Practice “Mise En Place” to Prevent Recipe Mistakes
Practicing “mise en place” (Photo by Alice Henneman)
Avoid missing recipe ingredients by practicing “mise en place!”
Pronounced (MEEZ ahn plahs), this is a French term that means to have all your ingredients assembled before starting a recipe.
This is why it is so important …
By practicing mise en place, you may avoid such cooking catastrophes as:
- Forgetting to add the baking power to a batch of cookies.
- Discovering you needed to do some time-consuming preparation before starting a recipe, such as letting some ingredients come to room temperature.
- Learning you are missing an important ingredient and you don’t have time to go to the store.
- Frantically slicing, dicing, measuring, etc. each ingredient as you need it.
Mise en place also makes complicated recipes more fun to prepare when you’re no longer juggling several preparation steps at once.
I like to use small dishes and custard cups to hold many of my items. You may also be able to find “mini” or “pinch” bowls in a local or online store that sells cooking equipment.
