[Sca-cooks] mise-en-place

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise:
>but anyway, I was reading his comments about mis-en-place. I'd never
>really thought about it, associating it with people who scream bloody
>murder when some prankish sous-chef moves their olive oil 2 inches to
>the left in order to watch their heads explode...

It is common practice in both cooking schools and certain 
professional kitchens to _steal_ mise-en-place. (BTW: was this 
defined in this thread? Literally, "everything in its place", 
practically, the prepared ingredients you need for a given dish or 
work station). But I vividly recall having a brown roux stolen from 
me by a classmate, had to make another, and when the instructor 
handed out grades, the person I thought had taken my roux got a 
significantly lower grade because there was no way in the world his 
sauce could be that clear and smooth if he'd made his own roux. (No, 
I had not complained to him.)

At Bouley cooks would steal others' mise en place, or the ingredients 
to make it, like, say, the last Vidalia onion, the rationale being 
that they didn't care what problems the other cooks had, as long as 
their own station was perfectly equipped. This is not, of course, the 
way to run a business dedicated to customer service or overall 
product quality.

>but it seems to me that the concept of mise-en-place obviously could be
>somewhat adapted to SCA feast kitchens beyond that... certainly the
>chain of events at my feast that ended up making us switch the feast
>courses and nearly poison someone because they read the menu and drank
>lemon drink which they thought was sekanjabin, was partly because nobody
>could find anything and when they did find it, they moved it someplace
>else and we began the Great Spice and Equipment Hunt all over again.
>
>For those of you who are familiar with the whole concept, advice on
>applying that sort of thing to SCA feast kitchens-- and advice on
>organizing your feast kitchen-- is what I'm looking to hear.

I confess to being one of those stupid people who don't tend to do a 
lot of pre-prep; my background is more like, come in in the morning, 
unpack, cook an absolutely fresh meal, clean up, go home (or back to 
camp, I guess). Or some variation on this.

One of the problems I have sometimes encountered is misunderstandings 
between different people each requiring a certain ingredient, and not 
necessarily willing to measure them carefully. So, the person 
chopping ten pounds of onions, finding a bunch of onions (15 pounds) 
in a bag, will chop all of them a certain way, and when the next 
person comes along, looking for the five pounds of unchopped onions 
they need for the pottage, they find none.

One solution is to pre-prep everything, or as much as possible, in 
advance, separate out whatever is needed for different projects and 
label them appropriately. One method I've used is to set up sheet 
pans or hotel pans on the shelves of a walk-in fridge (if you have 
one, and room), and label those as mise-en-place for the pottage, one 
for the meat sauce in the second course, etc.

Another possible aid is in conceiving a menu where many of your 
ingredients can all be prepped in a certain way, cut to the same 
size, etc. This makes it both expedient and necessary for the cooks 
to measure a certain number of cups, quarts, or pounds of chopped 
onion, leaving behind what they don't need. Certainly it affects the 
look of the finished products (sometime ask me about how this has 
changed the appearance of Chinese restaurant food in, say, the last 
20 years, reflecting both that expedience but also a decline in the 
skills of the prep cooks, or at least their willingness to shred 
things to 1/32 of an inch).

Another possible organizational aid is to create a combined shopping 
list, ingredient list, and ingredients per dish with quantities, 
list, in an Excel or other spreadsheet document. When I'm able to get 
this done, I post it clearly in a highly visible location, like, say, 
the front of the refrigerator door.
One feature of such a list is the ability to color code certain key 
ingredients that you'll need in several dishes, so a quick scan of 
the chart shows pretty clearly everything that calls for butter, and 
how much is needed for each. While it's not a perfect solution, I've 
had people tell me, "I'm really glad I spotted that you needed butter 
for both the pastry and the soup, or I might have just grabbed it all 
without thinking."

Now, it's great to be able to think in terms of restaurant 
mise-en-place, with little bain-marie containers tightly wrapped in 
plaswrap and labelled, but a problem the SCA cook frequently has to 
deal with is a lack of dedicated space for SCA stuff (what does the 
site caretaker _do_ with all that half-and-half anyway???). Another 
is a lack of good-quality containers that fit well together in a 
small space. Ditto an occasional tendency to buy the smallest, 
cheapest possible plastic wrap, foil, etc.

Bearing all this in mind, my experience has been that the Excel 
chart, the onions all chopped the same way, and dealing with that, 
bringing a scale so nobody can say they couldn't figure out how much 
was five pounds, is a pretty good compromise.

Adamantius

-- 
  "Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04