Purple Kale Kitchenworks’ instruction focuses on mise en place for the home. Mise en place refers to a readied cook’s station, where everything–from ingredients to equipment–is set up for elegant and efficient assembly of a meal. The basic idea of mise en place is familiar to fans of cooking shows, where little glass bowls coddle TV-ready ingredients for the glib assembly of stylized food. In other words, TV borrows the idea of pre-preparing ingredients from the professional kitchen, although it does so mainly for visual effect, and to squeeze an entire recipe into slots between commercials. Lost is any real instruction on adapting the professional method to the home.

Mise en place is the backbone of any commercial kitchen. But it looks quite different than what we see on TV. A celebrity chef’s pretty little bowls are to commercial mise en place as paint by numbers is to great art.

In a professional setting, mise en place is often quite elaborate. It conforms to a kitchen’s physical constraints (can a burner be entirely devoted to making crepes, or should the crepes be made entirely ahead of time?), a menu’s ingredients and their preparation (slowly braised octopus, for example, is impossible to cook from scratch, to order), a cook’s abilities (can the chef fillet each fish upon request or would she need to do this in advance?), the pace of service (if twelve orders of risotto came into the kitchen at once, could the chef cook each one from scratch with only two burners free?), and the restaurant’s standards (would a chef allow for duck breasts to be seared in advance, or are they prepared completely to order?).

Open kitchens provide a glimpse of mise en place at work, but customers rarely see the stockpile of prep backing up the publicly viewed cook’s station. I thought I’d post some shots of it here.

The following photos are taken from inside highly regarded Rose Water restaurant, in Brooklyn, New York, during service set up on a recent Monday night.

Rose Water's kitchen

Setting up stations

(As an aside, you should note that this kitchen is smaller, in total square feet (225), than those in most suburban homes. Cooks have little room to move, but they have everything they need to assemble the dishes on their menu within reach. Here, as at home, organization trumps size. Another benefit of mise en place.)

How does all this work? Rose Water’s executive chef, Bret Macris, describes preparing a grilled octopus appetizer:

“First, the octopus is cooked slowly in red wine and olive oil. We braise it for hours, depending on its size, with many aromatics: ginger, onions, jalapeno, fresh thyme, lemon and orange, among others. Once the octopus is just tender, we pull it out of the liquid, and chill it down. We remove the tentacles from the body to marinate, after first removing any excess skin or suckers. Many of the same vegetables and aromatics that flavor the braise go into the marinade, too. When an order for octopus comes in, we lift the tentacles from the marinade, season lightly, and toss on the grill. We complete the plate with a red pepper coulis (prepared ahead of time with red bell peppers, jalapeno, salt, olive oil, a touch of lemon and a little water) and watermelon, diced and tossed with lemon juice, mint and parsley.”

Octopus, braised

Octopus, prepped at station

step one, red pepper coulis

step two, watermelon

step three, octopus

the appetizer, plated

What takes a cook at Rose Water two minutes to prepare on the kitchen line represents, in essence, hours of advance work. This is what distinguishes restaurant-quality cooking from most of what we do at home.

Rose Water shows how much work and care chefs put into making great meals, but also how simple assembling a well-prepared dish can be. More importantly, it clues us into how such organization can work for us cooks at home. Whether or not octopus is on the menu for our family’s weeknight dinner, the strategy of advanced preparation–of cooking to what Purple Kale calls a “Holding Point“–is the same. Mise en place is arguably as much about strategy as skill: we can apply it to things we cook often to shorten the time it takes to get meals on the table, allowing us to also add new, more ambitious dishes to what we usually cook. And, if we’re really on top of things, we can begin to stock our pantries with enough thoughtfully prepared ingredients to improvise meals ourselves.

You can find examples of “mise-d” dishes from home by searching this blog under “menus.” As promised, I will upload many more when time allows.

To learn more: http://www.purplekale.com/workshops/.

Enjoy.
Ronna