The Making of

“A food designer is somebody working with food, with no idea of cooking”. Inga Knölke, 1999

Lately I found myself sort of lost in a limbo, trying to conjugate my work and passion, which would be design, with that of food. I’ve never really believed in the figure of Food Designers. I really don’t think the world can benefit from the birth of another design category. But I do believe that we need to question and discover the unknown environment that surrounds us and what better way to learn something we know nothing about, then playing around with it and getting our hands dirty.

So that’s what I tried to do for this dinner, I thought it would be fun to try something a little different. The idea came from my recent work with porcelain. I’ve been working on making kitchenware products such a plates and bowls in the studio for the last couple of months. We know that plates and bowls come in different shapes and sizes, depending on what we intend using them for. We have oval plates for fish, deep bowls for soup, small plates for fruit. Handles, lids and non-drip spouts are all ergonomically thought out in regards to how people will interact with each particular object and depending on the functions they need to full-fill. The same goes for the materials which are used: Steel, aluminium porcelain, ceramics, plastic and glass, every material is specifically used in order for it’s fundamental properties to be most useful and adapt to the situation. Heat conductive or insulation, imperceptibility, rigidity, transparency .

The bowls and plates we eat from are conditioned by the shape and physical state of the food we intend to eat or prepare in them. But what if it were different, what if we had no porcelain or plastic? What if we had to make our own plates and bowls out of ready available materials. How would we make them? What would we make them out of? And most interestingly how would we use them?

Excluding most “normal” materials didn’t really leave me with much choice. Especially since cost of production had to be close to zero and the manufacturing would be done in my home. I looked around the kitchen and quite quickly decided that using flour would be the smartest and easiest choice. The interesting fact is that under many aspects working with bread is very similar to working with ceramics. They both come in a pulverized form, they both need water in order to make them mouldable and both need moulds for forming and heat for stabilizing.

So maybe making containers out of bread isn’t the most original of ideas, on the other hand we have plenty of examples where bread is already used as a food container, just think about a pizza or a kebab (or kebap) and in such case it’s not only a container, but a fundamental part of the meal. We decided to use this idea and expand on it. We would make edible containers, which were functional to use and pleasant to look at, strong enough to cut on and impermeable enough to hold soup.

If you would like to learn the secrets behind making these wonderful bread plates and bowls, drop us  a line. We are soon going to organize a little workshop where we can experiment, play and eat together from these super cool TourDeFork bread bowls. Hope to see you soon.

Thanks to Luca Intorrella for his photos.