Daedong Festival
Competitive spirit.
Always doing whatever he wants, that senior.
It wasn’t that he was wrong. Knowledge from who-knows-where—no, it was on an entirely different plane. Even she, a complete outsider, could tell it wasn’t student-level.
Tak! Tak! Tak!
That didn’t mean she was going to sit there with her eyes open and just watch. She wanted to stand on the same line.
At the very least.
She wanted to land one solid hit. Develop a menu the senior would have no choice but to acknowledge.
Sizzle…!
She poured cooking oil into the pot, then tossed in a handful of the green onions she had just chopped and stir-fried them.
Like this, draw out the green-onion oil.
On top of that went the ramen soup base. Before adding water she would force as much wok-hei into it as possible.
Gurgle-gurgle!
Only then did she pour in the water. The ramen that had gone through this sequence was far beyond ordinary.
Mmm~ Definitely delicious!
Deep and rich. A thick umami rose up that no ordinary ramen could produce.
Slurp!
Spicy yet refreshing—the taste was superb. By the time she came to her senses she had already slurped down one full chopstickful.
Huk!
She had completely forgotten her diet and just eaten it. It was nothing short of demonic ramen. Definitely delicious. But she knew something merely decent would never beat the senior.
A little more… if I could just add something more.
The green-onion-oil ramen was a recipe she had found online. She had boiled any number of other variations herself. This one had been the best of the lot. She had the feeling that if she refined the flavor just a little further it would be perfect.
Tok, tok!
The problem was she was full. For the past four days it felt like she had eaten nothing but ramen for more than two meals a day.
It would be a waste to throw it away.
Even boiling half-portions had its limits. Her own tongue was growing duller to ramen; proper tasting had become impossible. No matter how good something was, eat too much of it and you got sick of it.
Got a second?
Of course I’ve got time haha
She decided to call for SOS. Club members—specifically the ones who looked free—would become her test subjects.
Lots of the girls are dieting, so that won’t work.
Even if they ate, it would only be one or two bowls. The guys had real appetites; three bowls or more might be possible.
Anything I can help with?
She picked the ones who looked like they could eat. Preferably ones whose tongues still functioned.
So… Sora invited me?
Ramen… this is a green light, right?
Ah crap, it’s been ages since I cut my hair.
The male students who received the KakaoTalk messages were already soaring on the wings of imagination.
Economics department lecture hall.
“Hey! What’s wrong with you guys?”
“Your faces are all puffy…”
The students were a little restless. Overnight the three guys’ faces had completely changed. Yechan, Taewoo, Yunhwan—three bulky guys looking like that were impossible to miss.
“Your faces doubled in size. Complexion’s yellow too.”
“Did you get beaten up somewhere?”
“We protected Sora’s face.”
““What?””
Their excuses were pure nonsense no one could understand.
I even told them it was fine to leave some…
The reason their faces had swollen like that—Sora had a pretty good idea. She had fed them ramen. Each of them had forced down more than five bowls.
“The kids ate like it was a competition, right?”
“H-how did you know?”
“I can roughly imagine.”
“?”
Exactly as Suhyun said. Helping out moderately would have been fine, but the guys had been far too combative.
At the time I thought it was just because they were hungry.
Looking back, it had been pure overeating. The aftereffects showed up on their faces the next morning. There had been a payoff, though. Thanks to them she had been able to test every repertoire she wanted to experiment with.
“You’re pretty cruel yourself.”
“Still, I narrowed it down carefully. I didn’t do any of the ones with tons of extra ingredients.”
“No, not that.”
“?”
She had thought long and hard. When people said “ramen,” kimchi ramen, cheese ramen, rice-cake ramen, dumpling ramen—just the ones that immediately came to mind were more than one or two.
Those don’t feel like pure ramen flavor.
It wasn’t only about taste. Ingredient cost, hassle, whether the people actually running the stall could reproduce it—she had learned all of that over the shoulder at last year’s Daedong Festival. Running a food stall was reality, not idealism.
“You completely wrecked three guys.”
“Well… I do feel a little sorry.”
“Didn’t know you could already handle a 4P.”
“?”
Ramen showdown. She was going to win against the senior. At the very least she would land one solid hit.
He might pull something weird I can’t even imagine.
The scale was different. She was starting to understand what the senior meant by having a global standard.
Sizzle…!
Still, she had no intention of going down easily. Sora poured cooking oil into the pot.
Green onion, minced garlic, and chili powder.
It would produce deeply aromatic oil. When the green onion turned golden brown she poured in the soup base. Everything was coming together exactly according to the recipe she had built.
As it went smoothly she grew curious. What kind of ramen was the senior making? She glanced across the two meters of kitchen.
Bubble-bubble!
All she saw was a pot and a soup packet. Nothing that could be called an extra ingredient.
Yukgaejang?
The ramen itself was ordinary—one of the cheapest, most featureless national brands.
“Senior, aren’t you adding anything? Kimchi or green onion or something.”
“Do I need to pull out a knife just to deal with the likes of you?”
“Seriously!”
