“Mise en Place” is fancy French for Cooking Prep work. Literally it means “Put in Place”. This covers all of the putting in place of ingredients ready to cook. The following steps cover “Mise en Place”.
- Collect all of the ingredients needed for the dish
- Measure out the appropriate quantities needed
- Cut, chop, dice, julienne, brunoise appropriate ingredients.
Sometimes a Mise en Place might actually entail cooking something. For example a Green bean salad with almonds may call for blanched green beans and roasted slivered almonds; this means there is the cooking process of blanching the green beans and shocking them to stop the cooking before your Mise en Place for the salad is complete.
So Mise en Place for one dish might spawn other Mise en Places recursively. C’est La Vie… I cannot overstate the importance of this process. Getting everything ready just makes the cooking go faster, smoother and you don’t forget that last ingredient that needed to be added and in your hurry as the stove is going and you want to avoid overcooking something you miss adding it. Ergo, it is worth the extra minutes to put everything in its place…
An Example Mise en Place for a Paella from the website Passport dinners below to demonstrate
