Sugarcane (2)
At my summons, the Supply Battalion soldiers came running to the dungeon without a moment's delay.
By now, the northerners were used to me pulling off stunts they had never heard of and never seen. They also knew full well that the results of those stunts always improved their living conditions.
"Loyalty! The Supply Battalion answers the Young Master's call!"
So they arrived without complaint, eyes bright and shining as they looked at me.
"The reason I called you here is simple. I've found a new crop for us to study."
I pointed to the heaps of sugarcane and cassava piled high.
A few days had already passed since I came to this place. I slept in the village outside the mine beyond the dungeon, but every other hour I invested in building facilities for the new research. Having attached technicians in advance while constructing the village meant everything we needed was ready before the Supply Battalion even arrived.
"This is called sugarcane. Taste it and you'll understand—it's a crop that runs mostly sweet."
I handed out pieces of sugarcane I'd cut for sampling.
"Ohhh! So this is it!!"
"The thing the knights on escort kept talking about."
"Good heavens—there was a taste like this?!"
The sugarcane I had already been passing out as snacks to the knights and soldiers guarding the place had been a hit all on its own. The supply troops, whose job was the North's food, felt its importance even more keenly. Their eyes went round with awe, and I drove the point home.
"As you've all just tasted, this crop gives sweetness. Ordinary people would stop there and enjoy it as a nibble. But the Supply Battalion has to think about how to put that sweetness to work."
So I had prepared for this.
"Here—the juice of the sugarcane, the source of the sweetness. Keep reducing it and it turns into a powder like this."
Most of the prep work I had already done myself. What I needed now was to pass the knowledge on. I held up the brown powder.
"This is what they call sugar down in the South."
"Sugar! I think I've heard of it!"
"I think I have too! But I was sure it was an outrageously expensive spice…"
Expensive it would be. In a medieval world there weren't many proper spices to begin with, and even if there were, sugarcane grew in the tropical climate of the South. Shipping it all the way up here to the opposite end of the continent wouldn't be easy.
"Simply reduce it and you get powder. Distill and ferment it, and you get liquor. I've decided to call that rum."
I had half a mind to make the rum while I was at it, but brewing took time, so that was impossible for now. I settled for letting them know the possibility existed, then steered us back to the main purpose.
"And this is a crop called cassava. Eat it raw and the toxins can kill you, but if you grind it well, rinse it under running water, dry it, and roast it, it becomes like starch. Boil that and you get this."
I held out the finished dumpling-shaped pieces. The supply troops each gave one a squeeze, tilting their heads in curiosity.
"The texture is… unfamiliar."
"Soft, yet the spring is incredible."
Of course it was. Until I introduced gukbap, nearly everything that reached a northern table was dry and hard. Soft and chewy was not a common experience for them.
"What is this called?"
I answered the curious supply troops simply.
"Its name is tapioca. More precisely, these are tapioca pearls made from it."
Exactly. The reason most Koreans have eaten cassava even though the plant itself is hardly common among them is simple: cassava is the main ingredient in the tapioca pearls that go into bubble tea.
"Tapioca itself has almost no flavor. But put the two together and you get this."
I dropped the tapioca into water diluted with sugarcane juice, mixed it well, and held it out.
"I call it bubble tea."
Medieval bubble tea.
Bubble tea.
A lot of people think it is called bubble tea because of the tapioca pearls. In truth the name comes from the "bubbling" step in how it is made. So it goes without saying that Earth's bubble tea and this medieval version were completely different drinks.
Just tapioca pearls floating in sugar water.
No signature creaminess, none of the frothy quality that earned it the name "bubble tea." But it was more than enough.
"What a delicacy!!"
"I could live on nothing but this for the rest of my life!!"
"Those southern bastards have been eating this every day?!"
"Damn it—I've wasted half my life!!"
Because the North had never known a taste like this.
"This is dessert. Gukbap may have become the North's staple, but people can't live on rice alone. You need something sweet afterward."
Using a method similar to making tapioca, you could also make something called fufu—a doughy cake of sorts. If bubble tea was a dessert you drank, that was a dessert you chewed.
"We'll be supplying this across the entire North. You'll manufacture it and portion it out with every meal, so learn the process here and take it with you. Ah—and of course, take as much as you want for yourselves."
"Waaaaaah!!"
