Preliminary Cooking and Flavoring

Precooking and flavoring of ingredients may be required to make them ready for use in the finished recipe. For example, if a recipe for chicken salad calls for cooked, diced chicken, you must first cook the chicken before you can proceed with the recipe. A complete cooking procedure, in such a case, is part of the mise en place. Complete cooking procedures are discussed in the remainder of this book, so you will have to be familiar with a wide range of techniques to complete your mise in place.

In this section, we summarize partial cooking techniques, as well as seasoning and flavoring techniques such as marination.