(My apologies in advance to the late great Anthony Bourdain, who I have in part ripped off for this blog, the idea of breaking down a pro's mise en place was his, he did it in the excellent "Les Halles Cookbook" which, if you don't have, you should; but it seemed pretty apt for the time, and I can assure you that the words are very much mine)
One of the common archetypes of a certain sort of fiction is the person who can't help but bring their work home with them, the workaholic who can't switch off. There's generally a moment of clarity about half way to two thirds through when their child or significant other yells some damning imprecation at them, and they learn the error of their ways. They loosen up, make more time for family, realise that there's more to life than work. Then, because you can't have a life lesson in this sort of fiction and then just get on with things, the person that taught them the life lesson dies in the penultimate chapter. And the moral of the story is, don't interfere, I think.
Now, rest assured, I have had no such conversion, it wasn't necessary. I'm well aware that there's more to life than work, for a long time, it was what I thought about when I was in work. Cleaning down a kitchen at two in the morning thinking "y'know, I'd quite like to see what all this life business is about" gives you a fairly robust view as to where to pace the thumb on the scales of the work life balance.
But now I am one of the furloughed I am, I confess, bringing my work home with me. Well, to an extent. I am in the happy position of my work corresponding with one of my interests, and whilst I am now the chef of my house as opposed to being the chef of a busy restaurant, a few of my professional habits have come home with me, as the home kitchen comes to resemble, in part, my work one. So I thought I'd share a few of these cheffy shortcuts with you, given that I'd imagine that you're doing quite a lot of cooking, too.
To a professional cook, their mise-en-place is their everything. Simply put, it's knowing that everything is in its place. On my station (saute) at work I will have everything I need to finish dishes a la minute: seasoning, wine, cream, butter, that sort of thing. If you open up the flip-top of my service fridge you will normally see a number of small refrigerated compartments each containing elements that I need to keep chilled, but which have already been partially prepared; chopped parsley, sliced chorizo (for burgers) diced chorizo (for jambalaya), there is always a pot of cooked onions (I'll get to the importance of this in minute). In the fridges beneath the top, everything else I'll need sits, arranged by shelf, clearly labelled. The steaks, the fish, everything raw on the bottom, the prepared dishes on the top. There is always, always stock. Chicken stock, vegetable stock, lamb stock. At the start and the finish of a shift, I check the levels of everything, and note what I need. This is my mise-en-place. Everything I need to crank out a shedload of decent quality meals quickly but to a standard which I'm reliably informed is high enough to get away with charging what we charge, it's what stands between me and utter chaos.
Now, whilst I'm not suggesting that you have a large service fridge within easy reach of your stove at home, and you probably don't need to have batches of hotpot or chilli ready to go at a moment's notice, there are a few things which you can do at home to make your cooking life a little bit easier. There are a few basic aspects of my mise-en that I also do at home, and it doesn't half make life easier.
Butter. People often wonder why they can't replicate restaurant cooking at home. The simple answer is butter. You see, we don't care about your arteries, we want you to have a nice time, think "ooh, that was lovely", and come back. So there's always butter, stirred into a sauce at the last minute, basted over a piece of meat at the last minute, immediately to hand for emergency sauces, and (and this is the crucial bit) don't keep it in the fridge. Amazingly, lots of people still do this. Room temperature butter will not kill you. What might kill you is stabbing desperately at a block of rock-hard stuff that you need to slide under the skin of a roasting chicken. It needs to be soft. A butter dish near the stove can help work wonders.
Garlic. If you have a garlic press, throw it out. They're worse than useless, you lose half of it. At work I'll normally have a pot of garlic which I've pureed with oil (I say "I", I've made some poor sod of a KP do it, my years of making vast batches of garlic puree are very much behind me). To peel your garlic, smash the clove underneath the flat of a knife, when you've got a enough, blitz it with a neutral oil, rapeseed or vegetable (olive tastes too strong) and keep it in a screw top jar in the fridge. Health regulations demand that I tell you it'll be fine for three days (but it'll be fine for longer). A brief digression about screw top jars here, always have a stash to hand, they come in amazingly useful, I've normally got half a dozen repurposed jars of various sizes knocking around. If you're feeling super-fancy, you can roast the garlic first for a wonderful depth of flavour. If you can't be arsed making puree, the simplest way to prep garlic is to use the fine side of a grater rather than try to chop it with your probably blunt as hell kitchen knives.
