Part of the trick to cooking is keeping the kitchen clean

"Washing up has in most cultures been seen as an activity which is not an intrinsic part of preparing, cooking and consuming food. Nor has it been highly regarded."

— Alan Davidson, "The Oxford Companion to Food"

WHEN PREPARING a meal at home, the professional chef performs an act of magic. It has nothing to do with razzle-dazzle chopping or sauté-pan flipping. You won't even notice the trick while it's under way, but then, when dinner is served, the evidence of prestidigitation is right there (or, rather, not there) in the sink: no tower of dirty dishes, no regrets.

I've seen chefs do this trick many times, and eventually it occurred to me that maybe this was a bit of fire I could steal without going to culinary school or working pro bono for a toque-wearing taskmaster. So I called some local chefs, and they were happy to show me what's behind the curtain.

Trick 1: Keep your station clean.

Washing up is not an optional part of cooking.

"Working clean" is a concept drilled into chefs from the first moment they step into a kitchen. It means more than simply wiping down surfaces and washing pots; it means putting things where you found them so you're ready to do the next task.

"The mindset of a chef is to always have their station as clean as possible," says Keith Luce, chef at The Herbfarm. "Every time you have a spare moment, there's something that must be done. If you put washing dishes into that equation, it's easy to see that at the end of the whole task — the task being preparing the meal — it's pretty easy to work those things out."

A pile of dirties taunts Maria Hines, chef-owner of Tilth. "Definitely get everything cleaned up before dinner happens," she says, "just because you want to be able to relax and not worry about it after you're done eating dinner or in the morning when you wake up."

Trick 2: Have a small kitchen, or just pretend you do.

"I think it helps that I have a really small kitchen at home," says Hines. "When you're used to working in small spaces you're used to working really clean, and if you only have a couple of pots, well, you need to wash it so you can use that pot again."

It's not just home kitchens. "A lot of the kitchens I worked in were so small that you couldn't afford, really, to have crap all over the place," says Melissa Nyffeler, chef-owner of Dinette and a former cook at Le Pichet. "At Le Pichet, it's like working in a small boat in that kitchen. There's like 12 inches of space to work in, and there's just no room to have dirty containers lying around. You can't work if you're messy."

Trick 3: Let the food cook.

But where do they find the time? When I'm cooking, I'm cooking, baby. I'm making noise and setting fires.

Well, sometimes. Another thing chefs do better than we mortals is ignore things that aren't important right now. I've probably cooked fewer steaks in my lifetime than the average chef cooks in a week, but after years of carnivory, even I have developed a sixth sense about when to flip the steak. In that three or four minutes while the steak sizzles, I can tear up salad greens, check the potatoes and wash a passel of dishes.

It sounds like this would make cooking more stressful. In fact, it's more fun. The phrase "in the zone" was invented for this solo kitchen ballet.

Trick 4: Foist it off.

"The choice of person to do the washing up is no light matter, and . . . the person or persons chosen should be viewed as having a privilege." — Alan Davidson

"Now, I'm so old and tired," says Luce, "if I cook at home, which is often, I require the people that I'm cooking for to wash dishes. True wisdom comes with age."

He wasn't the only chef willing to fess up. "I am guilty of being a bit of a messy Marvin," says chef Kenyatta Carter of Kingfish Cafe. "My husband is the dishwasher of the family and constantly cleans up behind me. But we're still married, so it's OK."

And when I e-mailed neatnik Nyffeler to ask about interviewing her for this article, she wrote back, "I just had a dinner party last night and woke up to a mess!"

OK, there are no real tricks to cleaning while cooking. But I still find it miraculous even when I do it myself. Making the perfect omelet? That's nice. Having the omelet pan washed and put away seconds after the omelet hits the plate? That's cooking.

Matthew Amster-Burton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest To Raise An Adventurous Eater." Contact him at mamster@gmail.com. Susan Jouflas is a Seattle Times assistant art director.