Do you love mise en place like I do?
Mise en place is a concept I’ve come to love because of the way it helps me think about routine and being organized.
It’s a culinary term that professional chefs use to mean everything in the right place. When you have your mise ready, all your ingredients and tools are prepped and organized on the line, set up in a way that makes it ultra-convenient for you to work through any recipe during service.
Having your mise en place helps with quality, too. The perfect placement of the spices, essential utensils organized just so, the backups ready at an arm’s length: a set up like this means the cook is prepared to complete any dish to perfection. This nightly setup includes a checklist and ensures that no essential ingredient is out of sight, or mind, or out of stock. Quality is built into the routine.
And it’s that routine that might be the most special thing about mise en place. For a professional chef, setting up their mise is a sort of ritualistic practice. It can induce a meditative-like state, where focus becomes so intense that someone could start talking to you and you might not even hear. This focus and prepared state of mind translates into poise and confidence on a busy night when the tickets start flying in.
You can imagine then, how this can apply to areas of life outside the kitchen, too. Think of the morning routine and getting the kids on the bus; or setting up for a presentation; or mise-ing your entire week.
Here are three places you can use the concept of mise en place to make this week run just a little bit smoother.
Mise en place in the kitchen
Mise en place works just as well in the home kitchen as it does in a professional one.
Even if you’re not much of a home cook, you can apply the concept of mise en place to just about anything you prepare in the kitchen. It doesn’t require anything fancy to be useful.
To keep it simple, you can take steps like these:
At the start of making dinner, pull out all the required ingredients and tools and get them on the counter. This includes the main ingredients, herbs and spices, oils, utensils, pots & pans, hot plates, serving plates, etc.
Organize by type of utensil and food item, and/or begin to put them in the spot they’ll be when you’re cooking. You can put pots and pans on the stove, food near the cutting board, spices where you’ll do your seasoning, etc..
Decide what steps you should do right away, before the food starts cooking. This might be: peeling and chopping; measuring and mixing; boiling water or warming up the oven
Pull out meat and season to allow for max absorption (except fish, which should be seasoned right before you put it on the heat)
Keep a small trash bag on the counter so you can stay on your spot as you prep (or use refuse from one of the ingredients (e.g. a box or bag))
And remember to keep your station clean
Over time you’ll figure out what you should start first, what you can start after the food starts cooking, and how you can keep up with cleaning and organization while the food is cooking.
The zen feeling is real, and it feels amazing to have a routine in the kitchen.
Mise en place in the morning
One reason mise en place improves efficiency in a professional kitchen is because it reduces the cognitive and physical load on the cooks.
Imagine a cook on a busy line having to go search through the shelves and pantry any time they got a new ticket? Or, if all their essentials were placed in a different spot every time they started to cook?
They’d have no energy or brain power left to actually prepare the food.
A morning that is chaotic, filled with searching, scrambling and running behind is also a brain drain. In the busyness of the morning, having everything in the right place can reduce mental strain and unpredictability.
It’s especially important at the start of the day when our brains are tired and we’re still waking up.
A perfect morning routine should look different for everyone, but the underlying constant is that it reduces effort, choice, mental strain and unpredictability. There will always be some of those (or all, sometimes), so staying on top of the predictable helps to cut out unneeded friction in the early hours of the day.
If it seems like a burden to do the night before, woosh - just wait til you have to do it in the morning.
For some, that zen-like feeling can be invoked with a steady, well-rehearsed morning routine. Whether that’s through an ice bath or an iced coffee it doesn’t matter, but there’s definitely something to seize by developing a set routine during the opening hours of the day.
Mise en place the week
How much of the upcoming week can be predicted on a Saturday and Sunday? What can be set up beforehand to make it run just a little bit smoother?
Obvious ideas could be like laundry, dishes, cleaning up and removing any clutter so you are starting the week off fresh.
It could be as involved as prepping meals for the week, or as simple as writing down what’s for dinner each night.
Planning or reviewing your schedule is like giving the recipes a final rundown before service. What are this week’s staples, and are there any specials?
This time also allows time for planning the stuff we always forget to plan (even if it's the most important stuff) - when am I going to take a break? When am I going to make that call I’ve been putting off? When am I going to bed each night?
One spot where the mise en place analogy breaks down is that, in some areas of life we don’t have to respond to incoming “dinner tickets;” we get to decide if we want to do them or not. Getting your mise set up helps make those optional (and sometimes undesirable) tasks easier to tackle because the fiction is removed; and, if not because you’ve removed friction from the task itself, then because you’ve spent less energy handling the predictable.
There are probably too many ingredients in any given morning or week to plan out exactly as you’d like, but what if just 50% of the easily-avoidable could be avoided? What if just 20% went away?
Mise en place for the win
You don’t have to be a chef to enjoy the benefits of mise en place. It’s an easy way to keep things organized and iron out the kinks in a morning routine, and to ensure a week is planned appropriately, with all the ingredients prepped and ready to go.
Plus, it’s a fun way to make home cooking just a little bit easier, and feel just a little more professional.
What will you mise this week?
