Behind every successful cook is an organized prep list. When I worked as a prep cook, I followed one to a tee every morning. Most days, I wasn’t even at the stove. I was prepping: unloading groceries, sharpening the knives, putting ingredients away, and keeping my station clean as I chopped onions and peeled beets. Organizing the kitchen every day and taking the time to prep my ingredients properly instilled good habits, and I am a much tidier, more efficient home cook because of it.
Prepping at home can be similarly seamless if you set yourself up for success. In our hungriest moments, it’s tempting to rush through a recipe without reading all the steps and tips and default to messy habits. And sure, we’ve all frantically thrown together a meal. But learning how to prep smarter can help streamline cooking and cleaning up, and, most importantly, make cooking a more enjoyable experience. Whether it’s maintaining a sharp knife or organizing a tidy work station, good prep can make all the difference between a smooth cooking session and a kitchen mishap.
Editor’s Note
This is the first in a series of articles sharing essential tips and techniques that have changed how I, our readers, and the other Serious Eats editors cook. This series is by no means an ultimate collection of essential techniques—just some of the more important ones that separate good cooks from truly great ones.
Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik
A sharp knife isn’t just safer than a dull one, it’s also the key to clean and precise cuts. And it can improve the cooking experience in some surprising ways. For instance, sharp blades make onions less pungent, since a sharp knife ruptures fewer of the onion’s cell walls, and since this rupture is what leads to the production of the onion’s noxious fumes, cleaner cuts mean less eye-watering aroma. With a whetstone and a honing steel, you can easily maintain your knives at home so they stay in tip-top shape (or make an annual habit of sending your knives to a quality local sharpener).
Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik
While setting up a prep station for small kitchen jobs is unnecessary, staying organized when you meal prep or tackle a big project will help you streamline tasks and make cooking and cleaning easier and faster. That means setting up your mise en place ahead of time, cleaning as you go, and keeping the tools you need close at hand. Prepping is especially useful for fast-paced cooking methods, such as stir-frying in a wok.
Serious Eats / Grace Kelly
Lists of “essential” cooking gear can get long quickly. Most of the time, it isn’t necessary to splurge on expensive equipment when you can make do with what you have. But some cooking equipment can expand the possibilities of what you can cook, and save you time, too. If you have the budget, it’s worth investing in items like a good Dutch oven for stews, braises, and one-pot dinners; a scale for accurate measuring; a bench scraper for transferring ingredients to prep bowls and portioning out dough; an instant-read thermometer for checking doneness on proteins; and an immersion blender, which can emulsify sauces (such as mayonnaise or hollandaise) in just a few seconds.
Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt
You might be able to mince garlic in your sleep, but there’s no harm in brushing up on basic knife skills, especially when you’re working with new ingredients or ones you don’t use too often. (When was the last time you cut butternut squash?) We recommend learning four essential knife cuts: slicing, chopping, back-slicing, and rock chopping. Having good knife skills will make meal prep much faster, safer, and more pleasant. Plus, cutting ingredients into uniform pieces ensures they cook and brown evenly, so don’t end up with some pieces of food that are undercooked and others that are overcooked. If you’re starting from scratch, check out our guide to holding a knife properly.
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Instead of freezing a large block of tomato paste or minced garlic, divide the portions into usable amounts in ice cube trays or reusable zip-top bags. You’ll waste less and won’t have to hack away at a frozen block for a single serving. Freezing stacked bags of meals or prepped ingredients is also a more efficient way to meal prep, since all you need to do is defrost, reheat, and enjoy when life gets busy.
While you might not think of preserving herbs as prep, having fresh, flavorful herbs on hand to incorporate into various dishes is a sure path to better meals. Left untouched in the fridge, herbs will quickly wither away, but there are a few ways to keep them fresh. Wrapping hardy herbs such as rosemary, thyme, and sage in damp paper towels and refrigerating them in a bag helps them stay vibrant. The best way to keep tender herbs like cilantro and parsley fresh is to store them upright in water, like flowers. You can also freeze herbs for soups and stews or dry them in a microwave for more concentrated dusts and rubs.
