Are you overdoing prep work in the kitchen?
July 7, 2012 by Lindsay
On Sara Moulton’s website, she has an interesting
article that’s creating some buzz in the food world.
Whereas cookbooks, videos, and blogs have – at least for the last
10 years – argued that home cooks should always prep and
measure ingredients before starting to cook (a practice
professional chefs call “mise en place”), Sara has decided this
practice is mostly a waste of time. As she writes:
“I take my life into my own hands by saying this. I’m sure all my chef instructors from my alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America, will want to shoot me at dawn. But here is what I have discovered from cooking dinner at home 5 or 6 nights a week for the last 25 years – mise en place (meaning, prepping and measuring all your ingredients before starting a recipe) is a waste of time, literally.”
To demonstrate her point, Sara walks through a hamburger recipe, noting that prepping it would have roughly doubled her time. Instead she shows how to look at the recipe and minimize the time needed to prep, largely by starting some ingredients cooking while prepping others.
However, she does admonish that there are two times when prepping is essential:
- When making any kind of Asian food that involves a lot of ingredients (each ingredient might spend 30 seconds in the pan, so if you are still mincing your chiles while the garlic and ginger is being stir fried, your garlic/ginger mixture will burn).
- When cooking in a restaurant
While we agree with her for the most part, sometimes prepping before starting a baking recipe can prevent the dreaded “skipping the baking powder” or “oversalting” problems that we’ve all experienced. But, overall, reading a recipe a few times and planning some time-saving steps truly can’t hurt. We’d love to hear your opinions – do you prep everything or just occasionally?
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