Chapter 43: The Role of a Head Chef (6)
Chapter 43: The Role of a Head Chef (6)
Her attempt to liven up the mood was painfully obvious. Whether that cheerfulness was forced or genuinely came from the heart, Jo Minjoon could not tell.
One thing he did know was that he felt a little calmer. Harsh words did not only hurt the person hearing them; saying them could leave a bitter taste as well. Minjoon was no exception, and he could hardly feel good after speaking so severely to Kaya and Peter. Chloe had stepped in to lift the mood, and without her, nothing but an awkward silence would probably have remained. Whatever her intentions, Minjoon was grateful. Thanks to her, some of the weight pressing on him had eased.
“At least I don’t have that kind of illness.” Jo Minjoon grinned and stood up.
“Me neither,” Hugo said as he rose, and almost immediately the rest of the team followed. Peter and Kaya stood as well. Neither of them could exactly back out now.
Minjoon looked at Kaya. “I think it would be good if we made the dishes we’re planning to serve tomorrow. What do you think, Chef?”
Kaya had been listening with a sour expression, but the moment he called her Chef, her face stiffened and she looked at him. Hugo, standing beside them, immediately picked up on it with an exaggeratedly amused expression.
“Now that I think about it, even if it’s only temporary, the head chef is still the head chef. I’ll call you Chef from now on too, Chef.”
“Me too, Chef.”
“Chef? I like that. Makes it feel like we’re in a real kitchen. That’s fine, right, Chef?” Joanne and Chloe laughed as they looked at Kaya.
She forced herself to remain calm, but her ears had already turned red. “Just... fix the recipes.”
“Yes, Chef!” Hugo answered like a soldier snapping to attention. Kaya said nothing more.
The atmosphere became much more comfortable once they started cooking. Each member of the team began preparing the dish they intended to make for the mission, and Minjoon did the same. He decided on bisque de crabe.
(Translator’s Note: Bisque de crabe (crab bisque) — Bisque is a smooth, concentrated soup traditionally associated with crustaceans such as lobster, crab, crayfish, and prawns. French bisques developed over several centuries and became established within classical French cuisine by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bisque de crabe specifically refers to crab bisque.)
In Korea, bisque was often understood as a soup made by grinding the shells of clams, crabs, or prawns. That was only half right. Strictly speaking, bisque was a soup made using the shells of crustaceans or molluscs; grinding the shells themselves was not essential.
Minjoon began with the vegetables: celery, carrots, onions, garlic, parsley, thyme, salt, olive oil, and bay leaves. He chopped them, added them to boiling water, and began making a vegetable stock.
Ordinarily, chicken stock or fish stock would have been recommended for a bisque. However, using either now would mean relying on a prepared product, and Minjoon thought a freshly made vegetable stock would be better than that. Product or not, vegetable stock also had the advantage of bringing out the flavour more cleanly.
Leaving the stock to simmer, Minjoon turned to the crab. It was a Dungeness crab, a species commonly eaten along the west coast of North America, and this one was impressively large. Even by a rough estimate, it weighed close to one kilogram.
(Translator’s Note: Dungeness crab —A large edible crab native to the Pacific coast of North America, ranging particularly from California northwards towards Alaska. Its English name comes from Dungeness, Washington. Commercial harvesting became important along the American Pacific coast during the nineteenth century.)
Still, bigger was easier in this case. Minjoon quickly separated the crab at the joints, then carefully removed the shell and began extracting the uncooked meat. Someone who handled crab every day could probably do it without much thought, but Minjoon was not used to the work and had to be cautious. The slightest excess pressure could cause the flesh to crumble.
Maybe this difficult step is part of the reason the cooking score is only seven.
He smirked at the thought. The crab bisque he was making would be served by placing the raw crab meat directly in the bowl, then pouring the hot bisque over it.
“Minjoon, is it going well?”
“I’m about halfway done.”
“Wow, already?” Chloe sounded genuinely surprised.
Minjoon glanced over his shoulder. She had said she was making grilled sea bass, but she was still working on the fish.
“Want me to help?”
“No, I’m almost done.”
“If you need anything, just ask. I’ll be finished before long.”
“Yeah.”
Not long after that, the vegetable stock was ready. It was time to make the bisque itself.
