On my food beyond its nutrition journey, I am constantly creating new recipes and putting my twist on recipes that I have come across. Two of the most helpful things I have discovered on my journey is creating a weekly menu, and mise en place (me zon plass). If I had to choose between the two, I would choose mise en place every time.
Mise en place literally means: everything in its place. This is used as part of the cooking preparation. You place everything that is required for the recipe, in the order that you will need to use it. And put it at your fingertips.
This way you know that you have everything needed to create your recipe and ingredients will not be accidentally left out. It also prevents you from having to dash around the kitchen trying to grab what you need or slice and dice ingredients as you are cooking.
I decided to make char siu. Typically, char siu is made with different cuts of pork. It’s sweet, zesty, sticky, savory/umami and aromatic. The aromatic flavoring and aroma is from a seasoning call Chinese 5 Spice. This is the core element of char siu, in addition to the distinctive vibrant red color that is usually attained by using red food coloring.
On Saturday, I decided I was going to make a char siu marinade for seafood, minus the red food coloring. Last week, I made char siu Chilean sea bass using a store-bought marinade. While it tasted good, and it really did, I knew it could taste so much better if I made the marinade myself.
I checked out numerous recipes and decided what elements were important to me in the creation of my recipe. Many had a base of tomato ketchup, which wasn’t going to work for me. (As quiet as it is kept, I’m not a huge tomato ketchup person). It’s important to understand the ingredients that you choose to use in any recipe that you’re creating. Tomato ketchup is very acidic and mixed with the other ingredients needed to create the char siu marinade, like shaoxing wine and mirin, would literally cook the seafood, if marination was long enough. It would have a ceviche effect.
I decided on all the elements I wanted in my recipe. D-day arrived and I decided on the seafood that I wanted to char siu. Char siu means to fork roast. In place of the fork, I used a baking tray for lobster, colossal shrimp, extra large scallops and salmon.
I kinda got my mise en place ready and made my marinade. The color of the marinade was a deep mahogany red, that almost looked brown. I was very happy with that.
I added the sea food to the marinade, then transferred everything to a Ziploc bag. I expelled as much air out of the bag as I could and place the Ziploc bag into the refrigerator. Marination was approximately 5 hours.
I preheated the oven, removed the seafood from the refrigerator and placed them on chili oiled baking tray. I made the honey glaze and all systems were a go.
Roasted the seafood, glazed it and roasted it some more, glazed it some more until it was done. It looked good. It smelled wonderful, although my brain said something is missing. Umm!? I couldn’t figure out what that missing element was. If you look at the image of my mise en place you’ll be able to see what I missed.
We sat down to dinner and I took the first bite of my char siu seafood, which happened to be lobster, and I realized that I had forgotten the core ingredient for this recipe. I had left out the Chinese 5 Spice that is made of a combination of ground cloves, anise seed, cinnamon, fennel and sichuan pepper, which is what this recipe is about. I was so focused on creating the depth of color I wanted to attain, without using food coloring, that I didn’t do the correct recipe cross check.
Mise en place is only as good and as effective as the person creating it. Remember to cross check your recipe for all the ingredients. Once when putting your mise en place together and then again right before you start cooking. Ironically, my inner self actually suggested that I do a final check before I started cooking, but, I had my mise en place, in place so I ignored it.
While this was an epic failure for me, I AM choosing to embrace my Mum’s words of wisdom. “Every spoil is a new style!” And I have to agree. I created two recipes instead of one. How’s that for turning this culinary debacle into a positive experience?
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