Fat. If you roast a chicken (or, glory be, a duck). KEEP THE FAT (this is where your screw top jars come in handy). Cook stuff in it. Thank me later. My walk-in fridge at work has a box with a jealously guarded hoard of rendered duck fat in it which I use for confit (which, simply put, means cooking things immersed in fat). Whilst you're unlikely to be able to get or store the quantity I use at home, even a little goes a long way. Try laying some garlic cloves in a small dish, and covering them with fat (then cover the dish with foil). When cooked (medium oven, about 40 mins ish) take them out and mash them into a paste. Bake a jacket potato, when it's done, scoop the flesh out, mash it with your confit garlic paste and pop it back in the oven for ten minutes.
Stock. This one is, admittedly, a little bit trickier, but it does make a difference. I've generally got a few old takeaway cartons full of stock in the freezer. Cubes and jelly pots are fine (the knorr stock-pots are perfectly decent), but they haven't got the something something that a proper stock brings to the dish. Throw a bit in your chilli as it cooks out, make gravy-making a breeze. Most cook book stock recipes are formidably off-putting. There's no real magic to it, if you've got some bones, roast them (if they're from a roast, don't bother). Chuck them in a pot with some water, onion, celery, carrot (probably best not garlic to start off with, it has a tendency to take over) a bayleaf if you've got one knocking about. Roasting a tomato or two and chucking them in deepens the colour, as will roasting the other stock veg. Resist the temptation to chuck all the odds and sods in, too much veg in with the stock and it will start to take some of the flavour out, unless you're making a veg stock, in which case there's no such thing as too much veg. Cook it for a few hours (never boil it). Strain it, chill it and tub it up. If you've time on your hands, reduce it down yet further and freeze it in ice cube trays, ready to pop out for an instant hit of flavour whenever you need it. When you've got the hang of this then you can go nuts, chicken, beef, veggie, fish (just remember that you can't use oily fish bones in fish stock, and on no account let the gills go anywhere near it). All stock freezes well and can be a life-saver at the right time. If you're feeling particularly thrifty, you can make a second stock from the same set of bones: this is called remouillage, and because it's got a fancy French name that means that it's a totally legit thing to do in the kitchen. If you want to be able to grandly say "I made stock today" without putting the slightest effort in, boil a bone-in ham hock. The resulting liquor is deeply savoury without you doing anything else to it at all (of course, if you do do other things, it will be better). I've sold this with some green split peas and a bit of onion in at six quid a bowl and nobody bats an eyelid. Because it's gorgeous. Without wishing to give too much of the pricing game away, a pea and ham soup on the starters means you can afford to knock a quid off a couple of the mains, it's an absolute GP (Gross Profit) hero.
Onions (told you I'd get to them). This is more by way of advice than anything else. Onions take longer to cook than you think. Always. I've worked in kitchens for coming up to thirty years and I still go, bloody hell, is that onion not cooked yet? At work, I have the luxury of a tub of onions which have already been slowly sweated until they're at their soft, sweet, just shy of caramelised spot; which is where I can use them to cut twenty minutes off the cooking time of a dish. I'm not suggesting you do this, it's a bit of a faff, and unless you're VERY confident that you're going to use them quickly, they go a bit fizzy after a day or so. However, cooking the onions off is a job which can be done way, way ahead of time, bung them on at some point during the day, and when you come to cook dinner, you're half-way there already. If you want to be fancy, use shallots, I do for some dishes, but my unit cost percentage bloody loves onions.
