mise en place for the home cook

Mise en place /miz ɑ̃ plas/
noun
proper planning of equipment and ingredients for food service

If you read cookbooks or watch cooking shows you have heard the term Mise en place. It seem like a fancy french word that is only important to professional chefs, but I assure you it is not. Understanding and putting the practice of Mise en place to work for you in the kitchen will make every meal and party 10x’s easier for you.

When restaurant chefs talk about Mise en place they mean that each person in the kitchen should have all the ingredients they will use for the night cut, prepped and within arms reach. They will also have all of their tool (pots, pans, knives, etc.) in place and ready for use. This keeps everyone at their spot working efficiently through the night. Instead of the alternative, chefs running through the kitchen trying to cut onions for the dish that was supposed to be in the oven 5 minutes ago. The service to your table would not be as smooth if dishes were coming out at different times and there was chaos in the kitchen. This is no different in your kitchen

How do you start cooking a recipe? Do you read the recipe and as the steps mention ingredients you cut them only to find out that in step 3 you were suppose to save some of the onion you used in step 1? Now you are at step 3 and all your onion is already sautéed in a pan! This could be easily avoided.

clean your kitchen & clear your mind
Preparing to cook is as important as cooking. Starting with a clean kitchen allows you to have more room to move and fewer obstacles in your way. If you are constantly moving dirty dishes to make room for what you are working on it is going to slow you down. So much so the prep time for the recipe could take you twice as long. Instead take the 10 minutes to tidy up the kitchen and mentally prepare to cook. If you are busy running through your to do list you are so much more likely to misread the recipe or forget an ingredient. Forget everything for a moment and and prepare to enjoy creating something in the kitchen. Before you start, focus on what you are doing and the steps that need to be done.

read the entire recipe & gather your ingredients and tools
Read the entire recipe and give some thought to how long each step takes. Get a plan together so you know what time you need to have something in the oven or on the stove to ensure dinner will be on the table at your planned time. Now gather all the ingredients you are going to need and any tools. I try to gather my ingredients and set my pots or pans out on the stove before I start chopping anything. The rest of the tools are within arms reach so I don’t worry about dragging everything out during this step. This is also where I preheat the oven if needed.

preps all your ingredients
Chop, dice, mince, wash, whatever it is the recipe calls for get it done now. Put each ingredient in a small bowl so it is easy to grab when you are ready for it. It may seem like overkill but I promise you it will make the actual cooking time that much smoother. They don’t do this on the cooking shows for no reason. They do it because it is more efficient. If dishes aren’t your thing you can use paper towel, or paper plates. Just get it all prepped and ready before you even heat the oil in the pan.

read the recipe again
Now that you are all prepped, read through the recipe and make sure all the steps make sense. You might catch a step here that you missed earlier that will save you frustration down the road.

cook
With everything in front of you start cooking. After a couple of times through the recipe and all your ingredients ready to go you will find even the most complicated recipes will seem easy.

What other kitchen terms would you like explained? Something keep coming up in a cookbook or on a show that you wish made more sense? Leave it in the comments and I will get to it in future kitchen vocab pieces.

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