Chapter 179: Taking the Initiative (1)
Chapter 179: Taking the Initiative (1)
[Chicken Jelly Spaghetti]
Freshness: 99%
Origin: (There are too many ingredients, so it is hidden)
Quality: High
Cooking Score: 7/10
Seven points from the noodle alone.
Jo Minjoon put a strand of the jelly spaghetti, now finished setting, into his mouth. He could feel the elasticity of the jelly, but because it had been made with agar, that elasticity was accompanied by a softness that gave it a chewy texture much like ordinary noodles. If he focused only on the texture, it might even have been difficult to tell whether he was eating noodles or jelly.
Even by itself, the noodle tasted like a decent dish. That was only natural. Instead of grain, the noodle already contained chicken broth, basil, pepper, salt, and other seasonings.
Standing nearby, Janet stealthily took one of Jo Minjoon’s spaghetti strands and put it into her mouth. Her eyes widened slightly.
Jo Minjoon smirked. “How is it? Good?”
“……It’s good, but……”
Janet looked at the spaghetti with a slightly dissatisfied expression. Jo Minjoon understood what her gaze meant.
“Something’s missing.”
“First, it needs some kind of garnish to add a crisp texture. Drizzle a little olive oil over it, but don’t add any more herbs. The flavours of the ingredients inside are already strong enough.”
Although Janet rarely engaged in casual conversation, she tended to become quite talkative whenever the subject was cooking.
There was only one other thing that could make her talk this much.
Janet turned her head.
“Ella, do you want to eat this?”
“Yes!”
“She says she wants some.”
Jo Minjoon laughed at Janet’s gaze, which seemed to ask why he had not given Ella any yet.
Ella rested her chin on the countertop and stared at the plate with sparkling eyes. Looking at the pale green noodles, she opened her mouth in admiration without lifting her chin.
“It looks like jelly!”
“It’s spaghetti made from jelly.”
“You make spaghetti with jelly? Then do you put tomato sauce on it?”
“You can…… but it probably wouldn’t taste very good.”
Jo Minjoon answered with an expression that made it clear he could hardly imagine the flavour.
Janet brought over some tomato paste.
“It’s not tomato sauce, but try dipping it in this. At least you’ll get an idea.”
“Ah, thanks.”
Of course, it tasted terrible.
Jo Minjoon shook his head. “I either need to serve this as a cold pasta, or make it with vegetable broth instead of chicken broth and add seafood. That might work better.”
“If you’re done thinking about yours, I want you to try mine.”
“Yours?”
“You supposedly have absolute taste. Even if you’re my competitor, I should use whatever resources are available to me. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“Give it here.”
Jo Minjoon snatched the plate from Janet’s hand.
Her dish was ravioli. The difference from ordinary ravioli was that the dough was transparent and as thin as a plastic bag. It had been made using a molecular gastronomy technique called film, which used starch and lecithin.
(Translator’s Note: Lecithin — A group of naturally occurring phospholipids found in substances including egg yolk and soybeans. French chemist Théodore Gobley isolated and named lecithin during the nineteenth century, particularly in work published from the 1840s onward. In modernist cuisine, lecithin is commonly used as an emulsifier and to stabilise extremely light culinary foams or “airs”.)
At first glance, it might have reminded someone of the rice paper used for Vietnamese spring rolls, but it was far thinner than that and melted easily in the mouth.
Inside, Janet had placed finely sliced peanuts and seasoned vegetable broth that had been chilled.
Eight points.
With molecular gastronomy, even the slightest error in proportion could result in failure. In other words, any molecular gastronomy dish that succeeded tended to receive a high score.
Even so, Jo Minjoon wore a strange expression after eating Janet’s ravioli.
For an eight-point dish, it isn’t as good as I expected.
“……What? Is it bad?”
“Rather than bad…… I’d call it mechanical.”
At the implication that the dish lacked something human, Janet’s eyes wavered.
Jo Minjoon quickly waved his hands.
“I’m not saying that about you. What I mean is…… it feels like you focused too much on making a technically excellent dish. There’s a difference between cooking well and making something delicious. You know what I mean?”
