Definition

The term mise en place comes from French culinary practices. It loosely translates to “putting in place” or “setting up”. In cooking, we generally use mise en place to mean preparing and organizing our ingredients before starting to cook. That includes things like cleaning and chopping vegetables, measuring out ingredients and preheating the oven. In a professional kitchen cooks often use “mise” to refer to their prepped ingredients. Like, “Hey, don’t touch my mise.”

Does the Home Cook Need It?

In a professional kitchen, it is a necessity to get the prep work done prior to the start of service when the real cooking begins. Not everyone agrees that it’s important for the home cook. Sara Moulton goes as far as saying it’s a waste of time for the home cook. I certainly agree that multi-tasking can save time. If the first step is to sauté bacon to render its fat and the next step is to add chopped onions, it makes sense to chop the onions while the bacon is sautéing. But, you might be surprised that this onion turns out to be one of those crazy, hard to peel individuals and it takes longer to get the job done than you thought. Your bacon then ends up overdone. Another example is when it’s time to add a teaspoon of smoked paprika to the pot. This should take no time. You go to your spice drawer and you can’t find the smoked paprika. You know it’s there, so you spend 2 minutes digging around, trying to find it. Finally, you give up. You need a substitute, and you must think a bit. OK, you have some chipotle powder. That’s smokey, like smoked paprika, but it brings more heat.  You decide it will work well enough. Now, what would have been 15 seconds actually ended up being 3 or 4 minutes.

There is some level of mise en place that is appropriate for each individual home cook and each particular recipe. The more experienced you are, the more that you can get away with multi-tasking. But even if you are experienced, you can still be surprised. I can say I get surprised due to a lack of mise en place more often than I look back at a cooking experience and think “boy, I really wasted time with mise en place before I started cooking.”

Expanded Definition

Also, understand that mise en place is more than just the preparation of ingredients before you start cooking. It is everything that goes into ensuring successful kitchen execution. The head chef performs mise en place while commuting to work as they organize their thoughts about what needs to happen with what priorities and timings to get the kitchen ready for service. The sous chef performs mise en place when they ask line cooks for status on their preparations and verify the quality of their work. Line cooks perform mise en place at the ends of their shifts when they fill out inventory reports which then guide the ordering of new stock. The home cook performs mise en place when they ask their child if they would like a special dinner for their birthday next week.

For the home cook, embracing mise en place can mean the difference between enjoyable, rewarding  kitchen success and messy, stressful kitchen failure. Again, mise en place doesn’t start when you begin preparing a meal. It includes things such as inventorying the pantry, making a grocery list and doing the grocery shopping. It also includes washing dishes after dinner, in preparation for the next day.

The concepts of mise en place can even be applied outside the kitchen. Dan Charnas has written a book on how to apply mise en place to your personal and professional life. Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind.