Chapter 167: The Friendly Judge (3)
Chapter 167: The Friendly Judge (3)
“Oh, looks like the two of them are going to cook.”
“…I’m standing right here watching too.”
Janet replied with a touch of sarcasm.
Inside the kitchen, Jo Minjoon and Anderson took their places behind the counter, apparently preparing to demonstrate the test themselves. Jo Minjoon spoke in a low, clear voice.
“There are only two dishes you’ll be making. Tomato spaghetti with shrimp and scallops, and salmon steak served over fried radish with velouté sauce. The recipes are in front of you.”
“Minjoon and I will demonstrate both the pasta and the salmon,” Anderson continued. “If the written recipe isn’t enough for you to understand what we want, then watch us carefully and figure it out from the way we cook. All right, we’ll begin.”
Before the applicants had time to fully prepare themselves, the two of them began. Anderson took charge of the tomato spaghetti, while Jo Minjoon started on the salmon steak.
Neither dish was particularly complicated, but that did not mean either one was easy to make. People often misunderstood simple recipes, assuming that fewer steps automatically meant lower difficulty. In reality, the opposite could easily be true.
There were people who could fail at something as simple as grilling salted fish. Some would burn the skin, while others would control the heat poorly enough that the fish stuck to the pan. Nor was that problem limited to beginners. Even experienced, well-known chefs could burn a piece of fish if they lost focus for a moment.
Tomato spaghetti was much the same. With pasta based on tomato sauce, the most difficult part was often the sauce itself. Bringing out the proper flavour of tomatoes was deceptively difficult.
When chopped tomatoes were sautéed over heat, determining exactly how far they had cooked was not easy. Crushed tomatoes released so much liquid that appearance alone could be misleading, which meant the cook often had to rely on taste. But that was not simple either. After smelling the tomatoes continuously throughout the cooking process, accurately judging their flavour with the tongue became increasingly difficult.
Experience could compensate for that. A chef who had cooked the same sauce for years might know instinctively when it was ready, while someone with an exceptional palate like Kaya could simply taste the difference. For the applicants standing there now, however, the smartest option was to carefully observe how long Anderson cooked the sauce and use that as their guide.
Yes. That’s how an applicant should approach this.
Jo Minjoon’s gaze sharpened as he worked.
Both recipes were eight-point dishes. Rachel’s salmon recipe itself was straightforward: begin with vegetable stock, then use thyme, cream, and lemon zest to make the velouté sauce. Coat slices of radish in cornflour and fry them before placing them over the sauce. Finally, season the salmon with lemon salt and pepper, sear it in a frying pan, and flambé it with white wine.
It was an excellent recipe for testing fundamentals. An applicant might be familiar with frying in general, but handling an unfamiliar ingredient under pressure was another matter, and radish was exactly that sort of ingredient. Salmon, by comparison, should have been familiar to most of them, but that was part of the test as well. Rachel wanted to see whether they could still cook something familiar properly while under this much tension.
Jo Minjoon began by preparing the ingredients for the vegetable stock. He set the pot over the heat, lifted his knife, and moved without the slightest hesitation. The vegetables on the chopping board were quickly reduced to pieces roughly the size of a baby’s palm.
Once the stock ingredients were simmering, he moved immediately to the velouté. He melted butter, added flour, and made a roux. Up to that point, nothing was especially difficult. The challenge began once the liquid was added and the sauce had to reduce without scorching. If he stopped stirring for too long, it could burn easily.
That meant even while he moved on to other tasks, part of his attention had to remain on the velouté. That divided concentration was one of the true difficulties of the test. During ordinary service, the sauce would likely have been prepared in advance, but here the applicants had to handle every step themselves from beginning to end. It was only natural for their attention to scatter and the quality of their dishes to suffer.
For most people, at least.
Jo Minjoon never faltered.
He sliced the radish, coated it in starch, and fried it. He grated lemon zest into salt to make the lemon salt, then poured olive oil into a frying pan and laid the salmon into it without the slightest sign of nervousness. Watching him work gave the strange impression that there were two people moving through the kitchen instead of one.
“I thought his cooking only looked that flashy on Grand Chef because it was television… but is that really someone with no professional kitchen experience?”
“…I think I finally understand what people mean by genius.”
“Anderson at least worked in his parents’ restaurant, but Minjoon…”
The applicants whispered among themselves as they watched. Jo Minjoon looked so composed that some of them could not help feeling discouraged about their own abilities.
But there was a reason he looked that way.
Every time Jo Minjoon had survived a mission on Grand Chef, he had poured everything he had onto the counter. The conditions there had been completely different from those of an ordinary kitchen: time limits, unfamiliar themes, constant pressure, and the possibility of elimination hanging over every dish. More than once, he had been forced to concentrate to what felt like the absolute limit of human endurance.
