The Importance of Practicing Mise en Place

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Practicing mise en place while baking sourdough can ensure the best baked goods every time. This simple practice of gathering all ingredients prior to baking will cause less baking ‘’mistakes’ caused by forgetting ingredients and produce better baked goods as a result. 

Mise en place is a French term introduced in the 19th centuries within French culinary schools. The saying Mise en Place translates to “everything in place” or “putting in place”. When I say this simple practice has changed my baking results for the better, I mean it! 

I have been baking in the kitchen professionally for over 10 years and personally for as long as I can remember – eventually leading to this sourdough food blog. During my first part time job, I was helped prepare meals for banquets and also helping support the chef’s side hustle – a gluten free bakery. 

This job helped me to sharpen my knife skills (literally) and helped me to learn the importance of pulling all the ingredients aside as we read through the recipe before preparing the food. 

The chef’s best tip was stressing the importance of practicing mise en place. No matter what we were preparing- a fruit tray, made from scratch barbecue sauce or even gluten free cherry pie, every item was gathered prior to baking. 

Mise en place is the one thing that helped me to ensure recipe quality, every time. This simple practice of gathering all ingredients before preparing a dish ensured we had every item in stock and everything ready to go to prior to making a recipe.

What is Mise en Place?

There are five parts to mise en place:

1. Reading the recipe (understanding the steps, equipment and ingredients)
2. Gathering the ingredients
3. Organizing ingredients (sometimes completed by pre-measuring or putting them in order)
4. Preparing the baking area
5. Ensuring equipment is ready to bake with. 

In totality, mise en place is the practice of setting yourself up for success before making a recipe. All the ducks are in a row to ensure fluidity in the kitchen.

I find by completing mise en place, I am less likely to forget an ingredient when I am baking sourdough recipes with my children.

Benefits of this practice

There are many benefits of practicing mine en place including:

•  Ensuring enough quantity of ingredients to fulfill a recipe
  • No one wants to be making a double chocolate chip sourdough muffin and realize they are out of chocolate chips or a sourdough peach galette and notice all the peaches have turned! 
• Reducing time in kitchen
• Reducing stress while baking 
• Ensuring confidence in process and baked gods
  • We have lots of sourdough videos on our YouTube to walk through how to create sourdough baked goods. This can be helpful to understand technique and presentation of a finished product. 

Importance of Mise en Place: Sourdough Edition

When baking with sourdough, the steps of mise en place are important. Not only do sourdough recipes tend to have additional steps, but there can be a lot of waiting time between adding sourdough inclusions and leavening agents in long fermented sourdough recipes.

From ensuring sourdough is at peak for the best rise and largest bubbles. To setting aside ingredients which need to be added later. These steps are vital in any kitchen, especially one making sourdough.

I can not tell you the number of time people have stated they forgot to add salt into their sourdough bread recipe. And if you have made a sourdough loaf without salt before – it will still taste great, but the results may not be ‘knock your socks off’ great. 

Salt is one of the most common ingredients people forget to put in a sourdough recipe, along with baking soda and baking powder, when a recipe needs a little extra ‘oomf’ from an additional leavening agent (looking at you sourdough cinnamon rolls and sourdough English muffin bread!). 

Mise en place helps us to save time and money in the kitchen. Less food is wasted because ingredients are forgotten and the products just taste better. 

What are your favorite ways to ensure you produce the best sourdough recipes every time? Do you practice mise en place? Let us know in the comments below!