Chapter 28: Getting Help in the Face of Elimination (3)
Chapter 28: Getting Help in the Face of Elimination (3)
Jo Minjoon grumbled under his breath as he gathered the ingredients: white grapes, garlic, brown sauce, and veal stock made from calf bones. For seasonings and supporting ingredients, he took tomatoes, tomato paste, red wine, vermouth, salt, and several herbs and spices.
By the time he returned, nearly two minutes had already passed. Jo Minjoon grated the grapes and poured vermouth into a bowl. Vermouth was a fortified wine flavoured with herbs, spices, and other botanicals.
Broadly speaking, vermouth could be divided by flavour into sweet vermouth and dry vermouth, and by colour into white and red varieties. What Jo Minjoon was using now was a sweet white vermouth. It would preserve the pale colour of the white grapes while reinforcing their sweetness.
There was no need to start boiling it yet. More precisely, he did not have to. If they had decided to use commercial demi-glace, all he would need to do was add it to the boiling grape purée. But they had chosen to make the demi-glace themselves, which meant the purée would have to wait until the sauce was nearly finished. Naturally, everything still had to be completed before they roasted the foie gras. Judging by the order of their turns, Jo Minjoon would probably be the one to finish the sauce.
He had just started reaching for the garlic when the buzzer sounded and Alan’s voice rang through the room.
“Switch!”
Uncertain movements broke out at every worktop. Jo Minjoon immediately put down the knife and stepped back. Kaya took his place, grabbed the knife, and began chopping the garlic at speed. She fried it in the pan, and once it began to brown, she poured in the red wine. Flames surged up at once.
Flambé.
(Translator’s Note: Flambé —A cooking technique in which an alcoholic drink is added to food and ignited. The burning rapidly consumes much of the alcohol while leaving some of the drink’s flavour and aroma behind. Flambé became particularly associated with French restaurant and tableside cooking during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)
It was a technique that used burning alcohol to drive off its harshness while leaving behind aroma and flavour.
After that, Kaya’s hands came to a stop. It was not because she had forgotten what to do. There simply was not much left except to wait for the liquid to reduce and stir it from time to time.
Just as she was beginning to think the wait would be boring, Alan approached.
“What kind of dish are you planning to make?”
“We’re going to slice the foie gras, roast it, and serve it with white grape purée.”
“It looks like you’re making the demi-glace for the purée yourselves. Do you think you can finish in time?”
“I’ll finish it.”
Kaya answered with her usual cheekiness.
Alan paused and looked at her for a moment. He could not tell whether her tone came from irritation over the earlier judging or whether this was simply how she normally spoke. Either way, bringing up the previous incident himself felt oddly petty, so he cleared his throat and turned to Jo Minjoon instead.
“Based on the order of your switches, Kaya will be the one cooking the foie gras and doing the final plating, while you’ll be finishing the sauce.”
“Yes.”
“Kaya, have you ever cooked foie gras before?”
“No. I’ve never even eaten it.”
“Minjoon?”
“Neither have I.”
Strictly speaking, that was not completely true. Jo Minjoon had eaten canned foie gras before, the kind sold for French residents abroad, but claiming that counted as proper experience seemed presumptuous.
Alan lowered his voice. “Don’t think of foie gras as ordinary liver. Duck or goose foie gras contains far more fat and has a much richer flavour than common liver. You shouldn’t try to erase its characteristic aroma. You should preserve it. Keep that in mind.”
“Yes. Understood.”
Alan moved away after Jo Minjoon’s reply. Kaya glanced after him, then returned her attention to the pan. Jo Minjoon wanted to say something to her, but now was the time to concentrate. Of course, Kaya herself was only waiting for the sauce to reduce, so calling it intense concentration might have been generous.
“Kaya—”
The buzzer sounded before he could continue.
They switched places immediately. Jo Minjoon looked into the pan. The liquid had reduced considerably, with thick bubbles rising across the surface.
“Kaya, this is about halfway reduced, right?”
“Probably.”
“Okay.”
Jo Minjoon poured the veal stock into the pan, then lowered the heat as far as possible and left it to simmer. He took out another pan and began frying the tomato paste. Before long, the buzzer sounded again.
As Jo Minjoon stepped back, he instructed her, “Once the tomato paste browns, add it straight into the sauce. Do the same with the spices and tomatoes.”
“I know.”
Fifteen minutes had already passed. They had sixty minutes in total, and the last five would have to be reserved for cooking the foie gras. That left roughly forty minutes to finish the sauce.
Will that really be enough?
Jo Minjoon was not confident.
Sauces built on reduced stock, like demi-glace, were difficult to make truly delicious under severe time pressure. Even chefs who had spent decades working with them developed their own methods to coax out the exact flavour they wanted. It was difficult to be confident in a recipe improvised on the spot.
Of course, he had the system’s assistance.
The projected score was 7 points.
For a sauce that had to be completed in less than an hour, that was excellent. But even a small mistake could completely alter the result. There was no room for complacency.
Jo Minjoon watched Kaya. She added the browned tomato paste to the sauce, then put in pepper, thyme, and halved tomatoes. The purpose was to suppress the unpleasant odour of the stock while enriching its aroma at the same time.
From then on, it truly became a battle against the clock.
Kaya continuously skimmed the foam rising from the demi-glace until the buzzer sounded again.
