A Caterer’s Guide to Fresh Veggie Platters (Crudité)

I spent the last 10 years catering. Nearly every event, from formal fully staffed weddings to casual business luncheons with food delivered, ordered a fresh veggie platter (or crudité). Over the years I came to love and take pride in this simple dish. I love the flexibility of it. Incorporating the best of local produce and seeing how these platters evolved throughout the year as vegetables came in and out of seasonality. And in a hectic kitchen, building these platters took on a meditative aspect for me.

As I write this, we’re in the depths of the pandemic and it’s looking like my catering days are behind me. But someday, I will make food for other people again and in the meantime, it makes me happy to open my fridge and find these beautiful fresh vegetables, prepared with care and ready for easy and healthy snacking. Veggies prepped in this way will last a solid 5 days in the refrigerator, making it well worth the effort to stock up on a big container for the family to nibble on throughout the week.

5 Elements of a Perfect Platter

Quality of the Produce

First and foremost, quality matters with this dish as the vegetables are not cooked or seasoned. The best quality produce will be the stuff that is in-season when you buy it. I won’t buy tomatoes in the winter or spring months because I know I’ll be disappointed. If you shop at a Farmer’s Market or a local farm stand, every item there will be worthy of a crudité platter. If you are shopping at the grocery store, refer to the Seasonal Vegetables Table in this post to make the best choices and use a discerning eye to pick out the freshest vegetables.

Color

Pick out vegetables of assorted colors. Rainbow carrots add visual variety as do mixed sweet peppers, easter egg radishes, thin slices of Chioggia beets. Spring platters tend to be greener and more muted with asparagus, peas, endive, baby turnips, etc and summer platters feature bright warm colors that mimic the weather.

Texture and Shapes

The best cruité platters are rich with textures and shapes. I’ve seen a lot of platters where carrots, celery, and bell peppers are cut into uniform rectangles and then sorted in piles by vegetable type. These platters leave me feeling a little sad.

I like to retain as much of the natural shape of the vegetables as possible and embrace a little chaos by mixing them all together. It’s my way of paying respect to the ingredients and the natural order of things. I cut whole baby carrots and radishes lengthwise, retaining a little stem and a little of the taproot. I use whole endive leaves and display peas in their pods.

On a practical level, mixing the vegetables together instead of sorting by type means that at large events, people can grab an assortment with one tong-ful instead of holding up the line while they pick through each pile. When facing down 200 hungry people, these become important considerations.

The Sauce

Any dipping sauce or thick salad dressing works for these vegetables, be it store-bought hummus or home-made buttermilk ranch. I tend to prefer creamy-lemony dipping sauces or a warm garlicky bagna cauda sauce for winter and spring vegetables and hummus, or roasted red pepper tahini for the summer and fall vegetables.

At the restaurant, the sauce for these seasonal platters was dictated by whichever sauces and salad dressings were on the menu at any given time. I just used what we had on hand.

Garnishes

If you are making a platter for your own home that you plan on eating over several days, you may decide not to use any garnishes but if you are taking a platter over to a party or serving a crowd it can be fun to dress it up. Here are some simple ideas to garnish the platter:

• Edible flowers – there are a lot of different kinds. I use calendula, chive blossoms, sage blossoms, rosemary blossoms, and rose the most because I have all of these growing in my garden and at any given time, one of these is in flower.
• Vegetable Slices – Cross-sections of beets, radishes, and colorful carrots cut so thin they are slightly transparent and sprinkled around the platter is one of my favorite go-to garnishes. If your knife skills are good you can do this just with a knife, otherwise, you’ll want to use a mandolin. My most used vegetables for this are the Chioggia Beet (red and white striped interior that doesn’t bleed), and red/pink/purple/watermelon radishes.
• Chopped herbs – I’m not a big fan of chopped parsley as a garnish but chopped lime green celery leaves from the center of the heart and chives sliced into 1/4 inch long pieces or minced in cross-sections….
• Spices – A spinkle of za’atar over your hummus, ancho chili powder over Roasted Red Pepper Tahini or intense and dramatic black nigella seeds over light-colored winter/spring vegetables add visual appeal to your platter.
• Ice curled vegetable slices – Certain vegetables, when thinly sliced lengthwise, will curl when submerged in ice for a couple of hours. Asparagus peelings, thick carrot peelings (not the skin peelings but the inner part), green onion, and bell pepper all work well for this.

How to Choose Your Veggies

Vegetables that works the best for crudité are crunchy and crisp when raw. Starchy vegetables like potatoes or leafy greens like swiss chard don’t work as well, though sometimes I’ll boil off little potatoes the size of golf balls and serve those.

