Modular Cooking

The professional cooking process is modular. Each finished dish contains a number of component preparations, most of which are made ahead of time. Take, for example, a chicken salad sandwich. With each order, the line chefs cannot begin poaching chicken, making mayonnaise, washing lettuce, and baking rolls. For efficiency, the chicken salad must be premade, the lettuce previously cleaned and dried, and the rolls already baked, cooled, and sliced. Each of these premade elements is a module, or component, of the finished sandwich. To create the finished dish, the components are simply combined.