Forty minutes remained.
Jo Minjoon immediately turned on the heat beneath the pot containing the white grapes and vermouth. The purée would need around thirty minutes to finish. If he did not start now, it would never be ready in time.
Couldn’t they have given us a normal team challenge?
The thought kept returning, though in truth, he understood the point of the format.
At several of the other worktops, the participants’ movements were already beginning to fall out of sync. It was not that they had failed to explain their recipes to each other. The problem was that while describing their methods, they naturally skipped steps that seemed obvious to them. Their partners then filled in those missing parts with their own habits and techniques, sometimes in ways the original cook had never intended.
In situations like that, the result depended heavily on whether the two people respected each other’s methods. Most found that difficult. Trusting yourself was simply easier than trusting someone else.
Kaya and Jo Minjoon were different.
It was not that either of them had thrown away their stubbornness or consciously decided to defer to the other. Their approaches to cooking were simply similar from the beginning—from the way they controlled heat to the way they handled a knife.
And Jo Minjoon knew exactly why.
Kaya Lotus.
That name was the answer.
She was the chef he had envied most and the one he had wanted most desperately to imitate. He had watched hundreds of videos of Kaya cooking. He had studied how she approached ingredients, how she moved through a kitchen, how she thought about flavour.
In truth, Kaya had been Jo Minjoon’s teacher.
And his mentor.
When he had been staring at the harsher side of cooking and wondering whether he should give up, she had been the one who gave him a dream.
That was why their cooking styles resembled each other. More precisely, Jo Minjoon’s cooking resembled Kaya’s because no one had influenced him more than she had.
That was also why he had always been so partial towards her.
And precisely because of that—
I can’t let her be eliminated.
Kaya was his benefactor, even if she had never intended to be. She was the person who had shown Jo Minjoon the world of cooking and made him greedy enough to want to walk that path himself. She had taught him that cooking could be magnificent, and sometimes even beautiful.
It was entirely one-sided, of course. Kaya herself had never known she was his teacher.
But Jo Minjoon knew very well what kind of chef she would become.
He knew how valuable her talent was.
And this programme was where that value had first been proven.
Kaya had given him something to yearn for in cooking. He could not allow an unexpected variable like himself to cause an elimination that had never existed in the future he remembered.
Jo Minjoon stirred both pots carefully. If either sauce caught even slightly on the bottom, the smell of burning would contaminate the whole thing. He could not afford to lose focus for even a moment.
The buzzer sounded.
He and Kaya switched again.
She resumed the same work, skimming foam from the sauce. After a while, she sighed.
“I expected this, but it really is a pain.”
“It’s a battle against yourself.”
Jo Minjoon laughed as he said it.
Kaya wiped the sweat from her forehead and asked, “What do you think about the other teams? Are they doing well?”
“I think our teamwork is the best.”
“...Is there even such a thing as teamwork here?”
“At least we both know what the other person is going to do next.”
Kaya did not answer.
The buzzer sounded again.
Thirty minutes had passed, leaving thirty more.
Kaya sighed as she watched Jo Minjoon stir the sauce with a ladle.
“I get the feeling I can actually take it easy. This switching system isn’t all bad. You get to rest for five minutes.”
“What a surprise. You being optimistic.”
“Did you think I was a pessimist?”
Jo Minjoon paused at the question.
What kind of person was Kaya?
The Kaya he had seen in videos was confident and full of energy. At least, that was how she appeared after Grand Chef. Before that, however, she had been very different. She still acted confident, but some of that confidence had clearly been forced, with anxiety hidden beneath it.
Thinking about that, the answer came naturally.
“You’re not exactly an optimist either.”
“How many people in the world really are? Unless you’re an idiot, it’s hard to stay optimistic.”
Kaya spoke bitterly.
The tone of her voice made Jo Minjoon wonder about the life she had lived. Even on television, she had only ever said that her past had been difficult. She had never gone into detail, so even Jo Minjoon knew little about it.
He remembered something she had said to him earlier.
You don’t understand what it means for a white girl to grow up poor.
What had she meant by that?
He did not know. He had not grown up in the United States, and all he had ever seen in the videos was the bright, successful side of Kaya.
Jo Minjoon spoke because he wanted, in some small way, to give her the same kind of strength she had unknowingly given him.
“You don’t have to be optimistic. Just believe in yourself. What I said in the interview wasn’t bullshit. You’re skilled, and you have talent. So there’s no reason to be nervous like some newcomer waiting for a job interview.”
He genuinely did not want to see Kaya nervous.
Competitor.
No matter how many times he tried to engrave that word into his mind, she was still his idol and his teacher. He did not want to see someone like that looking defeated.
Kaya did not answer.
Jo Minjoon had no idea what she was thinking.
The buzzer sounded four more times.
Fifty minutes.
Ten remained.
That meant the sauce had to be finished now.
Jo Minjoon poured the white grape mixture through a sieve. The thick pulp remained behind while the strained purée flowed out pale and smooth, almost like white cream.
The next step was simple.
He only needed to mix in a spoonful of demi-glace.
The process almost felt absurd after everything they had done. They had spent all that effort making the demi-glace from scratch, only to use two spoonfuls of it in the finished sauce.
But Jo Minjoon believed those two spoonfuls would be the key to winning.
And then the result he had been waiting for appeared.