Mise en place is a fancy French term used in culinary arts to describe the process of preparing one’s workspace. It is the process of preparing, seasoning, measuring, and laying out the ingredients for a recipe before cooking it.

That’s neat, but why should you care? There are lots of reasons, but the most important is that using the mise en place technique makes cooking much easier. When all of your ingredients are measured and lined up in the order you’ll use them, cooking is a breeze. You can just grab the ingredients and add them to the recipe without having to refer to a recipe card or measure ingredients out on the fly. Mise-en-place even makes cleaning up easier. Just stack the empty containers neatly as you go, clearing your workspace with almost no effort.

So how do you cook with the mise en place technique? There are two basic steps: reading the recipe and preparing the stuff. First, read your recipe from start to finish so you understand the process. You need to understand what you’ll be doing and when you’ll be doing it and you need to know what ingredients you’ll need. Second, get out all of the ingredients and measure them out into ramekins, plastic containers, mugs, or whatever containers you have lying around. This is also when you should cut up vegetables, season meat, melt butter, preheat the oven, boil water, and otherwise work ahead to get the kitchen environment prepped for cooking.

After preparing and measuring out the ingredients, line them up in the order you will use them. In the photo above, the oil is first because it’s first in the pan. Then the onions and garlic, veggies, rice, and soy sauce go into the pan. Having everything ready to go makes it possible to fly through the recipe and pay attention to technique without having to worry about measuring, cutting, and so on.

Mise-en-place is a very simple technique but I can’t emphasize enough what a game changer it is. I used to be kind of a mess in the kitchen, frantically grabbing ingredients and measuring them while also trying to mix, stir, or cook the food. It made cooking feel very stressful and difficult!

Using mise-en-place, all of your ingredients are measured, prepared and lined up. Cooking goes from chaotic and frenzied to calm and collected. I use this technique every time I cook a formal meal, and it has never let me down. Taking the extra few minutes to prep, measure, and line up your ingredients before you begin to cook will transform cooking from a chaotic chore to a delightful journey. Cook, share, and enjoy!