As the title alludes, there are a few more bits and bobs which I find handy and which you may, too, but that'll do to be going on with (translation: if I don't have any other ideas for a blog then there's one ready to go, which saves a little time for the important business of staring off into the middle distance and wondering how long until lunch) until some other time. Toodle pip.
One of the common archetypes of a certain sort of fiction is the person who can't help but bring their work home with them, the workaholic who can't switch off. There's generally a moment of clarity about half way to two thirds through when their child or significant other yells some damning imprecation at them, and they learn the error of their ways. They loosen up, make more time for family, realise that there's more to life than work. Then, because you can't have a life lesson in this sort of fiction and then just get on with things, the person that taught them the life lesson dies in the penultimate chapter. And the moral of the story is, don't interfere, I think.
Now, rest assured, I have had no such conversion, it wasn't necessary. I'm well aware that there's more to life than work, for a long time, it was what I thought about when I was in work. Cleaning down a kitchen at two in the morning thinking "y'know, I'd quite like to see what all this life business is about" gives you a fairly robust view as to where to pace the thumb on the scales of the work life balance.
But now I am one of the furloughed I am, I confess, bringing my work home with me. Well, to an extent. I am in the happy position of my work corresponding with one of my interests, and whilst I am now the chef of my house as opposed to being the chef of a busy restaurant, a few of my professional habits have come home with me, as the home kitchen comes to resemble, in part, my work one. So I thought I'd share a few of these cheffy shortcuts with you, given that I'd imagine that you're doing quite a lot of cooking, too.
To a professional cook, their mise-en-place is their everything. Simply put, it's knowing that everything is in its place. On my station (saute) at work I will have everything I need to finish dishes a la minute: seasoning, wine, cream, butter, that sort of thing. If you open up the flip-top of my service fridge you will normally see a number of small refrigerated compartments each containing elements that I need to keep chilled, but which have already been partially prepared; chopped parsley, sliced chorizo (for burgers) diced chorizo (for jambalaya), there is always a pot of cooked onions (I'll get to the importance of this in minute). In the fridges beneath the top, everything else I'll need sits, arranged by shelf, clearly labelled. The steaks, the fish, everything raw on the bottom, the prepared dishes on the top. There is always, always stock. Chicken stock, vegetable stock, lamb stock. At the start and the finish of a shift, I check the levels of everything, and note what I need. This is my mise-en-place. Everything I need to crank out a shedload of decent quality meals quickly but to a standard which I'm reliably informed is high enough to get away with charging what we charge, it's what stands between me and utter chaos.
Now, whilst I'm not suggesting that you have a large service fridge within easy reach of your stove at home, and you probably don't need to have batches of hotpot or chilli ready to go at a moment's notice, there are a few things which you can do at home to make your cooking life a little bit easier. There are a few basic aspects of my mise-en that I also do at home, and it doesn't half make life easier.
Butter. People often wonder why they can't replicate restaurant cooking at home. The simple answer is butter. You see, we don't care about your arteries, we want you to have a nice time, think "ooh, that was lovely", and come back. So there's always butter, stirred into a sauce at the last minute, basted over a piece of meat at the last minute, immediately to hand for emergency sauces, and (and this is the crucial bit) don't keep it in the fridge. Amazingly, lots of people still do this. Room temperature butter will not kill you. What might kill you is stabbing desperately at a block of rock-hard stuff that you need to slide under the skin of a roasting chicken. It needs to be soft. A butter dish near the stove can help work wonders.
Garlic. If you have a garlic press, throw it out. They're worse than useless, you lose half of it. At work I'll normally have a pot of garlic which I've pureed with oil (I say "I", I've made some poor sod of a KP do it, my years of making vast batches of garlic puree are very much behind me). To peel your garlic, smash the clove underneath the flat of a knife, when you've got a enough, blitz it with a neutral oil, rapeseed or vegetable (olive tastes too strong) and keep it in a screw top jar in the fridge. Health regulations demand that I tell you it'll be fine for three days (but it'll be fine for longer). A brief digression about screw top jars here, always have a stash to hand, they come in amazingly useful, I've normally got half a dozen repurposed jars of various sizes knocking around. If you're feeling super-fancy, you can roast the garlic first for a wonderful depth of flavour. If you can't be arsed making puree, the simplest way to prep garlic is to use the fine side of a grater rather than try to chop it with your probably blunt as hell kitchen knives.
