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Musings on mixing bowls from a community kitchen manager.

Mixing bowls are for mixing stuff hence the name.
They are not for storing stuff in the fridge or the freezer.
They aren't for holding all your mise en place ingredients.
They aren't trash cans or dirty rag bins or sanitizer buckets.
They are not gladiator helmets, cymbals, or step stools.
If you do happen to be using a mixing bowl for mixing, please note that they come in different sizes. Small mixing bowls are for mixing a small amount of ingredients. Medium is for a medium amount of ingredients. Large for a large amount of ingredients. Extra large if large isn't big enough. Please don't try to mix an extra large amount of ingredients in a small mixing bowl.
They will not get clean unless you scrub them with soapy water.
They will not get dry if they are stacked all together right side up so that the water has no place to go.
So next time please don't use so many mixing bowls but if you must then wash and dry them properly so I don't have to.

Honest question from a home cook - what do mise en place go into then?
 
Honest question from a home cook - what do mise en place go into then?
If you're just making one recipe at home do whatever you want. We are usually teaching groups of people. Either workforce development classes, culinary medicine, general health and wellness, etc. in a professionally stocked commercial kitchen. We have all kinds of little storage containers that have lids and are stackable and fit on the shelves and carts and tables and have flat bottoms and aren't wide and round. But imagine you have 8 or 10 people each working on one or two recipes and each recipe has 6-10 ingredients. If the first thing every person does is grab enough mixing bowls to have one bowl for every ingredient then soon every square centimeter of workspace and cooler shelf gets taken up by a mass of mixing bowls.

So one of the first things I usually do is show them all the storage options and how the storage containers fit together and how you can put 10 or 12 little containers on one sheet tray. But you can't do the same thing with 10 or 12 mixing bowls. Unfortunately, or fortunately really, I don't teach all of the classes and other instructors aren't as aware of the mixing bowl issue. So I often come into the kitchen in the morning and find dozens of sopping wet mixing bowls in large stacks that all contain a fair amount of fetid rinse water in them that need to be rewashed, rinsed, sanitized, and dried.
 
Do you have favorite containers that might be useful for holding mise in a home kitchen? At work are you mostly just using teenth pans or whatever? In my home kitchen (the only kitchen I'm in) I use deli containers as well as a Japanese yakumi pan with various inserts. The yakumi pan inserts are the closest feeling to what I "should" be using, but they're expensive and have limited sizes available.
 
If you're just making one recipe at home do whatever you want. We are usually teaching groups of people. Either workforce development classes, culinary medicine, general health and wellness, etc. in a professionally stocked commercial kitchen. We have all kinds of little storage containers that have lids and are stackable and fit on the shelves and carts and tables and have flat bottoms and aren't wide and round. But imagine you have 8 or 10 people each working on one or two recipes and each recipe has 6-10 ingredients. If the first thing every person does is grab enough mixing bowls to have one bowl for every ingredient then soon every square centimeter of workspace and cooler shelf gets taken up by a mass of mixing bowls.

So one of the first things I usually do is show them all the storage options and how the storage containers fit together and how you can put 10 or 12 little containers on one sheet tray. But you can't do the same thing with 10 or 12 mixing bowls. Unfortunately, or fortunately really, I don't teach all of the classes and other instructors aren't as aware of the mixing bowl issue. So I often come into the kitchen in the morning and find dozens of sopping wet mixing bowls in large stacks that all contain a fair amount of fetid rinse water in them that need to be rewashed, rinsed, sanitized, and dried.

That makes a fair amount of sense. As a home cook, I just use whatever bowl is handy (either mixing or eating bowls). I'll also combo stuff into the same bowl that gets added at the same time to save bowls/washing.
 
Do you have favorite containers that might be useful for holding mise in a home kitchen? At work are you mostly just using teenth pans or whatever? In my home kitchen (the only kitchen I'm in) I use deli containers as well as a Japanese yakumi pan with various inserts. The yakumi pan inserts are the closest feeling to what I "should" be using, but they're expensive and have limited sizes available.

You are right on. I encourage people to use ninth pans, sixth pans, deli containers, and very small cube shaped lexans. At home I have a variety of small tupperwares. But I usually try to go straight from the board to the pan and skip storing anything altogether if I can avoid it.
 
