I love a prep list
Try it this Thanksgiving
Thank god they’re letting me go home.
I’ve never seen the Cool World kitchen this crazy before. We’ve had some wild days, sure, but this is different. We’re hosting our friend Fidel Caballero for a pop up previewing his upcoming restaurant, Corima. Stations typically set up for steak frites and fried chicken sandwiches are now swarmed with a whiff of roasted chiles, citrus and stress.
“Yo, Austin, thanks, get the hell out of here.”
It’s 4:55pm. We re-open in five minutes, having made the brilliant decision to run this one-night-only menu following a brutal Sunday brunch service. It feels wrong to leave while everyone is in the weeds, but they’re right. I don’t belong. I’ve only been cooking professionally for a few months, and what I witnessed all day humbled me to my core.
Fidel and a few of our best cooks arrived early that morning with a monstrous prep list. They had printed off this spreadsheet, organized by dishes they’d never made before, with bare bones steps that would pull the whole menu together. Knife cuts, making salsas, breaking down proteins. The rest of us were tasked with not embarrassing the restaurant during brunch. At one point, with service wrapping up, our head chef asked me to char scallions. I was about to ask him how exactly he wanted it done, but caught myself. I’d been watching the other cooks move and operate all day. They were collaborative, tasting and running things by Fidel.
These onions look good, chef?
Yes, thank you chef.
But, seemingly more than anything else, they proved valuable by being told a task once, knowing how to do it well and do it quickly, then moving on to the next thing. The dinner prep list was posted right next to me. I watched in awe as people popped in and out, checking off items that would have taken me hours. So I ran down to the walk-in and grabbed three bunches of scallion. Trimmed the ends, reached for olive oil before remembering — oh, yeah, duh, Mexican food, roast with neutral oil — threw on a little salt and put them in the salamander broiler.
The worst thing you can do in a busy kitchen is stand around, so I started getting plates and utensils out for family meal, but really all I could think about was the scallions. I kept peeking at them. This is the one thing they asked me to do. Don’t screw it up. After a few minutes, I pulled them out onto a sheet tray, nice and blackened.
Scallions, chef.
I need these charred. Like, charred charred.
How much … uh … longer do you think they need?
Immediately, I feel the frustration. While standard is high and the feedback is blunt, I’ve always been able to freely ask questions and learn here. Today is different. Time is even more precious. Instinct and execution matters. I get cut and told to enjoy my night. Tickets start printing. Someone asks what the pick up is on the crudo. No one had gotten to that part yet.
Those prep lists stuck with me. I’m not really interested in dishing out Thanksgiving advice. (My one hot take for the best holiday of the year is that turkey is pointless. Why waste so much time and effort on a protein with such a low ceiling? Embrace a no-turkey Thanksgivings. Try buckets of fried chicken. Whole Dover sole. Pork shoulder sandwiches. Aged duck three ways. Idk, go nuts. Just do something that will make people happy). But I will offer this one note: Stop and spend time on a prep list.
Here’s the one I’m using to get ready for Saturday’s Bangers & Jams pop up dinner, Jabroni’s:
I do a version of this for basically every meal I don’t cook on the fly. Sometimes it’s just sloppily scratched onto a notepad. But for bigger events, like Thanksgiving, I like a composed list. And since multiple people who claim to love me unconditionally have told me that I have the worst handwriting they’ve ever seen, I whip them up on a computer and print them out.
Some tips and tricks on prep lists as you consider your own:
Mine is intentionally sparse. Yours doesn’t have to be. But it helps me to see the full board with minimal description.
I like to organize by dish, with the dishes ordered sequentially by how they’ll be served. Under each dish, I order the steps based on when I’d like to get to them. This can mean I jump around the sheet a ton — I mostly just let instinct take over what I do when — but that’s fine.
It may not be fine for you, though. Experiment. Group similar tasks together. Make a detailed, timed schedule. Assign items to different people. (I’m a control freak who refuses to accept help). The goal here is to make the day easier and more successful.
I like to leave out measurements, techniques and plating steps. But get as detailed and as intricate as you think will be helpful. I do suggest trying a minimal prep list some time. It’s tied to my strong belief that you should work to break yourself free from recipes. I know I need an aioli to serve with crab claws, and I’m excited to whip that up today with whatever strikes me. I’ve gotten better at aiolis — and salads, and seasoning, and cooking proteins — by taking my eyes out of cookbooks, using feel rather than measurements and letting myself fail a bunch first.
I think that’s especially true with pick up and plating. As a first step, try going hyper-specific on the actual prep part of your meal plan. Everything you see on the list above that you should do ahead of time. And then when it’s time to actually mix the salad or roast the fish or plate the sweet potatoes, trust your instincts and what you remember from having read the recipe. Taste as you go. Know that you can make adjustments any time. Have some faith.
No post tomorrow. Just this one, and paid subscribers in LA get to enjoy Jabroni’s. Send me your Thanksgiving prep list if you make one. I’d love to check it out. And if you’re making a salsa, be sure to char your scallions into eternity.