the ready means you can kick back and enjoy a cocktail alongside your guests when they arrive instead of sweating away with a cocktail shaker in hand.

We create curious serving presentations, from rolling coolers and ice mortars to hidden surprises within the drinks themselves, letting us personalize the cocktail experience even if we can’t be crafting drinks one at a time. These pieces and drinks keep the interactive, good-time Pinch philosophy at the forefront, but at the end of the day, if you just sat down at a bar and ordered one of our drinks served individually, it would still be damn good.

The recipes that follow are cocktails that can be made in advance and served the more traditional way, in pitchers, or the Pinch way. As with all the recipes in this book, feel free to use our suggestions as inspiration to mix and match and create your own flavor combinations.

Each of the recipes can also be scaled down to make one or two cocktails instead of a pitcher’s worth of drinks, so there’s no reason you can’t shake one or two up for yourself at the end of a long day. Likewise, our bar snacks are easily adaptable for larger or smaller numbers of guests, and all snacks and drinks are a snap to make in advance so you’re not rushing around when the party starts.

{ BASTERS }

A staple of everyone’s Thanksgiving Day routine, a run-of-the-mill turkey baster can also be a really amusing (not to mention functional) way to serve cocktails. Everyone knows how to use one, but when placed in a new context, the baster makes people stop and think, and most likely smile in delight, as they squeeze themselves a drink!

One of our favorite ways to serve pre-made cocktails is in beautiful squat glass cylinders sitting on five vintage elevator stools attached to a freestanding wall covered with a grid of glasses hanging from hooks. Once the basters are in place, the Punch Wall, as we refer to it, becomes a self-manned drinks station for hosts who don’t want to hire a bartender for the evening (see this page). Even if we offer trays of pre-poured drinks near the Punch Wall, everyone ignores the trays and prefers to baste their cocktail! It’s a much cooler, more adult way of self-serving than tapping and pumping a keg—and perfectly suited for small-scale gatherings at home.

Though our dream is to find glass basters, like oversize versions of the pipettes used in scientific laboratories, our basting equipment is nothing more than the clear plastic, black-knobbed kind you’ve seen a million times. We like the eighteen-inch basters that are slightly larger and more industrial than the supermarket models typically found near the aluminum roasting pans. They are commonly used in beer making, and now that home-brewing is so popular, they are pretty easy to locate online.

DIY

OUR DIY BAR CART, IS EASY TO ASSEMBLE AT HOME. WE USE A PREFAB BUTCHER-BLOCK CART WITH S-HOOKS FOR HANGING GLASSES AND DRINK DISPENSERS FOR GUESTS TO SERVE THEMSELVES.

{THIS DIY BAR CART WAS CREATED FROM A KITCHEN BUTCHER BLOCK.}

BACK-UP BOOZE, JUICE, OR PRE-BATCHED COCKTAILS

(LIKE THE JALAPEÑO-CUCUMBER GIMLET ON THIS PAGE)

JUICER

BEAKER OF SIMPLE SYRUP

POURER

GARNISH

HANGING GLASSES MAKE IT EASY FOR GUESTS TO SELF-SERVE

BAR CART, SIDE TABLE, OR CLUSTER OF STOOLS

GLASS VESSEL OR PUNCH BOWL

18-INCH (46-CM) BASTER

Jalapeño-Cucumber Gimlet

If you’ve never had St-Germain elderflower liqueur, then we are so jealous that you get to taste it for the first time. Its taste is hard to pinpoint: It’s floral, it’s fruity, it’s strong yet delicate. The vegetables are the star of this drink, but the St-Germain lends an intriguing undercurrent. This was our first signature drink—so simple to mix, yet so addicting. Bet you can’t have just one!

YIELD: Serves 12

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT: baster

3 cups (720 ml) New Amsterdam gin

1½ cups (360 ml) St-Germain elderflower liqueur

1½ cups (360 ml) fresh lime juice (from about 12 limes)

12 thin cucumber slices, for serving

12 thin jalapeño slices, for serving

In a 2-quart (2-L) punch bowl or other serving vessel, stir together the gin, St-Germain, and lime juice.

Garnish each of twelve ice-filled highball glasses with one cucumber slice and one jalapeño slice. Set the punch bowl, garnished glasses, and a baster on a tray or bar table and allow your guests to serve themselves with the baster.

MAKE-AHEAD/STORAGE

The gin, St-Germain, and lime juice can be stirred together up to 4 hours in advance and stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator until ready to garnish and serve.

Spicy Mango Margarita

The combination of mango and Sriracha in this margarita was inspired by TJ’s trips to Mexico, where the lime- and chile-sprinkled fruit sold by street vendors left a memorable impression on her taste buds. Now these quintessential tastes come in cocktail form.

