Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

This event was on Tuesday, January 18, 2022 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

It seems to me that mise en place has a place if you are doing something where timing is important or for demonstration. But combining things together to be shaken up, mise en place seems a waste of dishes. Comment?

— Olivia Huff

Answer:

So that kind of depends on what you're making. So mise and plus is a great tool that chefs use to be able to literally keep everything in its place what it means now if what you're saying, we're putting it all together to shake it up so stir fry is another great example of that, right? So everything's getting shaken up in your stir fry but the technique of a stir fry means that you actually want to add in ingredients that cook longer at the very beginning of your stir fry so they have time to cook and then slowly add the ingredients that have the less cooking time. So something like broccoli might go in first and something like a bean sprout might go in very last because the Brock that takes more time to cook than the bean sprout. So your meats and plus helps to be able to keep all those separated out so you can strategically add those to Luck as you're cooking your stir fry. Now there are a lot of questions when it comes to our classes. Do I need to have my mise en place all an individual little dishes and you don't need to do that, you know, as long as you're putting out your mise en place and it's well represented out. It's okay to have all your meats and plus say on a plate just right next to each other. So you only dirting one dish instead of all those little tiny dishes does it look really cool in all the little tiny dishes of course, but then you're also, you know wasting a lot of those dishes because you're not going to be using them for cooking. They're just holding the ingredients until you have them. So just putting your knees and plus together on a plate is totally fine to be able to make that happen. Now if you are, you know, not doing this for the class, you're just doing it at home. You don't always have to have your knees and plus separated out too. So if you're doing something like I don't know like if you're doing a Satan dish, right so you can take all your dry ingredients and put them into one bowl and put all your wet ingredients and put them into a different bowl. That way you don't have you know, what is that nine different dish? Something like that filled with all these different, you know spices or flowers. You can just put all the dry in one and then, you know blend it with a fork or a whisk and then have the same thing with your wet ingredients mix those up. Then when it's time you can dump your wet ingredients into your Satan mixer the dry batch until it gets to the right consistency for that. So there are a couple different ways to be able to look at that amazing plus definitely helps in the kitchen every time you do it you'll see that you have a little less stress in the kitchen because it helps to be able to keep everything in its place. But do you need individual dishes for everything definitely not, you know just go at your own pace for it and whatever works in the kitchen for you is probably the best just for our one our instructors and looking at some of your assignments. Make sure you have your amazing plus separated out so we can see all the individual ingredients on your assignment because as much as we'd like to we can't taste the ingredients through the computer.
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com