By Joanne Chang
Published 2010
When you hear a chef say “mise,” he or she is referring to getting everything in order before starting a recipe. (It comes from mise en place, which is essentially French for “Get organized!”) In order to bake well and happily, you need to approach the task like a one-act play with no dress rehearsal. Read through the entire recipe carefully, assemble all of the equipment you will need, gather together and measure all of the ingredients, heat the oven to the correct temperature—and then raise the curtain and begin the play. If you mise everything in advance, you should be able to march through the recipe step-by-step with no problem. Trouble occurs when you don’t have all of the elements ready: Midway through a recipe, you realize you should have already melted the chocolate, and as you stop to do just that, your egg whites overwhip, your cream boils over, and, wah, chaos strikes. Or, your cake batter is ready to go, and as you start to pop it into the oven, you realize the oven isn’t on. If you mise properly, such scenarios will never happen to you.
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