{"id":2041,"date":"2014-08-24T20:09:05","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T00:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/?p=2041"},"modified":"2014-08-24T20:09:05","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T00:09:05","slug":"mise-en-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/2014\/08\/24\/mise-en-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Mise En Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"kitchen<\/a><\/p>\n

The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm\u2019s reach, your defenses are deployed. <\/em><\/p>\n

That quote is from Anthony Bourdain\u2019s Kitchen Confidential<\/a>.\u00a0 A self-proclaimed rant fully intended for people in the business, they call it the culinary world now, not so much as an expose\u2019 but as an affirmation for Chefs.\u00a0 Written around the time the celebrity chef phenomenon was coming to life he truly believed it was a book for the real people in the kitchen.\u00a0 He wanted to uphold what every chef knows, cooking is hard.\u00a0 You try putting out meal after meal exactly the same way at the same quality.\u00a0 You try doing anything over and over with perfection, it\u2019s hard.<\/p>\n

There have been a few articles lately on the subject of mise en place.\u00a0 Pronounced meez ahn plass, literal translation, set in place.\u00a0 NPR\u2019s: The Salt did one titled:\u00a0 For a More Ordered Life, Organize Like A Chef.\u00a0 Their premise was if Americans were going to spend almost $10 billion dollars on personal organizing products they might want to adopt a mise en place mentality for a hell of a lot less.\u00a0 They did allude to the deeper meaning to the Chef by saying: \u201cSome cooks call it their religion. It helps them coordinate vast amounts of labor and material, and transforms the lives of its practitioners through focus and self-discipline.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 They went on to quote a senior at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) \u201cIt really is a way of life\u2026it\u2019s a way of concentrating your mind to only focus on the aspects that you need to be working on at that moment, to kind of rid yourself of distractions\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Ron Friedman recently wrote about \u201cHow to Spend the First 10 Minutes of Your Day for the Harvard Business Review.\u00a0\u00a0 Quoting none other than Anthony Bourdain, \u201cMise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook\u2019s \u2018meez\u2019 \u2014 meaning his setup, his carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system\u2026 <\/em>He left out some of the more floral language, obviously he hasn\u2019t worked in the business.<\/p>\n

There are productivity companies out there with mise en place in their name.\u00a0 They handle workflow management, paper management, email management, and e-document management.<\/p>\n

With all these people talking about mise en place as basic organization I take exception.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t been in food service in over twenty years (slowly but surely I\u2019m being dragged back in, in a good way this time) but I still live in mise en place.\u00a0 Good life management is mise en place.\u00a0\u00a0 Again, Anthony Bourdain, \u201cIf you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you\u2019ll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook\u2019s station in the middle of a rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He\u2019d press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side towel. \u201cYou see this?\u201d he\u2019d inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef\u2019s palm. \u201cThat\u2019s what the inside of your head looks like now.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t begin to tell you what the inside of my head looked like; I wasn\u2019t paying attention to my mise en place.\u00a0 I forgot to gather my ingredients, sharpen my knife, keep my board clean, I lived in Plan B.\u00a0 Plan B is NOT mise en place.\u00a0\u00a0 If you look around my home now I am surrounded by quality ingredients, not high end pricey \u201cstuff\u201d.\u00a0 I\u2019m surrounded by simple and meaningful.\u00a0 You could spend days walking around my tiny home with me and learning the stories of each of my possessions.<\/p>\n

A place for everything and everything in its place, thanks Ben Franklin.\u00a0 It makes life easy, every day is the same but different.\u00a0 It\u2019s the same in its simplicity, its creativity, and\u00a0its ease.\u00a0 I can sit at my desk and reach for anything I need.\u00a0 My tiny kitchen is perfect in its easy reach, organization, clean board, knives ready, fridge stocked.\u00a0 My poor Sister might never live down the day she inadvertently (or maybe not) rearranged the contents of my fridge, and took the bag that I keep my apples in\u2026I know how that sounds and I hope someday you\u2019ll be there with me. Just sayin.<\/p>\n

I have a list each day, it usually starts with an adjective, there\u2019s a goal and prioritizing exactly as Ron Friedman suggests.\u00a0 The list, or becoming one with the list as Wylie Dufresne, James Beard award winning chef and restaurant owner claims, is the basis for all good mise en place.\u00a0 It cements your creativity and makes it attainable in a clean and precise manner. \u00a0\u00a0The New Professional Chef puts it this way:\u00a0 \u201cmise en place means far more than simple assembling all the ingredients, pots and pans, plates and serving pieces needed for a particular period. Mise en place is also a state of mind. Someone who has truly grasped the concept is able to keep many tasks in mind simultaneously, weighing and assigning each is proper value and priority. This assures that the chef has anticipated and prepared for every situation.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Any good chef knows that prep is key.\u00a0 There is more time spent on prep than anything else.\u00a0 Menu development, recipe building, mise en place (prep) and the rest is production.\u00a0 If all goes well in the first two, production is instinctive and the benefits are delicious.\u00a0 Call it what you like but find some new religion <\/a>people.\u00a0 And, if you can, thank a chef.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[496,497,495],"class_list":["post-2041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pause-points","tag-chefs-know","tag-live-in-mise-en-place","tag-mise-en-place"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27hQ5-wV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2041"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2043,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions\/2043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ordinarylegacy.com\/word\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}