Six Restaurant Techniques to Make Your Home Kitchen More Efficient
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Cooking can be an exercise in managed chaos, and that managed chaos can be intimidating. That’s why so many people are reluctant to cook in their own kitchens (if they even have the energy to try)—there’s even a diagnosable fear called mageirocophobia that describes a fear of cooking.
It’s easy to see why—kitchens are messy, the gear in them (even in basic kitchen setups) can seem complicated if no one ever taught you how to use it, and it’s possible to mess up even the simplest recipes. The end result is a kitchen that feels like a war zone, and every meal an uphill climb against time, missing ingredients, and the din of fire alarms going off.
You can reduce that chaos by borrowing some tricks of the trade from professional kitchens. You don’t necessarily need how to handle a knife like a chef or know what a mother sauce is—but there are a few simple lessons you can take from the way restaurants run their kitchens and apply to your humble cooking spot.
Practice mise en place
This is probably the most useful concept you can take from a professional kitchen and use in your own. Mise en place is a French term translating to “putting in place,” and in a kitchen it means having everything prepped and within reach. That means having all the ingredients measured, cut, and properly prepped (e.g., thawed), then arranged in the order you’ll need them but with everything within easy reach.
Practicing mise en place offers a ton of benefits: You’ll know if you’re missing anything you’re going to need before you start cooking, and having everything prepped properly reduces anxiety because if something goes wrong in the prep stage, you can just reset and do it over without worrying about ruining an entire meal. And, of course, during the actual cooking, if you have everything right there, organized and ready to go, it will make cooking a lot less stressful.
Use deli containers
If you’ve watched The Bear (or any TV show or movie set in a professional kitchen) you’ve probably noticed the deli containers everyone uses—both for ingredients and for drinking. There’s a reason these plastic buckets are so popular: They’re absolutely perfect for storing food. They’re light, stackable, airtight, every size uses the same lid (so you won’t go mad trying to find that one missing lid) and easily labeled. They’re also so cheap you don’t care if you lose a few here and there (you can buy a 36-pack for $22). If you want a similar storage solution that’s a little sturdier, you can use soup containers, which look the same but are more robust.
Use these containers to hold prepped ingredients while cooking, and to store leftovers in the fridge or freezer. Even though they’re clear, label each one so you know what’s in it and when you stored it; this will help you avoid wasting food because you lost track of how long it’s been in there.
Use a FIFO system
If you cook a lot, you buy a lot of staples and basics. The professional kitchen concept that you need to steal is FIFO: First in, first out.
It’s a simple concept: Organize your food items by expiration date. The stuff that will go bad soon goes in the front so it gets used, and the stuff that’s fresher goes in the back. This minimizes waste, because you won’t let things expire just because they were hidden in the back, and you won’t have multiple instances of an ingredient open and half-used. As an added bonus, organizing your pantry with the FIFO method means you’ll have a better sense of how often stuff goes bad before you use it, which can be useful for calibrating your grocery lists—and budget.
This should also be applied to all those deli containers—whether they contain leftovers or unused ingredients, date them meticulously and store them in a FIFO arrangement to ensure you don’t waste anything unnecessarily.
Get some squeeze bottles
The humble squeeze bottle is great for more than just ketchup and mustard: It’s one of the best things you should transport from a pro kitchen into your own home. Squeeze bottles offer three main benefits:
They make bulk buying easier. If you go through a lot of oil in your cooking, you probably buy enormous tubs of the stuff—and make a tremendous mess when you use it. Filling up a squeeze bottle periodically keeps things cleaner, and makes storing your ingredients easier because the bottles are a uniform size.
They allow for better accuracy. Drizzling stuff in a pan or on a dish is an easy way to wind up with stuff all over your kitchen. Squeeze bottles allow for more control—instead of pouring and hoping you don’t splash, overpour, or suffer poor aim, you can use a precise number of squirts to get the coverage you need.
They can contain bespoke stuff. If you use certain dressings repeatedly, loading up a squeeze bottle with your homemade mayo or salad dressing means you can deploy them any time a recipe—or your mood—calls for them.
Squeeze bottles are also just a lot more fun to use than lugging a 64-oz container of olive oil to the pot on your stove.
Buy in bulk and store the extra
If you cook a lot, you know that there are basics that go into a wide range of recipes—stuff like stock, sauces, or diced veggies like onions or peppers. Instead of prepping these each and every time you cook, next time you’re making some for a single recipe, make a lot of it instead. Then portion out the leftovers into deli containers or freezer bags, label and date them, and toss them in the freezer. Next time you need a cup of diced onions, there they are, ready to go.
Clean as you go
If you’ve ever cooked a meal for a large group of people (or battled your way through a complicated and ambitious recipe) you know that feeling of doom when you gaze upon the destruction you have wrought on your kitchen. The microwave is covered in sauce, the stove looks like a strange buffet of various foods, the counters are covered in mystery powders, and the sink is so full of dirty dishes you briefly consider setting the house on fire and starting a new life.
That’s why one of the best ideas you can borrow from a commercial kitchen is “clean as you go.” It’s a simple concept: Clean up spills and other messes right away and put everything away once you’re done using it—food and spices go in the fridge or pantry, and used utensils, cookware, or empty containers go into the dishwasher, if you have one. It only takes a few seconds to do this, and cleaning up as you go not only reduces the work of cleaning up after dinner, it makes for a healthier cooking environment because you don’t have a sticky film over every single surface in your kitchen.