Personal essays
Before you go to the stove
Solo cooking
I love cooking for a bunch of people.
I plan a menu with a variety of dishes. I reach for recipes that are challenging, involve a lot of prep, and take a while to finish.
I’d like to do the same when cooking for myself and I often do, but if you’re going to go to the trouble of all that work and you’re going to dirty all of those pans, it’s hard to justify scaling it down so it only makes a single serving.
And so, whatever I make tonight I’ll eat for days.
I’m not going to soak, boil, and prepare a single serving of beans and so by the time I get to the end of that pound of beans it’s a weak later and I’m ready to move on to something else.
On the other hand, I’m not going to not cook for myself - I seldom go out to eat when I’m not traveling and those home meal plans are not for me.
So I’m eating beans for a week.
Unless…
The unless is that I cook a different item each night that can be part of a meal for the next few days. Each day there’s a new component I can add in the mix. Often I go on culinary themes and cook different Mediterranean dishes, or Indian, or Italian, or Chinese, or …
Lately, I’ve been cooking recipes from Kenji’s Wok cookbook and, as you would expect, everything has come out great. I often will cook several items in an evening and then take a day or two off before cooking the next batch.
Restaurant cooking
In any cuisine there are staples that you prep for many of the dishes. You don’t use the same ingredients in every dish, but there are flavor profiles that are common that mean that many dishes might contain the same base ingredients.
Some dishes may have ginger, some may have garlic, and some may have both.
Some may have dark soy, or a vinegar, or a wine as an accent. Some may be thickened with a corn starch slurry.
Not every dish has the same items but there are items that are used in a lot of dishes.
So a professional restaurant will have containers of each of these ingredients prepared ahead of time.
I’ve you’ve seen the kitchen at your local Chinese takeaway, you’ve seen the cook dip the corner of the shovel shaped spatula in a container of minced garlic and put approximately a teaspoon in a horizontal ladle. They then reach for ginger and add that to the ladle and add that too a steaming hot wok along with a squirt of oil.
The spatula keeps the food moving while they reach for a bowl of the marinated meat they’ve set aside.They cook that, remove it from the wok and add another squirt of oil and dump in the vegetables they’ve assembled for the dish.
They toss the vegetables and take a second to add the components of the sauce to the ladle.
Boom the meat goes back in the wok, the sauce is added. A couple of quick tosses to meld the ingredients and the dish is plated and the wok is cleaned - ready for the next dish.
Start to finish the dish takes a couple of minutes to cook.
Well - it takes a couple of minutes to cook because the ingredients have been cut and put in containers completely accessible to the cook along with the marinated meat.
The prep part which happened earlier in the day - took all day.
Restaurant cooking at home
I love that kind of cooking.
When we used to have friends over, I would often have prepped for days and ended up with bowls labeled and grouped for each dish. It didn’t matter what sort of cuisine. I would check my notes to see which dishes need to be made in which order using what techniques. The same onion might be diced for one dish and sliced for another. The garlic might be chopped for one dish and microplaned for another.
Most of that prep was me scaling down techniques I’d learned while working in restaurants.
Kenji makes it explicit in his book. It’s more than just mis en place. There’s a real understanding of context.
He organizes your prep into bowls.
After telling you the ingredients you need and how to prepare each one, he lists the bowls you’ll need based on ingredients that go in at the same time.
In one bowl put your garlic and ginger. In another put the peppers and onions. One contains the corn starch slurry and another contains the sesame oil, soy sauce, and Shaoxing wine.
Once you go to the stove with your bowls lined up, there’s nothing to think about. Add this one, look for it to get to this point then add the next one - and so on.
Nothing is fool proof - but this method is designed for the home cook. In restaurants you have all of your ingredients around you because you don’t know what the customer will order.
At home you can prepare for exactly what you’re going to cook.
The advice is simple. In life, as in your kitchen, make sure your bowls are prepared and lined up before you head to the stove.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 137. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe