Setting yourself up for success
Mise en place is a French culinary term used in cooking schools that means “setting in place.” It describes the act of gathering and preparing all of your ingredients, tools and equipment, before you start the cooking process. It’s kind of like a surgical team preparing for an operation where they have all the tools, equipment, and supplies on hand so that they can focus on the task at hand without scrambling for things during the procedure.
In professional kitchens, cooks prepare for service hours before the actual service begins. They prep, chop and portion all the ingredients for the dishes they will prepare, make their sauce bases, blanch ingredients, have all their garnishes ready, hot plates in the warmer, and all their tools at the ready. This is how they are able to prepare hundreds of meals quickly and smoothly.
Although mise en place refers to the physical setup of the cooking process, it also touches on your mental readiness to get the job done. A cook with the right mindset can focus on the tasks at hand and can execute without distraction. For you, the learner, it’s critically important that you can focus on practicing the techniques behind successful cooking, and that you can pay attention to the visual and auditory queues during the cooking process so you can react accordingly.
Moving forward on Swich, you’ll note that almost all of our recipes talk about setting up your mise en place before any cooking begins. This even means gathering all required tools and equipment. We promise that if you make this switch before you start cooking, the process will be a whole lot more fun.
Watch the following video
Storing your mise en place
Over time, you will collect and develop a cache of tools and equipment for your kitchen that will allow you to cook with ease throughout the week. For now though, some very basic tools will help you get started such as
- small bowls of any kind or material – this will be for your prepped ingredients
- small pinch bowls for your spices and seasonings
- measuring cups and spoons
- storage containers (freezer bags, mason jars, or even ziplock bags etc.)
You don’t have to spend a lot of money on these, but you do need to have a good supply of these in order to transform how you cook. Prepping ingredients and trying to measure things out during the cooking process should be a practice of the past.