Minjoon lowered the heat to medium and added butter and canola oil to a pan. Once the butter had mostly melted, he added chopped shallots. Shallots were a member of the onion family, but their texture was finer and their flavour milder. When ordinary onion tasted too strong but its flavour was still needed, shallots were a good substitute.
After lightly sautéing them, he added the stock and cream, then seasoned the mixture with salt and white pepper. Next came the crab—or more precisely, the crab shells and innards. He simmered them for five minutes, poured in dry white wine, and boiled the mixture again.
After that, the bisque had to be strained. Bits of shell or innards could not be allowed to remain in the soup, so a fine sieve was essential.
Once strained, the bisque was ready. Minjoon poured it over the crab meat in the bowl, then finished it with finely chopped fresh tarragon. Tarragon had a distinctive sweetness and gentle spiciness and was sometimes called the “queen of herbs” in French cuisine. Minjoon expected its flavour to lift the relatively simple taste of the crab bisque.
He slowly tasted a spoonful.
At first, the flavour did not strike him very strongly. Sweetness and saltiness touched his tongue first, but as the soup slid down his throat, its clean, distinctive flavour and aroma gradually filled his mouth.
By the time he realised it, he was smiling broadly. It was the kind of flavour that made it impossible not to.
This time he tried the crab meat. The soft flesh yielded like silken tofu, tender enough to break apart between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. There was not the slightest trace of fishiness.
“Is it good?” Hugo, who was working on the osso buco, glanced over at him. Minjoon answered only with a smile, but that was enough. Hugo, stirring his purée, looked at him earnestly. “Give me a bite.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“If you try it now, the impact won’t be as strong later when we all eat. Nothing beats the first bite.”
“No, I’ll evaluate it based on what I eat now. Just give me one.”
“I can’t. The smell of your purée is still lingering in your nose and mouth. I’d feel sorry for my bisque if I let you taste it like that.”
“Damn, you’re stubborn.” Hugo grumbled and looked away.
Minjoon smirked and surveyed the room. Everyone was busy, but most of them were nearing the end. Hugo, Chloe, and Peter, who were handling the main dishes, were mainly working on their sauces by then. More precisely, that applied to Hugo and Chloe. Peter’s turkey was already roasting in the oven.
Did he change the recipe?
The argument earlier had started because of that disastrous idea of simply coating the turkey with mustard. If Peter had any sense, he would have chosen a different approach.
Minjoon looked elsewhere, and his gaze eventually landed on Kaya. She was sitting on a chair with a bored expression, watching everyone else work. There was not much else she could do. They were preparing dinner, but they were also practising for the mission, and Kaya was the head chef. There was no frying pan waiting for her.
“The bread’s done.” Carlos, who was in charge of baking, announced it.
Despite his Brazilian-sounding name, his skin was paler than most white people’s, and his eyes were such a vivid blue that they were almost uncomfortable to look at. The bagels coming out of the oven, however, were a deep brown.
Kaya immediately stood up as though the tedious wait had finally ended. “Good. Everyone, gather around. Let’s eat.”
They stopped what they were doing and took their seats. Carlos’s bagels were baked well enough, but they were not really to Minjoon’s taste. He had never particularly liked bagels, and he was not fond of cream cheese either. He spread banana cream cheese over a quarter of a bagel, ate it, then got up. His dish was next.
The crab bisque was meant to serve as an appetiser. Minjoon placed bowls containing the raw crab meat in front of everyone and poured the hot bisque over them from a kettle. Strangely enough, serving food to his fellow contestants made him more nervous than cooking for the judges. Showing a report card to a teacher and showing it to your classmates were two very different things. Still, according to the system, the dish had received a score he did not need to worry too much about.
[Crab Bisque Soup]
Freshness: 81%
Origins: (Too many ingredients to display)
Quality: Medium-High (Average ingredients)
Cooking Score: 7/10
The medium-high quality rating was a little disappointing, but there was nothing he could do about it. The crab, the key ingredient of the dish, had been frozen rather than fresh. Even so, Minjoon could not help feeling slightly dissatisfied when he looked at the cooking score.
He watched the others nervously. “Is it good?”
“...It’s excellent. This is my first time eating raw crab meat, but I didn’t expect it to taste this good. It doesn’t taste fishy at all.”