Do you have favorite containers that might be useful for holding mise in a home kitchen? At work are you mostly just using teenth pans or whatever? In my home kitchen (the only kitchen I'm in) I use deli containers as well as a Japanese yakumi pan with various inserts. The yakumi pan inserts are the closest feeling to what I "should" be using, but they're expensive and have limited sizes available.
Deli cups. Get the 8, 16 and 32 oz sizes. You can stack them in each other if they aren't full. 16 in the 32, 8 in the 16. 3 containers but with the footprint of 1 container.
 
I guess I miss out on mise by focusing on Chinese cooking rather than French. There's no mise, in the sense of a general pool of prepared ingredients that can be drawn on to make multiple dishes. There's just a sequence of ingredients cut for a particular dish, to be added at the right time. Example for my Kung Pao chicken:

Hot dried peppers
Small amount of minced ginger and scallion white
The chicken breast, having been cut, marinated for a couple of days, then drained
1/4" green scallion cut and minced ginger
Roasted and salted peanuts (not in shell, red hulls removed)
The sauce (rice wine, soy, salt, vinegar, sugar, corn starch), with a little whisk in there to recombine with the corn starch just before adding

Each of these is lined up in order, next to the wok.

My containers are appropriately-sized bowls and little dishes, either from an Asian supermarket (cheap) or from MTC Kitchen (not cheap, but not that expensive either), because they make me a lot happier than plastic would.
 
Right stuff
Puns aside, this is what I do, cooking for 5 all meals from scratch. If I were doing something closer to catering I might prep stuff into multiple large containers (like hotel pans) but mostly mise as Rangen does, and yes some of these containers are 1/2 qt mixing bowls.

Unasked question but Vollrath makes the very best mixing bowls. Made in USA to boot.
 
I guess I miss out on mise by focusing on Chinese cooking rather than French.
There's just a sequence of ingredients cut for a particular dish, to be added at the right time.
I am the most anal about getting all my mise 100% locked down whenever I cook any meal involving a wok, as it moves so quickly once you put the first ingredient in.

Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, whatever - I’ll even have my sauces pre mixed, eggs cracked into a bowl etc and ready to go so I can minimise clean up and focus on the wok during the short cooking time.
 
Same here, before making fried rice I have separate bowls lined up for everything that goes in at a different time.

Also put everything that has to be cooked separately from the rice on left side of wok and everything that has to go in after the rice right side of wok.
This means having like 10 tiny bowls with 1-4 tablespoons of things each (carrot/mushroom/beans/soy/rice wine etc.) in the order they go in and two big bowls for eggs and rice.
 
Same here, before making fried rice I have separate bowls lined up for everything that goes in at a different time.

Also put everything that has to be cooked separately from the rice on left side of wok and everything that has to go in after the rice right side of wok.
This means having like 10 tiny bowls with 1-4 tablespoons of things each (carrot/mushroom/beans/soy/rice wine etc.) in the order they go in and two big bowls for eggs and rice.
Yeah I forgot to say I arrange my mise in chronological order!

For most European cooking I’m a bit more laid back, depending on the specific dish.
 
If you get a big enough cutting board you don't need mise bowis

Think About It GIF by Identity
 
Unpopular opinion:
Sour cherries are better than sweet cherries.

Warning: misuse of kitchen equipment. Not for @stringer

So the birds ate my neighbors sweet cherries and left my sour cherries. I love eating fresh sour cherries. So I grabbed some mixing bowls and went picking.
IMG_9696.jpeg

Pitted them with pastry piping tips then placed on sheet pans in the freezer. Done. No money invested in specialized tools. Will repeat tomorrow.
 
If you can chop as fast as you can cook then you don't need mise bowls. Just go straight from board to pan. Skip the middleman.
This, a thiusand times this. It's so much more efficient. Doing a proper mise en place can make sense for certain meals or when doing large volumes but for a lot of home cooking it's just a waste of time.
Becoming fast enough with my knife skills to cut as I cook was the biggest efficiency boost I ever made.
As long as you have a reasonable weight cutting board. Some are heavy as hell - you need at least a plate or something to scrape it into
First, like Mike said, cut next to the stove, it makes things a lot easier and more ergonomical.
Second, you can either use something like a dough scraper....or if you're using a pan with a long handle just hold it in front of the board and swipe stuff in.

Am really not a fan of the cheap disposable stuff like deli cups. Can understand why they make sense in a restaurant setting but at home I prefer to cut down on as much of the unnecessary waste as I can.
 
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