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Prep bowls: mise en place in every recipe

Prep bowls hold the ingredients that go into a dish at the same time, prepped before they are needed, so cooking is adding each bowl when its step calls for it.

Within Mise en Party, a prep bowl holds ingredients that go into the dish at the same time. Preparing a recipe into bowls prior to cooking is at the heart of mise en place. Once cooking begins, cooking becomes a paint by numbers where you just add each set of ingredients at the right time to make your meal. By organizing the prep into bowls, the scheduler can shift prep around to minimize the total cook time while ensuring that prep occurs before it is needed in the recipe.

What goes in a prep bowl

Mapo Tofu's ingredients: the cubed tofu, the aromatics and the spice base in prep bowls, each sized small or large, and the salt loose

Within individual recipes, ingredients fall into two categories: Bowls and Loose. Bowls are used to hold groups of ingredients that all enter the dish at the same time and can be prepared together. These could be spices in a spice blend or your aromatics like garlic and ginger. Loose ingredients are a dash of salt, a splash of oil, anything that a standard kitchen has lying around generally within arm's length and does not need work to prepare.

How to use bowl steps

On a Bowl step, Mise en Party provides a bowl size estimate (small up to about 1 cup, medium 1 to 3 cups, large over 3 cups) and lists each of the ingredients that need to be prepared in the bowl. Each bowl is numbered, which you can use to help track which bowl is which.

A Mapo Tofu step that starts a bowl: grab a new small Bowl 2 for the Aromatics and dice the arbol chilies into it

On subsequent steps that use the bowl, the exact bowl name and number will be linked. Clicking on or hovering the mouse over it will bring up a pop-up reminding you of the contents of that bowl.

The next step adds pickled ginger to Aromatics (Bowl 2); hovering the name lists the bowl's ingredients

Questions

Can I chop as I go instead? Mise en Party cannot easily be separated from the concept of bowls as they allow for much of the flexibility when timing recipes. If you want to make a recipe from this site as if it were a standard recipe page, just use the dish page as is.

How many bowls do I need? The number of bowls the meal needs concurrently and in total is estimated on the cooking lobby page.