I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [3]
My own mise en place method concerns a tray and a bunch of small reusable rectangular containers. I measure each item into its own container and stack the containers on top of each other in the order they’ll be used, so that the top box is the only one that needs a lid.
With mise en place in place, check the recipe once more for hidden dangers and booby traps. Overlooking a little phrase like “preheat oven” is an insidiously easy way to destroy a soufflé (which is in turn a great way to destroy your entire day). Recipe writers do err on occasion, and it’s not unknown for an ingredient to pop up in the procedural text without having been properly announced in the parts list (Internet recipes are notorious for this kind of thing).
Walk up to a cold residential oven and turn it to any temperature—say 350° F. Depending on your model, within a few minutes the oven will politely chime, telling you that the target temperature has been reached. What exactly does it mean by that? It means that the air inside the oven has reached 350° F. The moment you open the door to slide in your edible, most of that heat takes a hike toward your ceiling. Recovering that temperature can take quite a while, especially if the item you placed inside is large (say a turkey) and cold (shame on you for not bringing it to room temperature, but more on that later). At the very least, your cooking time calculations are going to go whacko and at the very worst, your food (a batch of cookies for instance) could be ruined.
Luckily you can help your oven keep its word by allowing it to continue heating for twenty minutes after it tells you it’s ready to go. That will give the mass of the oven—the walls, ceiling, and floor—time to get good and hot. Once that’s happened, they will be able to lend heat to the cooler air, allowing it to “recover” much faster.
If your oven is a little light in the mass department, you might consider leaving a pizza stone in it all the time as a kind of thermal regulator.
End of lecture number one, beginning of lecture number two.
The most underused tool in the kitchen is the brain. I blame the food media (yes, that of which I am a part) who have lulled us into a state of recipe slavery. We don’t think about recipes as much as we perform them.
As I have stated, I not only use recipes, I even try to memorize them from time to time so that I can ponder their finer points. But don’t think for a moment that recipes can replace knowledge. For example, one of the best omelets I ever had started out as a busted hollandaise. You could collect egg recipes all your life and still miss the relationship between these two dishes.
Cooking requires not just knowledge (which can simply be absorbed and regurgitated) but understanding, and understanding requires thought. If that seems a little too Zen-like for you, try one of these experiments.
ADAPT SOMETHING
Take a recipe that you really enjoy and feel confident making and change it around.
• Change Veal Scalopini into Turkey Scalopini.
• Trade fresh mushrooms for dry in a pasta sauce.
• Cook something that’s usually served raw, like lettuce.
• Change a “grill” to a “sauté.”
HOST A “REFRIGERATOR ROULETTE” PARTY
Invite a couple of friends over and ask them to bring three food items. Put the food in the middle of a table and figure out what to do with it all. This is a home version of the game that chefs have to play when they audition for jobs—an applicant is given a selection of ingredients and a set amount of time to do something with it.
What I’ve come to understand is that a lot of folks don’t want their own food. They want Mario Batali’s food, Charlie Trotter’s food, Thomas Keller’s food. I like that food too, but I have no desire to cook it. I want them to cook it.
Taking control of ingredients is the first step in taking ownership of food. If I set out to execute a recipe and decide to substitute basil for mint, or use plums instead of peaches, or red wine rather than white, I am taking the first step toward laying claim to that food. Sure, there are times