“I understand.”
“But don’t dwell on it too much. It isn’t terrible.”
“If it were you……”
Janet’s lips trembled.
She clearly wanted to say something, but she seemed to be struggling to force the words out.
Jo Minjoon did not urge her on. He was used to waiting. He was used to listening to other people’s silence. That was simply the kind of person he was.
In the end, his patience allowed Janet to finally speak.
“If it were you, what would you have done?”
The moment he heard the question, Jo Minjoon understood why she had hesitated so much.
Janet was normally stiff and fairly rough. In some ways, she was even worse than Kaya. For someone like her to ask Jo Minjoon for advice about cooking could not have been easy, considering her pride and personality.
Jo Minjoon’s expression became serious.
Since Janet had made such a difficult decision to ask, he could not give her a careless answer. In his head, he tore apart and rebuilt the recipe dozens of times. What he focused on was not the score, but the taste.
The flavours he imagined would never be completely accurate, but the accuracy of those imagined flavours had been steadily improving. As proof, these days the taste he imagined while designing a recipe was rarely very different from the finished result.
It was proof that his intuition for flavour was becoming sharper.
“If it were me, I’d start by using cornstarch instead of potato starch. It wouldn’t be as transparent, but I think the mouthfeel would be better. As for the broth…… the lightness of vegetable broth doesn’t seem strong enough to balance the oiliness of the peanuts. Wouldn’t fish broth work better?”
“……You thought through all of that in such a short amount of time.”
“This is our job. I need to be capable of at least this much. But it looks like you’re slowly starting to want to win.”
“My desire to work the appetiser station hasn’t changed. Still, even if second place would be the best outcome…… I don’t want to lose either.”
Jo Minjoon laughed.
“I’m the same.”
*
Ten days was not a long time.
At least, for beginners in molecular gastronomy trying to develop a proper menu-worthy recipe, it was an extremely short amount of time.
There was no need even to mention the prep cooks. Their homework every day was to reproduce the recipes Rachel created that day, whether traditional dishes or molecular gastronomy. On top of that, they had a more pressing concern than simply mastering those recipes.
“Who sharpened my knife?”
Anderson shouted in irritation.
The prep cooks looked at one another. The person who finally stepped forward was Maya, a Hispanic woman who still had some baby fat on her cheeks.
She spoke cautiously.
“I sharpened it. It looked like the edge had a few chips……”
“You said you came from Great Cuisine. Do people there just touch other people’s knives whenever they feel like it? Don’t do anything unless you’re asked! I hate other people touching my knife.”
“Yes, Chef! I’m very sorry!”
It seemed she had been trying to earn herself a few points, but all she had gained was a scolding.
Her fellow prep cook, Gerrick, clicked his tongue.
“Tsk, tsk. If you were going to sharpen someone’s knives, you should’ve done Chef Minjoon’s or Chef Javier’s. Those two would’ve thanked you. I could’ve told you that.”
“……I don’t know. I’m doomed.”
Maya muttered with a devastated expression.
Fred, a Kenyan man with a large build, whispered in a voice unexpectedly quiet for his size.
“It’s fine. Even if you don’t try to win points with them, if you end up working under them, they’ll probably treat you well. Just hope you don’t get unlucky and end up with Chef Janet or Chef Anderson. They’ll be really harsh.”
Among the prep cooks, those two currently topped the list of chefs to avoid.
In Anderson’s case, he had been showing his rough side from the beginning. Of course, he needed to be stern enough to make sure the prep cooks stayed focused and cooked properly, but they were already worried about how severe he might become once the restaurant officially opened.
As for Janet, she was not the type to raise her voice like Anderson. But if someone made a mistake, she would glare at them so intensely that it felt frightening enough on its own.
Maya sighed.
“When I become a demi chef, I’m not going to be like either of them. I’ll treat my prep cooks nicely.”
“I want to work for Chef Minjoon.”
“But Chef Minjoon has a hidden strict side too. Of course, he’s still much better than those two. I like Chef Javier because he’s nice.”
