FOCUS How mise-en-place works CHEF DWAYNE LIPUMA''S entire kitchen staff just quit. He''s looking at reservations for 40 people for lunch, then another 140 for a banquet tomorrow. To make all those meals, LiPuma''s bosses have provided him with 19 recruits, some of whom have never cooked in a fine-dining restaurant. Aside from LiPuma''s assistant and a pastry chef, not one of the staff has ever seen the menu, much less prepared the items on it, all gourmet dishes with elaborate presentations. But by the end of the day, the diners will leave satisfied. In fact, the customers--some of whom have waited months for a reservation at LiPuma''s restaurant, American Bounty--will scarcely notice that their entire meal was made by neophyte cooks. A miracle perhaps? Nope. It''s a regular day for Chef LiPuma.
In 3 weeks, when LiPuma has his crew trained and confident, they will leave and a new group of inexperienced cooks will replace them. He will repeat this process every 3 weeks, thus providing the penultimate course for students who will soon graduate from the Culinary Institute of America. What makes this impossible rhythm possible is not a miracle. It''s a system called mise-en-place. LEARNING TO COOK, LEARNING TO WORK The Culinary Institute of America, called the CIA without irony by people who think more about the epicurean than they do espionage, sits like a citadel on the banks of the Hudson River almost 100 miles north of New York City. Its grand campus in Hyde Park, New York, centered around a former seminary--housing an average of 2,400 students, 140 full-time faculty, 49 kitchens, and four student-staffed restaurants--the CIA is among the world''s most renowned culinary schools, with branches in Texas, northern California, and Singapore. From the first day of classes to the last, CIA students will hear the term mise-en-place, pronounced like "me''s on plahhs." It''s on the lips of Tim Ryan, the president of the college, as he greets new enrollees.
A few of the students may have heard the term before they arrived, perhaps in a kitchen for which they worked during high school or thereafter. Some will refer to their textbook, The Professional Chef, which provides the English translation of the term, "put in place," and a definition: "the preparation and assembly of ingredients, pans, utensils, and plates or serving pieces needed for a particular dish or service period." At first, mise-en-place blends into the dozens of French words and phrases they must remember as they make their way through their introductory class, Culinary Fundamentals, like mirepoix, brunoise, tourner, arroser, fond de veau, roux, consommé. But as students learn the basic techniques they''ll need to succeed in all the courses that follow--knife cuts, making stock, making sauce, cooking vegetables and meat--they learn that mise-en-place encompasses an entirely different set of vital skills, and that putting their ingredients and tools in place is just the first level of a deceptively simple concept that keeps unfolding. Instructors invoke mise-en-place when they tell students to keep their cutting boards and workstations clean and when they tell them to arrange their tools in a certain order and return them to that order after they use them; when they move too slow and also when they move too fast; when they move too much and when they move too little; when they start tasks too early and when they finish them too late; when they talk too much and when they don''t say enough; when they don''t use their five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, sound; and when they fail to use their sixth sense: common. As the days go by, the chef-instructors begin to talk about a deeper notion: mental mise-en-place, the idea that students can''t master physical organization without first organizing their minds. It starts with the CIA timeline, a paper form that chefs expect students to use every day and master. In preparation for each class, students must list their needed tools, ingredients, and tasks for the day.
They must arrange those tasks in time, plotting precisely when each thing is supposed to happen. When students find themselves running behind in class or skipping steps, the chefs refer to the student''s timeline; usually the chefs can point to the error in thinking that resulted in the error in behavior. Students commit these timelines to memory. Then they begin to tackle planning on-the-fly, the mental work that allows them to move smoothly from one task to the next. Over time, mise-en-place begins to reveal itself as a set of values: Apprenticing oneself. Getting to class early, not just on time. Working with intensity. Cultivating a sense of urgency.
