Category Archives: food

March 14, 2014 · 8:52 am

Doing Your Mies

Beth via Flickr

I realized as I thought about our Foodie Friday topic for this week that I’ve neglected to write about the most basic, and important, step in cooking. Turns out that it’s a pretty important business subject too. That step is doing one’s mise en place. It’s a French term that means “to put in place” and sounds like “meez  en plahse”. No professional kitchen would dream of opening for the evening without the mise having been done. No other business should either.

Doing your mise means you cut up your onions, mice your garlic, and get all the other ingredients for your dish ready before you start to cook.  It has the added benefit of showing you right away if you have all the components necessary to make your recipe or if you need to rethink your plan.  It means you heat up the pan or turn on the grill so it’s hot before you begin.  When I’m cooking a number of dishes, I do all of the mise at once.  That step allows me to cook the dishes without worrying if my timing will be upset by having to slice or dice some forgotten element. It’s the only way that a restaurant kitchen can crank out dozens of dishes in a reasonable time period.  After all, can you imagine how long you’d be sitting if the cooks had to dice onions or search for a carrot in the middle of the evening rush?

You should be doing mise in the office as well.  Starting the day by taking the time to mentally prepare yourself and your staff for the day’s tasks may seem like an unnecessary waste of time but it helps avoid a lot of crisis situations.  A manager’s job is to make sure his team has what they need to do their jobs and doing the mise by walking around first thing is a good step in that direction.  Diving right in to email is like turning on the stove before you’ve brought the protein up to room temp first and making sure you have the sauce components ready to go.  The pieces of the day won’t go together nearly as well.  Most people’s minds are clear first thing in the morning.  That’s the time to prep.

Everyone knows “Ready, Fire, Aim” is a bad idea in business and in the kitchen.  Doing your mise is both “ready” and “aim”.   It assures that the great product you have in mind is what you produce in the end.  Make sense?

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March 7, 2014 · 9:59 am

Getting Your Business On A Scale

One of the most basic kitchen skills is our topic this Foodie Friday: measuring.  If you cook, at some point you use standard measures – cups, tablespoons and such.  Even those chefs you see on TV grabbing pinches of salt know how much they’re pinching (you use your thumb and one finger, then two fingers, then three fingers and measure each result to have a sense).

English: Kitchen scale, electronic, household ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Baking, which is basically chemistry, requires very precise measuring to ensure success.  Sometimes, however, something doesn’t come out the way you’d like even though you measure carefully and that’s our topic today.

If you ask 10 people to measure out a cup of flour and then weigh each result, you’ll find that there is a huge variance in the amount of flour.  That can be fatal to a cake or in making pasta.  One thing I find incredibly useful in my kitchen is a scale.  I use it for cooking as much as I do baking (OK, I really don’t bake) and I seek out recipes where the measures are by weight and not just volume.  After all, the cup of grated cheese called for in a recipe could be finely grated and weigh more or relatively coarsely grated and weigh a lot less.  100 grams, however, is always 100 grams.  I find recipes that call for “1 medium onion, chopped” or “two ripe bananas” to be pretty useless since what I consider a medium onion or the size of those bananas may vary considerably from what the author had in mind.

It’s incredibly useful to have standardized measurements that are truly standard when you’re trying to get the best results.  Which is, of course, the business point.  One thing I spend a lot time with clients on is identifying and measuring the business in a standardized, objective manner.  Putting up a new website may cause you to think it looks better but that’s not measurable.  What is measurable and actionable are thing such as bounce rates, time on site, page views, and conversions.  If the new site causes those metrics to improve, it’s a better website.

The same is true about other business elements.  Presentations that look nice and flow well are good; presentations that result in decisions made in the presenter’s favor are excellent.  “Look and feel” is the cup of flour.  Data driven decisions are flour measured on a scale.   If you want success in the kitchen, get a scale.  If you want it in business, find ways to take subjectivity out of the process.  You with me?

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February 28, 2014 · 9:46 am

Pickles And Pizza

At last it’s Foodie Friday Fun time.  Today I want to contemplate pickles and pizza and how they relate to your business.  I’m a fan of each of those foods although I will admit to being rather fussy about the latter.  That stuff they serve in a pan in Chicago isn’t pizza.  It’s good, but it’s not pizza.  I’m careful when I choose to eat one – thin crust, great sauce, and whatever I choose to put on it needs to be fresh and/or of high quality.  I’m less fussy about pickles although I don’t really care for sweet ones.

Since you’re already wondering about the business point it’s this.  Even if you got your perfect pizza and a jar of your favorite pickles, you probably wouldn’t put the pickles on the pizza.  I’m told that in some parts of the country people do but pickles are probably not the first pizza topping that comes to mind.  Business is like that.

We do our best to find the best ingredients – great staff, a fabulous product or service, a superior business model – but we don’t often think about if they’ll go together.  Moreover, there is a tendency that once you realize that you have pickles and pizza to panic.  Maybe even to start over.   I think that’s a mistake in many cases.  Am I advocating a pickle pizza?  No.  I do think, however, we need to broaden our thinking.  Pizza is basically a grilled cheese sandwich with the tomato soup in which they’re often dunked already on the sandwich.  You’d eat a pickle with that, right?

We can also think about the pickle.  One can pickle any vegetable pretty easily – pickling liquid is just a spiced brine, after all.  Why pickled cukes?  Maybe peppers – you have those on pizza all the time.  Or cabbage – kimchi is a pickle and I have seen that on pizza.  That’s how we need to think in business.  How can I change whatever frame of reference has my business not performing optimally?

Business isn’t about looking at pickles and pizza and throwing your hands up in disgust.  It’s about rethinking each piece  – dough, sauce, seasoning, pickle – and finding a way to make it work.  How can I make things or people or markets that just don’t seem to fit work together to make something in which the flavors mesh and everything is balanced?  That’s how I see it.  You?

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