“You only say that because you haven’t properly experienced it yet. Chefs like that are the scariest once you actually start working under them. It might be better just to get yelled at by Chef Anderson.”
The one who said that was Antonio, a young man who had flown all the way from Italy just to work at Rose Island.
Maya looked at him.
“So you’re saying you like Chef Anderson?”
“Yes.”
“So in the end, the only chef nobody wants to work for is Chef Janet.”
“Chef Janet is…… she feels like she’s full of venom. When I’m next to her, I get so nervous I can barely breathe.”
Gerrick sighed at Antonio’s words.
“What good does talking about this do us? In the end, the demi chefs are the ones who get to choose us.”
He was right.
Rachel had announced that the order in which the demi chefs selected their prep cooks would also be determined by the results of the molecular gastronomy challenge.
Maya groaned.
“I think Chef Minjoon is going to win. That jelly spaghetti he’s been making lately is so hard to copy. Getting the density right is hard, pushing the air through the tube with the syringe is hard……”
“If you think about it, the chefs are just as new to molecular gastronomy as we are, so why are they so much better?”
“Their foundations are stronger, so their dexterity is better too. Anyway, I can understand the other chefs, but Chef Minjoon is seriously amazing. How can he be that skilled at twenty-one……? It’s not as though he has years of kitchen experience somewhere.”
“That just means he worked hard on his own.”
Jo Minjoon’s abilities frequently became a topic of conversation among them.
Most of the prep cooks were around his age or even slightly older. Anderson was a little older than Jo Minjoon and had gained experience from a young age because of his parents’ influence, so they could understand why he was so skilled.
But Jo Minjoon was younger than Anderson and obviously had less experience. Yet his abilities were not much worse than Anderson’s.
That made them respect him while envying him at the same time.
“……I wonder if they realise they stopped lowering their voices.”
Jo Minjoon whispered to Anderson beside him.
The four prep cooks had forgotten to control their volume halfway through the conversation and were now speaking loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear.
Anderson snorted.
“You must be pleased. You’re a respected superior.”
“So why do you act so rough……”
“I was born to be a Disney villain. What do you want me to do?”
He answered with a grumble, as though joking, but there was obvious nervousness in his eyes.
That was understandable.
Ten days had passed.
Which meant the battle was about to begin.
The method Rachel had chosen was simple. They would travel around in a food truck and serve their molecular gastronomy dishes to the public.
It would not be decided by who sold the most. Instead, they would choose random people, have each one try all four dishes, and then ask them to vote.
Jo Minjoon took a properly set batch of jelly pasta out of the refrigerator.
It was not just spaghetti.
There was blue ravioli filled with fruit and red lasagne as well.
This was the answer he had come up with after Janet pointed out that something was missing.
Variety.
The disappointing thing about his dish was that everything had been compressed into one element. But he could not simply abandon the concept of compression.
So the only answer was to increase the number of forms.
Anderson, standing beside him, looked at the assortment with a bitter expression.
“……Should I have made several different ones too?”
“Mine might look like several dishes, but they all fall under the same category of jelly pasta.”
“That’s true, but……”
“You want second place anyway. Wouldn’t it be better if I safely took first?”
“You say that like first place is already guaranteed.”
“Kaya told me not to lose.”
“……You must have a screw loose. Do you really like Kaya that much?”
Anderson sounded genuinely unable to understand.
Jo Minjoon looked at him as though he had just asked the most obvious question in the world.
“There’s no reason not to like her. She’s nice, cute, pretty, cooks well, and she’s talented. Wow. Now that I think about it, she really is amazing. What exactly does my girlfriend lack?”
Anderson grabbed his forehead, as though even answering was too exhausting. Then he closed his eyes and muttered as if praying.
Lord. Please forgive my friend. He seems crazy, but he isn’t actually crazy.
“Since you’re not saying anything, you must be amazed too. See? Kaya really is the perfect girlfriend.”
Jo Minjoon continued speaking.
Anderson closed his eyes again.
……I’m sorry. I lied. He really is crazy.