Mise en place is actually a very helpful cooking technique, as it will keep you organized and likely stop you from missing something critical. It’s a French phrase, literally meaning “set[ting] in place.” The basic concept that is that before you even butter the dish or pre-heat the oven, you have all of your ingredients, tools, and cookware ready to go for the next step in the process. If you watch cooking shows a lot, then you see this all the time–Ina always dumps her ingredients into the mixer, one right after the other, all in pre-measured quantities.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you need to prepare all the little condiment dishes like all the cooking shows, but you should have some kind of system. I usually just pull all my ingredients together on the counter in roughly the order that I’m going to use them. I never take the measuring spoons off their ring (this drives my wife crazy, but it drives me equally so when I have to put them back on after she cooks). And I have my bowls, spatulas, pans, cooking spray, everything possible within reach before I even start to mix.
Of course, this is the ideal and it doesn’t always happen. My wife has been wanting a cake for the last several weeks (I’m not sure about the craving, but, trust me, there’s not a bun in the oven, even if there is a cake there!). In fact, before I left for choir practice tonight, she said I had to bring her home a cake. I did not. So, to make things right, I pulled down one of the boxed cake mixes from the pantry (bad, right? I’m not much of a baker because I’ve just never tried) and dumped it into our mixer. I tried to soften some butter, but melted it instead (Hal’s Hint: microwaving at 10% power for 1 minute is still enough to melt butter). I finally got the butter right, just to realize I didn’t have enough eggs.
About this time, my wife comes downstairs and says, “But we don’t have any frosting!” I said “I’ll make some!” but she insisted that if I was going to make this cake, I needed to go to the store and pick up some eggs. So, I just picked up some frosting, too.
Good thing, because when I got home, I discovered there was not enough powdered sugar to make the frosting.
And do you know what? All this would have been avoided if I had just practiced mise en place. Now you know.
Oh, and my wife wasn’t that serious about the cake, but she has been craving one for a while.
Special thanks to Wolftrouble on flickr for the photo. The image is protected under a creative commons license, which basically means I can use this image without royalty as I see fit, as long as I credit the source. Yay for the internets!
