I'm a indoor kitchen hack and do much better with my smokers and outdoor cooking. In order to help me become better organized in the kitchen I've considered getting some sort of prep station. I see the cutting boards that come with built in containers so that once you cut chop or dice one ingredient you slide it into a container so it's out of the way and move onto the next ingredient.

I ran across this Prepdeck and wondered if it would be worth it. Interested to hear what the indoor chefs here use if anything.

Unless you are mass-prepping meals for a week I think those are way too much. Big and bulky and you don’t want to clean all that. Most of the time when I am chopping I do them in order of longest cooking to shortest, so for example, the onion gets scraped into the skillet off the board as soon as I cut/slice it. What would be much more useful and useable (and mult-tasking) is a set of small bowls much like these. I tend to mostly use custard cups and my smaller regular dining bowls.

https://www.amazon.com/Duralex...-Clear/dp/B007S00L9U

I do a lot of home cooking and consider myself an above average home chef. I've fine tuned my work space over the years and went from gadgets and stuff I thought would help me stay organized to a simple prep area. I now have a large plain 24"x36" cutting board next to the sink, good very sharp knives (mostly a Forschner Santoku) and small bowls to keep stuff organized. The cutting board is easy to clean and the bowls go right in the dishwasher. Unless you are prepping for a large group I really don't see a need for anything else.

I prefer a nice cutting board and small to medium square bowls or containers and you just put what you chopped into each one. Sometimes I just use a plate or two to put things on.

Boos block

I look at it from another side,

I was a Journeyman Meat Cutter/ Dept Manager for 19 yrs,

I still use the basic knives I used at work in the kitchen and I have a few different sized cutting boards,


like mentioned, any veg or whatever needs prepped is done in order of when it is needed,

I'll chop/slice/mangle what ever I need and if I need room on a board , then I'll just put it in a small bowl, or even on a papertowel out of the way,

had to clean prep stations, food processors, wrapping machines, etc etc way too much in that life to want to create something similar at home,

I like Melissa's idea for simplicity. I use a cutting board with a bowl cut out so I can just scrape it on a plate or bowl.



I try to keep frozen stock of chopped veggies so I can just thaw them or put right into the pan. Just did a batch of onions, peppers, Jalepeno's last weekend.

I'll echo what others have said here. I'm not a professional cook, but I do cook pretty often. The only thing I really need is an adequate size cutting board. It's no fun when you start cutting something and pieces of it want to fly off a tiny board. With a good size cutting board I can cut and either dump it in the pan, push it to a corner of the cutting board, or put it in a ramekin or bowl for later. I think those prep stations are just too much unless you are prepping huge quantities, in which case they make a lot of sense.

Yup, I use small Pyrex glass bowls & 2 cutting boards. I like the cutout on the board in the above image, but I have a nice lip on the edge of my counter and just scrape in the cut veggies from there.

I simply use a large cutting board and use a bench scraper to move the cut items to bowls or paper plates.

Like xantom, I keep various diced peppers in the freezer.

Depending on the type of cutting board you have, place a moist paper towel under the board to keep it from moving as you cut. When done, use the paper towel for any cleanup you might have.

When I redid my kitchen I put in a bar/prep sink so two of us could work at the same time.

We just sharp knives and cutting boards.

We only prep one or two meals at a time.

If we were cooking for a week, we would just use Tupperware, much cheaper and lots of different sizes so we don't wast space in the fridge.

As usual great advice from the forum. I ordered the various size bowls from Melissa's post and I have more cutting boards than I probably need. My outdoor cooking tools are organized and I don't seem to have the same problem doing prep work for that. Time to organize the in house kitchen I guess and get rid of all the junk drawers with gadgets that are not needed rather than adding more. Seems we have several drawers with stuff in it that need to be rifled through when I need a zester or something that I don't use that often.

Funny this topic came up.

About 2 months ago I heard of and learned about the term Mise En Place, which means everything in its place.

I was tired of having the habit of foolishly starting cooking and then finding out I was out of an ingredient or getting behind the curve of getting things ready while cooking, I just couldn't keep up with cooking while measuring, chopping, slicing, etc.

