Cooking faster with shared prep

If you are cooking multiple dishes, it’s extra work to repeat the same steps at different times, like chopping one onion now and one in an hour. Shared prep ensures each ingredient is sliced, diced, or otherwise prepared only once, and split into the different bowls for the different dishes.

Which prep is shared

To save you time, Mise en Party merges like ingredients across recipes within a meal, or across steps of one recipe, into a single step, so you only prep that ingredient once. For example, if you're making Mapo Tofu and Eggplant With Garlic Sauce, which both use chopped scallions, you'll receive a single instruction to prepare the scallions and how to split them across both dishes. The combined step will describe how to prepare each ingredient (sliced, minced, diced and so on) and which bowl to place the ingredient in so it ends up in the right dish.

Different cuts of the same ingredient are prepared at once into separate bowls. That way you're preparing all the onions or all the garlic for the meal in one go.

When shared prep is scheduled

Shared prep is scheduled like any other prep, into an available time slot that minimizes how long the meal takes to cook. Mise en Party schedules prep work before it is needed, and keeps prep that shouldn't sit out, like raw meat, close to when it's needed.

What is not shared

Shared prep only works within a meal: prep is shared between its courses, but not with other meals that day or on other days. Loose ingredients that go straight into the pot, like a pinch of salt or a splash of oil, are not shared.

Questions

Does shared prep change the amounts? Shared prep will change the amount of an ingredient you prepare at once, but it won't change the amount within each recipe; it'll just be the sum across all planned recipes.

Does shared prep need more than one chef? No. Prep is shared whether you cook alone or with others.