Prepreparation Part 1

Go into a Yacht Club kitchen any mid-afternoon in summer. It hums with noise and action. Pans and trays clatter on counters; knives rap out staccato beats on cutting boards. A cook's mallet thumps veal down to scaloppini thinness. Water gushes from taps as vegetables are washed. A rush of steam hisses from the cabinet steamer. Five prime ribs are sizzling gently in the convection oven. Pans splutter to themselves on the range. The mixer motor is rumbling hoarsely. The exhaust fans are humming. "Hot stuff coming through!" shouts a cook. "Somebody's burning the butter!" yells another.

All the cooks are intently busy. There is a formidable sense of bustle and hustle. Yet serving time is several hours away, and except for soup, prime rib, baked potatoes, and rice, every menu item will be finished in the few minutes before it is served. So what is every-one doing?

The blanket term for all this activity is preparation. In the hours before serving time not only the cooks but numbers of other persons from the executive chef to the kitchen helpers and potwashers are engaged in numberless tasks that add up to precooking readiness.

As the serving hour draws near, a great crescendo of noise and activity crests and then suddenly subsides. Everything comes into sync. Quiet descends, and the cooks wait, relaxed and confident, for the first orders of the evening.

At such a moment the old-school continental chef used to sit down to his glass of Pernod to savor the interlude of readiness that formed the threshold of triumphs to follow. Today it is a coffee break, or a split between shifts, and time out for the employee meal. In continuous-service operations there's no such moment; pre-preparation and preparation go on simultaneously all the time.

In this next series of articles we will look at some of the many tasks and techniques of pre-preparation. This is an area neglected by most books on cookery, and yet it can make or break a dish, or a meal, or a restaurant.

After completing this series you should be able to, understand the importance of pre-preparation and the meaning and importance of mise en place. Clean fresh produce properly. Use and care for knives and cutting machines correctly, and choose the appropriate tool or machine for the task. Identify and produce standard food cuts. Define and carry out basic processing techniques. Hold and store foods properly for sanitation and product quality and organize a production task or station efficiently.

THE MEANING OF PREPREPARATION

The tasks involved in turning raw products into menu dishes are separated into two groups: those that can be done ahead and those that are finished at or just before serving time. The terms used to describe this division of tasks are pre-preparation (oftener shortened in kitchen jargon to preprep) and final preparation, or finish cooking.

If you were to make a casserole of chicken tetrazzini, for example, you would cook the spaghetti and the chicken ahead of time. You would dice the chicken, sauté the mushrooms, make the sauce, and grate the cheese ahead of time, and you would assemble the dish in the casserole. All this is prepreparation. The only steps left for final preparation are to heat the dish and glaze it.

In food production everything that is possible to do ahead is done ahead—preprepared. This is partly because there is a great deal left that cannot be done ahead, partly because it is more efficient to spread the tasks throughout the time available, and partly because some things must be done before other things can be done in making many products. One of the most important aspects of food preparation is efficient organizing of pre-preparation tasks.

There is a term used with pride throughout the profession - mise en place (meez on plass). Freely translated from the French, it means "everything in its proper place." A simpler English version is "a good setup." It means that the precooking procedures have been carried out with thoughtful and good organization, and everything is ready to go. As a person pursues his/her career in the foodservice industry, he/she will be evaluated on his/her mise en place more than he/she can probably conceive at this point.

Mizer, Porter, Sonnier, Food Preparation for the Professional, 1978, Page 39.

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