I ended up buying a few small bowls, quite small, to prep before I started the cooking process. I already had some very small bowls.

Mise En Place made me to make sure I had everything I needed before I started. For example, not enough milk when already starting to make pancakes, or enough of a spice or ingredient, or even worse, none at all.

This idea of Mise En Place really helped me.
LINK to the meaning of Mise En Place


Mise en place (French pronunciation: ​[mi zɑ̃ ˈplas]) is a French culinary phrase which means "putting in place" or "everything in its place". It refers to the setup required before cooking, and is often used in professional kitchens to refer to organizing and arranging the ingredients (e.g., cuts of meat, relishes, sauces, par-cooked items, spices, freshly chopped vegetables, and other components) that a cook will require for the menu items that are expected to be prepared during a shift.[1]

In the kitchen, the phrase is used as a noun (i.e., the setup of the array of ingredients), a verb (i.e., the process of preparing) and a state of mind.[4] The term's broader meanings can be applied to classrooms, hospitals, and elsewhere.[4]
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Yep, the heat doesn't start until I have every ingredient accounted for and prepped.

I cook on the Big Green Egg several times a week. Usually it is just Mrs Greener and me but when all the kids and grandkids are here at once we will cook for up to 25 people. I have learned that getting my act together a day or two before, and pre-cutting or shredding or mixing as much as possible beforehand spreads the work and cleanup over time and reduces the stress of rushing to get everything done at once. A cutting board next to the sink and a few stainless bowls along with very sharp knives are adequate to my task.

We have been getting the Hello Fresh meals the last few months. This is a great program if you haven't tried it. Their recipe/instruction cards are great. They have a section on it that's called "what you need to bust out" it tells you if you need a peeler or a zester small or large bowl large or small fry pan etc. so yes this helped me with mise en place as mentioned earlier.

The other benefits are you get everything in pre measured pouches or just enough produce that you need for the dish. There is virtually no waste. No seldom used spices or rarely used sauces going to waste in you're pantry or produce tossed out a week later. Also for me at least it got me out of a cooking rut of 6 to 8 dishes. You only need very common staples on hand to complete the dish like sugar, milk, butter etc. and most of the times you need nothing it's a complete kit. Cost is about $10 a serving.

I'll echo was several others have said...

I don't have a fancy all-in-one prep station like that PrepDeck, but I have a large cutting board plus a variety of small-to-medium glass, stainless, and ceramic bowls available for temporary ingredient holding.

Unless there are significant lengths of time between steps in the recipe to allow for plenty of time to prep the next stage, I'll typically chop all the ingredients first and divvy them out into these smaller bowls to have them ready, and measure out all the spices and other additives ahead of time too. (Other than stuff like pinches and dashes of extra spices to be added as needed.)

You don't even necessarily need to divide each and every ingredient into individual containers... You can often stick all the ingredients for one step in the recipe together into one bowl, as long as they're going to be all added together.

Then, once you fire up the heat and start the cooking process, you only have to worry about following the recipe and dumping in the ingredients as needed.

I like cooking with an organized, regimented process. It's not only easier, but also burning something, or having your pot boil over, while you're trying to hurriedly chop or measure out the next ingredients sucks. And rushing to do so can lead to mistakes and messes.

All I know is a large maple or other fancy wood(end cut or course) is really cool to look at.

Get rid of the gadgets and marketed items 'to make your life easier', focus on proper tools and master them. Organization is important in any endeavor, its always best to review your recipe (more than once), get all the ingredients laid-out and do any of the cutting work prior to actual cooking. If you've got soup bowls, prep bowls, mixing bowls or, whatever container (Tupperwear, Rubermaid, Oxo..), they'll be sufficient to put those ingredients aside until ready to cook. I knew of a guy who, not only had each ingredient laid-out but, they were always lined up in the order that they were to go into the recipe...super OCD.

No need to go out and buy a unique device/container, just so that your kitchen counter looks like a prep station at a restaurant...because no professional chef has such a set-up in their own home kitchen but, what they do have is an organized area.

The biggest change that helped me out is a work station sink. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Ru...es-RVH8300/302944842