She had honestly been tense. He might have brought hand-pulled noodles or a self-developed soup base.
Completely treating me like a kid.
Just one pack of ramen. No special extras. As if that alone was enough. That made her even angrier. If he had faced her with full power at least she wouldn’t feel so resentful.
Splash!
She did everything she was capable of. She was going to smash the careless senior’s big nose flat.
Perfect.
The green onion had turned a beautiful golden brown. The minced garlic had dissolved cleanly into the oil. On top of that the soup base, then boiling water. She had discovered through countless trials that the temperature had to be high for the green-onion oil to bloom properly. She offered a silent prayer of condolence to the department friends still lying around complaining their stomachs felt queasy.
Tak!
The ramen was finished. Two sets of five bowls each lined up in a row on the table.
“Black? White?”
“Which is whose?”
“For fair judging we will not disclose!”
Judging proceeded under the direction of club president Hye-ri. Five self-proclaimed foodies took their seats.
Slurp!
Black first. One chopstickful of noodles entered a mouth. Then they lifted the bowl and drank the broth as well.
It really should just be ordinary ramen.
Of course water control was possible. But in the end it was nothing more than simple yukgaejang.
Slurp~!
If they compared, they would know. She had been certain that once they tasted the white bowls they would understand.
“This is… bland.”
“The green onion’s a bit chewy.”
“Besides that… yeah?”
???
She suffered a crushing 0-to-5 defeat.
Ramen. A food anyone could make.
Even people who can’t cook say it.
“I can at least boil ramen.” Because the process was so simple there was almost nothing to it. Paying money to eat something like that? Making people pay several times the cost for it—
“Did your tongues go bad?”
—that was the very essence of the food-service industry. Sora, unable to accept the fact, exploded. A rare sight. When she slammed both hands down on the desk the club members jumped.
“White was Sora’s?”
“The look was decent enough…”
“It’s not just the look!”
She was thoroughly furious. An emotional shift rarely seen in the usual Sora.
Slurp!
She tasted it herself. From the satisfied expression it seemed she had hit exactly the flavor she intended.
“It’s delicious though.”
“How vulgar.”
“The one senior boiled is just plain yukgaejang!”
“You’re vulgar.”
Sora sticking her lips out was understandable. She simply could not accept the result of the match.
Well, it is yukgaejang, that’s true.
The same stuff they always handed out on military marches. You could understand what six-hundred-won happiness tasted like. He had simply maximized it. The food-service industry was not an industry of making delicious food.
“If you eat it you’ll know.”
“It’s just yukgaejang.”
“Whether it’s just yukgaejang or not.”
It was a business of making people buy and eat it. Time to realize the similar-yet-different difference.
She ate reluctantly. What on earth did it taste like? Why had she lost to something like yukgaejang?
Slurp!
She tasted it. The moment Sora swallowed the noodles her eyes went round.
“This is…”
“How is it?”
“It’s salty.”
“??!!!”
The judges looked ready to flip the table. They had chosen it because they thought it was delicious.
I did pull a bit of a dirty trick.
He had asked Hye-ri to make sure they tasted the black bowls—his ramen—first.
“But it has flavor.”
“Hmm.”
“What did you do? In the kitchen it didn’t look like you put in any special ingredients.”
The taste was strong. And he had used yukgaejang. That was a very important point.
Cup-ramen noodles are thin.
Especially thin. If the temperature wasn’t high you could practically drink them. Thin noodles meant a large amount of broth came along with every bite. Eat something strong-tasting first and everything that followed tasted bland. A strategy that showed up all the time in cooking manga. Of course he hadn’t won on that alone.
“I lost because of seasoning?”
“Yeah.”
“I even used green-onion oil…”
“So what. Mine tastes better.”
“Ugh.”
Right before plating he had added a little seasoning. Ramen as a food product was, from its very origin, a collection of MSG.
Tak!
He revealed the identity. Sora’s expression flooded with shock.
“Three spoons of seasoning.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s enough.”
“It’s a dirty trick!”
“It’s not even pure MSG, so what.”
Momoya chili oil. Momoya seabura. And the one that handled the hidden flavor—
White balsamic vinegar.
A surprisingly little-known fact: vinegar went extremely well with ramen.
“It cleans up the off-notes in the ramen and the acidity adds accent.”
“You didn’t put in a single proper ingredient…”
“Yep.”
“Just seasoning at the end?”
“It’s enough.”
There was a famous Japanese ramen called Ichiran. One of the side options was Oscaran’s acidity—exactly vinegar. It added a charm that kept the greasy, spicy-only ramen from becoming tiring. The other seasonings worked on the same principle.
That’s what seasoning is for.
It multiplied flavor with almost no effort—far more efficiently than uselessly throwing things in, simmering, and researching.
“If I lost because the taste was strong… it’s unfair.”
“Why?”
“If they had eaten my ramen first the result might have been different.”
That’s something you can only say because you don’t understand the food-service industry.
“What?”
As long as you got to Seoul it didn’t matter if you went sideways. It was an industry where the only thing that mattered was making the customer buy and eat.