This dish is all about the quality of the produce and the best quality will be locally grown produce that is in season. If locally grown isn’t an option for you, the second-best bet is to buy the best looking in-season produce from the grocery store.

How to Prep Your Veggies

Each vegetable should be cleaned and cut in a way that highlights its natural shape.

Vegetables must be completely dried after washing them before they are added to the platter. Vegetables that are wet during storage will quickly turn slimy. Water and moisture can also spread germs. So if you are serving a group or your kids have dirty hands, the germs from those hands can travel to the whole platter if there is excessive moisture. Of course, the best practice would be to use tongs instead of bare hands.

Endive – Cut the base of the core and peel the individual leaves off. Endives are in season all year. I use these to add loft and volume to the platters and fill in empty spaces. There are two varieties, one is light green and the other is red. The red variety is particularly striking on the platter but harder to find. If you are making the platter for snacking on throughout the week, you may want to omit these as the leaves have a shorter shelf life than all the other vegetables.

Cauliflower – Cut the florets off in bit-size pieces. Stems can be sliced in rounds or sliced paper-thin as a garnish.

Little Potatoes – Small marble potatoes or variegated colors can be boiled for 10-20 minutes or until fork-tender, cooled, dried and served whole.

Small Cabbage – Remove whole leaves or slice cabbage lengthwise into wedges held together by the core. Works best for cabbages the size of two fists held together or smaller. Or bigger cabbages where the out leaves have been used for other uses until all that is left is a small cabbage. Red, Green, or Napa are all good.

Small Radicchio – Prep the same as the cabbage, but soak wedges or leaves in water for 20 minutes or so to cut back some of the bitterness. Some varieties or more bitter than others. Make sure the pieces are fully dry before adding them to the platter.

Asparagus – Trim the woody end off until you reach the tender part. Either halve lengthwise if thick or peel the bottom half with a vegetable peeler. Peelings can be soaked in ice water to curl and used as a garnish. If cut, place on platter cut side up.

Broccoli – Cut the florets off in bite-size pieces. Stems can be sliced in rounds or sliced paper-thin as a garnish.

Carrots – Ideally 6 inches long or less. Peel white, yellow and orange carrots. Wash purple and red carrots (peeling sometimes peels off the color of these). Cut the tops off leaving about half an inch of stem and half lengthwise. For larger carrots, I cut them in half and then cut those in half again on a big bias (diagonal). Place on the platter cut side up.

A note on the “Baby Carrots” you buy in the store. The “baby carrots” that come already peeled in a bag and are rounded on both ends are not actually baby carrots. They are large carrots that have been whittled down into that shape for reasons I do not fully understand. Often there is water in the bag with them and they border on slimy when you open them up. Prepped ready-to-eat vegetables that have been sitting in water for a long time just kind of give me the heeby-geebies so I do not use these. I also have a general distaste for anything that pretends to be something it’s not. I’m not into faux leather, faux stucco, or faux wood, and don’t get me started on faux meat.

Little Heads of Lettuce – Prep the same as cabbage.

Shelling Peas – Open up lengthwise. Discard the empty half. Serve the other half with the peas in it.

Radishes – Cut the tops off leaving about half an inch of stem and halve lengthwise. Place on the platter cut side up. Mixed colors of white, red, pink, and purple look really nice. Also good choices -the mild Icicle Radishes that are long and white and the French Breakfast Radishes that are half red and half white. Watermelon radishes tend to be really spicy and can be a bit woody, same with the Black Radish. These are good for slicing paper-thin and using as a garnish. Black radishes are best cooked, in my opinion.

Snow Pea – Leave whole.

Tokyo Turnips – These are often erroneously referred to as “baby turnips”. Tokyo turnips are white through and through, remain small when fully mature, and are sweet-bittersweet and crunchy when raw. I love these little turnips. Cut the tops off leaving about half an inch of stem and halve lengthwise. Place on the platter cut side up.

Green Beans and Yellow Wax Beans – Trim the stem end off. Serve raw or blanched for 1-2 minutes.

Cucumber – Cut lengthwise, remove the seeds with a spoon. Slice into 4-inch strips or semi-circles.

Peppers – Small sweet peppers (length of your thumb) can be halved. Place on the platter cut side up. For larger peppers, halve them, remove the seeds, remove the white pithy parts with a pairing knife and cut into strips.

Cherry Tomatoes – Leave whole. Try to find an assortment of some nice heirloom cherry tomatoes.

Corn on the Cob – Blanch for 5 minutes. Slice the cob into 1-inch rounds.

I hope this post inspires you to stock your fridge with beautiful locally grown fresh veggies. I’d love to see the platters you make. You can post pictures on our Facebook page or tag us in your Instagram posts.

This post was originally published on January 10, 2021