Remaining alert. Aiming for perfection. This idea of mise-en-place, a curriculum unto itself, begins to migrate outside the kitchen. Students load their backpacks and lay their clothes out at night before bed, iron their chef''s whites and shine their shoes. They use timelines and prep lists to study for their academic courses, not just their cooking classes. They organize their desks, their closets, their rooms. They even begin "mise-en-placing" their social activities to maximize their time off. Then the students go home for their first holiday and wonder how the rest of the world changed so much since they were last in it.
Maybe, like Alexandra Tibbats, they watch their parents scurry around the house for car keys that should, of course, have been put back where they belonged, or wait hours for high school friends who can''t seem to show up on time. Or maybe they''re like Kaitlin Ngo, whose mother watches in stunned silence as Kaitlin--for whom the opening of a suitcase had always been comparable to the uncorking of a geyser--now demurs on a quick shopping excursion to stay home and methodically unpack. The students return to the CIA and learn to cook à la carte breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for their classmates. At the end of their first year, they go on their "externship"--18 weeks working in a restaurant in the real world. Some will cook; others will do the kinds of jobs that kitchen trainees are expected to do: working in the prep kitchen, cutting vegetables and cleaning. They will marvel at how fast and smooth everyone around them seems to move, confirming how much they still don''t know. As their second year draws to a close, they will be assigned to one of the CIA''s four first-class restaurants, and the training wheels come off. Some of them will enter the kitchen of American Bounty and be greeted by a smiling Chef Dwayne LiPuma.
But LiPuma is not here to assess their cooking skills because they''ve learned and been evaluated on all their techniques already. What LiPuma will be teaching and testing here is their physical, mental, and ethical mise-en-place, without which they will never be able to use any of those techniques in a professional setting. WELCOME TO AMERICAN BOUNTY Nineteen students dressed in clean chef whites gather in a wood-paneled private dining room next to the lobby-bar of American Bounty. It''s 7:45 a.m. when Chef Dwayne LiPuma walks in for the first day of class. For the next 75 minutes he''ll lecture them on the daily work schedule and the rules of the kitchen, review the menu dish-by-dish, and describe how he''ll grade them. LiPuma is 5 feet 6 inches of compacted power, with spiky brown hair and metal-rimmed glasses.
He talks fast, very fast, Martin Scorcese-on-a- double-espresso fast. "Welcome to American Bounty," he says. "We are going into the whirlwind. Your anxiety level is off the chart. Everybody''s except for mine." LiPuma is calm because he has his own mise-en-place. He''s done everything he can to ensure the success of his new charges. He ordered the previous class to prepare a few days'' worth of ingredients so the new class won''t have to do any physical mise-en-place except for arranging those ingredients.
LiPuma tells them they can ease their fears by getting the lay of the land--a "plan" in the literal sense of the term, the French word for "map." Make a mental diagram of where everything is and should be. Know the recipes. And come to class every day with your timeline. "No timeline means 20 percent off your daily grade," he warns. He knows that when they get into the professional world, these students won''t write timelines. Instead they''ll internalize them. "I''m not going to teach you how to cut a carrot," he tells them.
"I''m going to teach you how to organize yourself." It''s one thing to apply cooking techniques to a recipe and construct a plate. It is quite another thing to do that a dozen times with speed and consistency. LiPuma argues that organization is going to deliver the speed they''ll need. Speed will come from their brain''s basal ganglia memorizing repeated muscle movements, which--if they are to be quick--should be as small as possible. They will gain some of that speed by selecting their tools with care. "What kind of ladle do you need for the soup?" LiPuma asks. "An 8-ounce ladle.
Why? Because that''s the portion size." If students have a 2-ounce ladle, they will have to ladle four times instead of one. They will win additional speed by arranging their tools. "I should be able to blindfold you," the chef says, "and when I say, ''Pick up your tongs,'' you know that they''re always right there, that your ladle is right there, that your oil is right here." They will accrue even more speed by properly arranging their ingredients. LiPuma wants all their ingredients "zoned out": all the ingredients for one dish in one area. "The less your hand moves, the more efficient you are." "You''ll see," he continues.
"By being organized, you will be more efficient. By bein.