Fat. If you roast a chicken (or, glory be, a duck). KEEP THE FAT (this is where your screw top jars come in handy). Cook stuff in it. Thank me later. My walk-in fridge at work has a box with a jealously guarded hoard of rendered duck fat in it which I use for confit (which, simply put, means cooking things immersed in fat). Whilst you're unlikely to be able to get or store the quantity I use at home, even a little goes a long way. Try laying some garlic cloves in a small dish, and covering them with fat (then cover the dish with foil). When cooked (medium oven, about 40 mins ish) take them out and mash them into a paste. Bake a jacket potato, when it's done, scoop the flesh out, mash it with your confit garlic paste and pop it back in the oven for ten minutes.
Stock. This one is, admittedly, a little bit trickier, but it does make a difference. I've generally got a few old takeaway cartons full of stock in the freezer. Cubes and jelly pots are fine (the knorr stock-pots are perfectly decent), but they haven't got the something something that a proper stock brings to the dish. Throw a bit in your chilli as it cooks out, make gravy-making a breeze. Most cook book stock recipes are formidably off-putting. There's no real magic to it, if you've got some bones, roast them (if they're from a roast, don't bother). Chuck them in a pot with some water, onion, celery, carrot (probably best not garlic to start off with, it has a tendency to take over) a bayleaf if you've got one knocking about. Roasting a tomato or two and chucking them in deepens the colour, as will roasting the other stock veg. Resist the temptation to chuck all the odds and sods in, too much veg in with the stock and it will start to take some of the flavour out, unless you're making a veg stock, in which case there's no such thing as too much veg. Cook it for a few hours (never boil it). Strain it, chill it and tub it up. If you've time on your hands, reduce it down yet further and freeze it in ice cube trays, ready to pop out for an instant hit of flavour whenever you need it. When you've got the hang of this then you can go nuts, chicken, beef, veggie, fish (just remember that you can't use oily fish bones in fish stock, and on no account let the gills go anywhere near it). All stock freezes well and can be a life-saver at the right time. If you're feeling particularly thrifty, you can make a second stock from the same set of bones: this is called remouillage, and because it's got a fancy French name that means that it's a totally legit thing to do in the kitchen. If you want to be able to grandly say "I made stock today" without putting the slightest effort in, boil a bone-in ham hock. The resulting liquor is deeply savoury without you doing anything else to it at all (of course, if you do do other things, it will be better). I've sold this with some green split peas and a bit of onion in at six quid a bowl and nobody bats an eyelid. Because it's gorgeous. Without wishing to give too much of the pricing game away, a pea and ham soup on the starters means you can afford to knock a quid off a couple of the mains, it's an absolute GP (Gross Profit) hero.
Onions (told you I'd get to them). This is more by way of advice than anything else. Onions take longer to cook than you think. Always. I've worked in kitchens for coming up to thirty years and I still go, bloody hell, is that onion not cooked yet? At work, I have the luxury of a tub of onions which have already been slowly sweated until they're at their soft, sweet, just shy of caramelised spot; which is where I can use them to cut twenty minutes off the cooking time of a dish. I'm not suggesting you do this, it's a bit of a faff, and unless you're VERY confident that you're going to use them quickly, they go a bit fizzy after a day or so. However, cooking the onions off is a job which can be done way, way ahead of time, bung them on at some point during the day, and when you come to cook dinner, you're half-way there already. If you want to be fancy, use shallots, I do for some dishes, but my unit cost percentage bloody loves onions.
As the title alludes, there are a few more bits and bobs which I find handy and which you may, too, but that'll do to be going on with (translation: if I don't have any other ideas for a blog then there's one ready to go, which saves a little time for the important business of staring off into the middle distance and wondering how long until lunch) until some other time. Toodle pip.
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