"Damn it, Second Young Master!! We believed in you!!!"
It was a trivial option, but they loved it in the simplest, loudest way.
They really do like this.
To them it felt like special treatment. Knowing sugarcane's nature, it was nothing of the sort.
Sugarcane is famous for multiple harvests a year.
It grew so vigorously that three crops a year was baseline, and in developing countries they managed as many as ten. That was how broken a crop it was. Later, once everyone knew that, the novelty might wear off—but for now the Supply Battalion soldiers were in ecstasy, cranking out sugar and bubble tea at a near-factory pace. The promise that leftovers would be paid as incentives only made them throw themselves into it harder.
But whenever people get that absorbed in something, byproducts always pile up.
"Uh, Young Master?"
"Yes?"
"What should we do with this?"
They pointed at what remained after the sugarcane juice had been pressed out. However hard they had run the juicers, the spent husks had stacked into a mountain.
There it is.
I nodded. Even in the modern world those leavings were considered classic agricultural waste.
Bagasse. Squeezed so dry it isn't even fit for feed.
In a lot of places they simply burned the entire sugarcane field to deal with it. But—
I needed that more than anything.
The greatness of modern science is on the level of a battle champ. It can turn trash into wood.
"Gather all of that separately and bring it with me."
I had the Supply Battalion soldiers collect the heaps of bagasse and follow. The space we entered was different from the bubble-tea production area. If I had to compare it to anything, it was closer to a smithy.
"Huh? Why here?"
"Wouldn't the Engineer Battalion be a better fit for this place than us?"
Fair questions. I had thought the same myself, but handing it to them meant the whole process could run in one continuous flow.
And they'll probably end up using more of the finished product anyway.
I introduced the equipment I had set up.
"Pack the bagasse into this perforated drum."
Holes were bored through the bottom. Once the soldiers had filled the drum, they lit a fire through the lower openings. When it had caught properly, I had them seal it with the prepared lid.
"Cutting off the air is important."
I meant to burn it incompletely.
When a material burns without enough oxygen, it can't combust fully—soot and carbon monoxide form instead.
The opposite of complete combustion, which leaves no residue. Instead of driving it to a state where nothing more can burn, you leave it in a state where it still can—and that difference produces an entirely different substance. That was the goal.
"This is…"
"Only carbon left."
An organic compound transformed into carbon by thermal decomposition—carbonization. The sharper among them would already have guessed: this was the process of turning sugarcane into charcoal. But that alone was not enough.
"Heh. It's completely powdered."
Unlike ordinary charcoal, the sugarcane had collapsed into powder, which made it awkward to use as-is. Luckily, the material that would make it usable was right beside us.
"Now mix this with cassava flour."
"Excuse me? This?"
"Th-this precious stuff!!"
"It's not that precious. Later on you'll have more than you know what to do with."
Anyone else would have been accused of playing with food. I wore the title of Second Young Master of the Northern Grand Duke's House. The Supply Battalion soldiers, still reeling from the heavenly taste of bubble tea, were shocked—but they followed my instructions without much resistance.
We mixed the burned bagasse ash with cassava flour into a dough, formed it into clumps, and compressed them.
Ideally we'd have a press…
Unfortunately, the North had no precision machinery like that. It didn't matter.
"Compress it."
"Sir!"
Technique was for people short on strength. If you had strength enough, technique was optional.
Kuuuuung—!
One after another, Supply Battalion soldiers whose forearms were thicker than my head brought sledgehammers and pounded the dough into dense solid blocks. After drying, familiar charcoal briquettes were born. When we set fire to one—
Whoooosh!!!
"Impossible!!"
"This much heat without even an agungi!!"
Flames roared up with insane force.
"Feel that heat?"
Ordinary wood loses thermal energy to the latent heat of evaporation from its moisture. These blocks, reduced in manufacture to pure carbon, burned completely without that loss, so combustion efficiency soared. And more—
"Wait—there's no smoke!"
"I-it's true! Every time I stand in front of an agungi the smoke stings my eyes!"
With nothing but carbon burning and no impurities, the lack of smoke was a free bonus. Only then did the Supply Battalion soldiers grasp the full picture and nearly fall over in shock.
That's the idea.
Health, environment, and flavor—all of them in one move. Sugarcane charcoal had been born.