YIELD: Serves 12

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT: baster

1½ cups (360 ml) Milagro silver tequila

¾ cup (180 ml) mango puree or mango nectar

¾ cup (180 ml) Bols triple sec

¾ cup (180 ml) fresh lime juice (from about 6 limes)

¾ cup (180 ml) simple syrup

1½ cups (360 ml) club soda

Sriracha, for serving

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

12 lime wedges

In a 2-quart (2-L) punch bowl or other serving vessel, stir together the tequila, mango puree, triple sec, lime juice, and simple syrup. Top with the club soda.

Fill twelve highball or margarita glasses with ice. Set the punch bowl, ice-filled glasses, and a baster on a tray or bar table and allow your guests to serve themselves with the baster. Garnish each drink with 5 to 7 drops of Sriracha, a sprinkling of red pepper flakes, and a lime wedge.

MAKE-AHEAD/STORAGE

The tequila, mango puree, triple sec, lime juice, and simple syrup can be stirred together up to 4 hours in advance and stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Stir in the club soda imediately before serving.

Celery-Cilantro Pop

The key ingredient here is the celery soda. When it’s combined with the tang of the cilantro, images of a fragrant garden can’t help but make their way into your brain. Though an unexpected pairing of flavors, celery and cilantro make a perfect late-summer quencher.

YIELD: Serves 12

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT: baster

3 cups (720 ml) vodka

1 (12-ounce/360-ml) bottle Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray celery soda

¾ cup (180 ml) fresh lime juice (from about 6 limes)

1 celery stalk, cut into brunoise (cubes no larger than ⅛ inch/3 mm)

1 teaspoon minced fresh cilantro leaves

Additional whole celery and cilantro leaves

In a 2-quart (2-L) punch bowl or serving vessel, stir together the vodka, celery soda, and lime juice.

Garnish each of twelve ice-filled highball glasses with the celery brunoise and minced cilantro. Set the punch bowl, garnished glasses, and a baster on a tray or bar table and allow your guests to serve themselves with the baster. Guests can add the whole celery and cilantro leaves as desired.

MAKE-AHEAD/STORAGE

Because of the carbonation in the celery soda, this drink should be made immediately before serving.

{ COOLERS }

Maybe no one actually gathers around the office watercooler to gossip anymore, but they sure do congregate at bars for happy-hour camaraderie and conversation. Inspired by a German art exhibition called Drink Away the Art, where gallery guests were encouraged to serve themselves from wall-mounted glass aquariums filled with colorful liquor infusions, we wanted to offer another sort of interactive self-serve drink dispenser for our party guests. Our wheeled watercoolers are modern, streamlined versions that house gallons of refreshing beverages—from kimchi Bloody Marys to vodka-spiked juice—so guests can easily grab a glass and drink up.

DIY

GLASS AND CERAMIC DRINK DISPENSERS WITH POUR SPOUTS ARE READILY AVAILABLE FROM MOST UPSCALE HOME DÉCOR STORES AND CAN BE PLACED ON A WHEELED BAR CART OR FILING CABINET AS IN THE BAR CART DIY ON THIS PAGE. USE THE SHELVES, DRAWERS, AND HANDLES TO STACK OR HANG GLASSWARE FOR YOUR GUESTS TO SERVE THEMSELVES.

AND IF YOU ALREADY OWN A WATERCOOLER AT HOME (AND ARE NOT FEARFUL OF VOIDING YOUR WARRANTY), YOU COULD REPLACE THE PLASTIC CONTAINER OF SPRING WATER WITH A STYLISH OVERSIZE GLASS JUG, ALSO REFERRED TO AS A WINE BALON, AND FILL IT WITH A COCKTAIL OR WINE OF YOUR CHOICE.

GLASS BALON FILLED WITH A COCKTAIL SUCH AS HUGO’S SPIKED HORCHATA (SEE THIS PAGE)

{SIMPLY INSERT BALON INTO A CERAMIC WATER DISPENSER TO CREATE A COCKTAIL COOLER.}

Kimchi Bloody Mary

Kimchi is the new ketchup—it’s such a ridiculously popular flavor now. It’s also sour, sweet, and spicy, and these are three qualities of a good Bloody Mary. The smoothness of this drink will make it hard to go back to the traditional version. We use pickles or green bell pepper for garnish, but you can use cilantro, fennel, or daikon.

YIELD: Serves 12

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT: watercooler-style serving vessel (optional)

3 cups (720 ml) vodka

3 cups (720 ml) tomato juice

1½ cups (360 ml) kimchi brine, drained from 1 to 2 (16-ounce/480-ml) jars of premade kimchi (such as Mother-in-Law’s)

2 tablespoons plus ¾ teaspoon soy sauce

Black Hawaiian sea salt (optional)

12 thin pickle spears, or 24 green bell pepper slices

In a watercooler-style serving vessel or 3-quart (2.8-L) pitcher, stir together the vodka, tomato juice, kimchi brine, and soy sauce.

Salt the rim of each of twelve ice-filled highball or Collins glasses, if desired. Garnish with pickle spears or 2 pepper slices and let guests serve themselves.

MAKE-AHEAD/STORAGE

The vodka, tomato juice, kimchi brine, and soy sauce can be stirred together up to 4 hours in advance and stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator until ready to garnish