He had not forgotten what those experiences taught him. Even afterwards, he had returned to the counter again and again, sacrificing sleep so that he would not lose the sensation he had gained under pressure.
That was how he had become the chef standing there now.
Given everything he had gone through, it was hardly surprising that there were no visible flaws in his movements.
Among the applicants, a young Asian man with closely shaved black hair alternated between watching Jo Minjoon’s hands and studying his expression. He swallowed unconsciously.
Just as I thought… he’s incredible.
The young man’s name was Gerrick. There had been many times when he had considered giving up on becoming a chef, but then he had learned about Jo Minjoon: a beginner who had stood proudly among the best amateur cooks in the country on Grand Chef, and the owner of the extraordinary ability known as absolute taste.
Aside from both being Asian, Gerrick could hardly claim they had much in common. The difference between their skills was far too large for that. But what Gerrick admired about Jo Minjoon was not simply his ability.
It was his attitude.
The expression he wore while handling ingredients, the precision at his fingertips, the way he treated every movement as meaningful, and the feeling he poured into every dish—love, perhaps, or devotion. Even through a television screen, Gerrick had been able to feel it clearly. Standing only a short distance away now, the effect was far stronger.
Nor was Gerrick the only applicant who felt that way.
Anderson carried himself with the same intensity.
The food they were preparing was merely the demonstration for the applicants’ test, yet the atmosphere between the two chefs felt almost like a competition. There was force behind every movement, as though neither was willing to allow even the smallest lapse.
Cooking, when you thought about it, was a profession with an absurdly broad range. That breadth also made it difficult to define. Even veteran chefs sometimes said, I’ve cooked my entire life, and I still don’t know what cooking really is. It was not false modesty. Many of them genuinely did not know how to put it into words.
Someone could say that cooking meant using a knife, controlling heat, and seasoning ingredients, but few chefs would ever be satisfied with such an answer. What they pursued throughout their lives was not merely knife technique, flame control, or seasoning. They were pursuing cooking as a whole, and the subtle difference separating one chef from another often came from the fundamental attitude with which they approached it.
That was what the applicants could see in Jo Minjoon and Anderson.
Conviction.
The two of them believed in the profession they had chosen and in the path they were walking. They understood cooking—or at least believed deeply enough in it to love what they were doing. Otherwise, there was no way they could wear expressions like those while they worked.
My supposed disciples… are the ones teaching me.
Watching from a short distance away, Rachel smiled gently. The path she had forgotten for so long seemed to be returning to her little by little as she watched the two of them.
The demonstration eventually came to an end.
Jo Minjoon looked down at his finished dish with satisfaction. Velouté sauce spread across the plate like a pale lake, with the fried radish resting in its centre like an island. The salmon steak sat on top, its crisp skin contrasting with the glistening pink flesh beneath.
Cooking Score: 8/10.
That meant he had made no mistakes.
Anderson had finished cleanly as well. Scallops were arranged around the edge of his plate like flower petals, while the spaghetti had been twirled neatly into the centre. A shrimp curved over the top as though wrapping itself around the pasta.
Anderson turned to the applicants.
“What do you think? Did you get a feel for it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“You can’t have understood it completely yet.”
Jo Minjoon interrupted the applicant before the answer had even finished. He tapped the plate holding his salmon with a fork.
“The core of a dish is always in the taste. Every movement I made while cooking, no matter how small, is contained in this plate now. So you need to taste it.”
He cut the radish and salmon into small pieces. There was nowhere near enough for fifteen people to have a proper serving, but that did not matter. They only needed a taste.
Anderson’s dish was the same. With his pasta, the most important thing for them to sample was the sauce. Beyond what was written in the recipe, they needed to understand exactly how far the tomatoes should be cooked.
Gerrick put his portion of Jo Minjoon’s salmon into his mouth with obvious excitement. The combined piece of radish and salmon was barely larger than his thumb, but the moment his teeth broke through the crisp coating and reached the moist interior of the radish, his eyes widened. The velouté was smooth and faintly sweet, brightened by lemon zest, while the salmon itself was so tender that it seemed to melt against his tongue.
“Oh…”
Soft moans of appreciation escaped from around the room. For a moment, the flavour was good enough to make the applicants forget their anxiety altogether.
They looked at Jo Minjoon with surprise.
Some of them had privately wondered whether he had only been given a demi-chef position because of his television fame and the marketable image of his absolute taste. After tasting his food, that suspicion disappeared.