“Raw crab and bisque... That’s an interesting combination.”
The responses were all positive, and they did not sound like empty politeness. Whatever else they might lie about, these were not people who would flatter one another about cooking.
Minjoon smiled, visibly relieved.
Hugo watched him and smirked, his expression handsome but slightly greasy in a way that suited his Spanish features. “So even someone with absolute taste gets nervous when other people try his food?”
“Of course. My palate doesn’t automatically become the standard for what tastes good.”
“Well, don’t worry. Anyone who isn’t allergic to crabs or afraid of them would like this.”
“I hope so.” Minjoon smiled, then glanced towards Kaya and Peter. They were the only two who had not commented yet.
Peter finally spoke with an awkward expression. “It’s good.”
“...Me too,” Kaya added quietly.
Peter glanced at her, but Kaya rolled her eyes away and ignored him.
Minjoon sighed inwardly. It would have been strange to expect them to suddenly become friendly immediately after their fight, but even so, Kaya’s attitude disappointed him a little. Whatever had happened between them, she was still the head chef.
The problem was that Minjoon increasingly felt as though he was the one acting like the head chef, and he did not like that. If he had drawn the head chef ball and actually held the position, it would have been different. At least then he would have had the authority to step in.
But Kaya was only his teammate. Acting like her guardian or taking over her responsibilities would be ridiculous. Minjoon kept quiet and turned away.
Soon afterwards, Chloe approached with a trolley carrying a beautifully grilled sea bass, almost like a proper guéridon. At a glance, the white sauce accompanying it appeared to be a mixture of White Russian and velouté sauce.
(Translator’s Note:White Russian — A cocktail traditionally made with vodka, coffee liqueur, and cream. It developed during the twentieth century as a variation of the Black Russian cocktail, which originated in Brussels in 1949. Despite the name, the drink is not a traditional Russian beverage; “Russian” refers primarily to its vodka base.)
(Translator’s Note: Velouté sauce — One of the classical French mother sauces. It is traditionally made by thickening a light stock, such as chicken, veal, or fish stock, with a pale roux. Velouté was established within French classical cuisine by the nineteenth century and was later included in Auguste Escoffier’s system of fundamental sauces around the beginning of the twentieth century.)
After one bite, Minjoon could sum up his reaction in only a few words.
Delicious. Really delicious.
Fish was difficult to grill properly, yet Chloe had managed to make the outside crisp while keeping the inside moist and tender. The texture was so refined that professional was the only word that came to mind.
The velouté sauce worked perfectly as well. At first glance it resembled carbonara sauce, but it had none of carbonara’s heaviness. Instead, it lifted the aroma of the sea bass. The juices released by the fish when he bit into it blended so naturally with the velouté that they seemed like a single sauce.
Minjoon looked at Chloe in admiration. “It’s... really delicious, Chloe.”
She smiled brightly, but instead of the response he expected, she immediately asked, “Really? What’s the score?”
Minjoon laughed. How long were they going to keep asking him that?
“Eight points.”
“Huh... So this is what an eight-point dish tastes like.”
Chloe stared down at her own food in a daze. The rest of the team began eating the sea bass with slightly different expressions as well. They had already known it was delicious, but once Minjoon declared it an eight-point dish, it somehow seemed even more luxurious and refined.
The pleasant mood did not last long.
The problem was Peter’s dish. It was not that he did anything wrong this time; the turkey itself was simply disappointing. The roast turkey stuffed with herbs and vegetables was not terrible, but it was certainly not something anyone could call exceptional.
More precisely, it tasted like home cooking. Peter had made a brown sauce to go with it and added some spring onions, but even the sauce had a problem: there was a faint burnt flavour to it. It was not a dish they could serve to customers.
What made things even more awkward was that Peter still asked Minjoon for a score, and he did so with an expectant look on his face. Minjoon could not inflate the result just to spare his feelings. When it came to food, he did not lie.
“Five points.”
“And the highest score is ten?”
“Yeah.”
“...Forget it. You guys eat without me. I’m going upstairs.”
Peter left the kitchen with annoyance, disappointment, and unhappiness written plainly across his face.
In the gloomy silence that followed, Minjoon suddenly seemed to remember something.
“He left without washing the dishes.”