Not one of them could confidently claim to be a better cook than Jo Minjoon.
He unquestionably had the qualifications to stand above them as the chef they would assist.
Anderson’s tomato spaghetti left a similar impression. Each bite carried a rich, comforting sweetness that made some of them wonder whether tomatoes had always possessed such a vivid flavour.
Am I… really supposed to make this?
The moment Gerrick became conscious of that fact, his heart began pounding.
Could he do it?
He wanted to.
More than that, he suddenly felt greedy. He wanted to reproduce the dish perfectly, pass the test, and earn the right to stand behind Jo Minjoon as his assistant.
Rachel was unquestionably the greatest jewel in the restaurant, but the person Gerrick wanted to follow was the one standing directly in front of him.
When all fifteen applicants took their places behind the counters, the atmosphere changed completely.
Had Rachel said that twenty-five people once worked in this kitchen?
Jo Minjoon walked slowly between the stations, watching each applicant begin.
The first dish was Anderson’s pasta.
As expected, nearly everyone struggled with the tomato sauce. Jo Minjoon focused on the applicants who seemed to be working steadily, and unsurprisingly, most of the ones who stood out had Cooking Level 6.
Even for them, however, the test was not easy.
The expected score for the recipe was eight points. Simply possessing the recipe did not mean anyone could automatically produce an eight-point dish.
Come to think of it, when did making an eight-point dish become so easy for me?
Creating a recipe from scratch was still difficult, but reproducing one had become far easier than it used to be.
Even in fine restaurants, the people actually preparing nine- and ten-point dishes were often demi-chefs and prep cooks with Cooking Levels of six or seven. They were capable of doing so because they repeated the same dishes so many times that their hands eventually moved almost exactly as the head chef intended.
Jo Minjoon had already learned that a higher cooking score did not necessarily mean a dish would suit someone better, but there was still no such thing as an easy high-scoring dish. Reaching those scores usually required complicated processes and meticulous concentration.
Even Anderson’s spaghetti looked simple at first glance, but everything—including the sauce—had been made from scratch.
Jo Minjoon realised again just how quickly he had improved over the past several months. Barely more than half a year had passed, yet he had learned an enormous amount and absorbed much of it into his body.
Eventually, the applicants finished the spaghetti.
As they immediately moved on to the salmon without being given any rest, Jo Minjoon quietly examined all fifteen plates.
Then he saw it.
Only one.
A single plate had reached eight points.
…Gerrick.
How intensely had he concentrated to make it that well?
Jo Minjoon tasted Gerrick’s spaghetti, then nodded and leaned towards Anderson.
“Hey. This one tastes pretty close to yours.”
“…Mine is still a little better.”
“Do you really need to defend your pride right now?”
“Hmph. If your pride changes depending on the situation, can it really be called pride?”
“…Fair enough. I’ll accept that.”
By the time they finished evaluating all fifteen plates of spaghetti, the applicants had begun searing their salmon.
Jo Minjoon frowned when he noticed one station.
Perhaps because the applicant was nervous, the heat beneath the frying pan was far too high.
Technically, he should have left them alone during the test.
But he could not bear to watch the salmon suffer for the sake of evaluation.
Jo Minjoon walked over to Rachel and discreetly pointed towards the station.
“Should I leave that alone?”
“Deduct points and tell him. If he keeps going like that, the only thing being punished will be the salmon.”
With Rachel’s permission, Jo Minjoon nodded happily and approached the applicant.
“What do you think about wasting ingredients?”
“It’s something every chef should avoid. The first pillar of a kitchen is customer satisfaction, and the second is financial stability.”
“Then what are you doing right now? Can’t you hear the salmon screaming?”
The applicant flinched and hurriedly adjusted the pan.
That was only the beginning.
Jo Minjoon continued walking between the stations, deducting points whenever necessary. It was a stark contrast to Anderson, who stood to one side with his arms folded and watched silently.
“We asked you to make velouté, not lava. Lower the heat.”
“You must really like melodramas. That salmon and frying pan are clinging to each other harder than most couples.”
“I thought we told you to flambé it. When did we ask you to make a white-wine reduction?”
Before long, the applicants visibly tensed whenever Jo Minjoon approached, swallowing nervously as he passed.
Rachel watched him with mild surprise.
She had expected him to be soft-hearted and reluctant to criticise people too harshly. Instead, he was proving unexpectedly strict, and with considerably more presence than she had anticipated.
That was actually the role she had imagined Anderson playing.
Rachel glanced towards him.
“I’m surprised. Minjoon actually has quite a bit of charisma. I thought he’d be a soft touch.”
Anderson shrugged.
“He’s Tinker Bell raised in the wild.”