Let's Wash Our Hands Clean
The baker broke into a bright smile.
"All right, friends! Before we make any bread, shall we wash our hands nice and clean?"
The baker had a point. Making bread meant you had no choice but to use your hands, so washing them first was only natural. With food, hygiene was everything. If someone told me to eat bread I'd kneaded and squished together with these hands as they were, I'd wrinkle my nose and refuse. Human hands, after all, were supposedly crawling with bacteria.
"It's cold!"
I scrubbed my hands clean at the sink installed off to the side of the classroom. I must have lathered them with soap three times. Right now, my hands were as close to sterile as hands could get. Jiyu and Yumi, who had been watching me wash from behind, spoke up in surprise.
"Hana, why are you washing your hands so much?"
"You're gonna rub the skin right off!"
I dried my hands on a towel as I answered.
"With food, hygiene is everything..."
Even I thought it sounded impressive, as if I'd suddenly become a baker with decades of experience behind me. Just my own opinion, of course. Once the kids had finished washing and returned to their seats, the baker launched into a kind, careful explanation. A large screen went up at the front, and she walked them through how to make the bread slowly and in detail. It wasn't some fancy loaf or an ultra-difficult recipe—just pizza bread, simple enough that even complete beginners could manage it.
"First, before we start, let's cover the desks with plastic!"
The baker and the teacher went around draping clear plastic over the tables. It was the same thing restaurants and raw-fish places did, covering the tables so they wouldn't get dirty. Making bread meant flour and all sorts of ingredients could easily mess a table up, and you had to dust flour across the surface anyway, so the plastic made perfect sense.
It didn't take long, perhaps because there were so few kids in the class. Class 3-1, where I sat, didn't even add up to twenty students all together. Compared with when I used to go to school, that was more than half gone. Back in my day, forty kids packed a single classroom. Maybe that was why it still didn't feel real sometimes, with so few people around.
"All right, let's start making bread!"
The baker had already walked us through the method well enough that there wasn't much fumbling. And if we didn't know something, we could just ask. It wasn't as if asking would make anyone angry. I sprinkled flour lightly over the plastic. I'd heard you had to dust it beforehand so the dough wouldn't stick. I didn't really understand the principle. They said that if the dough touched the plastic it would cling right to it, but a dusting of flour prevented that. Following someone with experience was the obvious thing to do, so I obediently scattered flour this way and that.
Jiyu and Yumi started dusting flour around their own seats too. It looked like snow falling.
"Hup!"
The dough must have already been prepared. The baker went around setting tubs of it down on the desks, placed a tub of enormous dough in front of us, and said,
"Friends, use this dough to make pizza bread!"
"Okaaay!"
Once the baker left, we pulled the dough out and set it down in the middle.
"Whoa, it's huge!"
"Can we even eat all of this?"
Jiyu and Yumi couldn't hide their amazement at the dough sitting on the desk. It was as big as our heads. The other ingredients were already prepared, so we tore into the dough and got started. To make pizza bread, all you had to do was wrap this dough around the sausages the teacher had set out. It was a little crude to put it this way, but we wrapped the dough around the outsides of the sausages until they looked an awful lot like poop.
"Yummy, so yummy!"
Jiyu couldn't hold back and was already sneaking a sausage on the sly. Beside her, Yumi frowned and scolded her.
"Jiyu! You can't eat the sausages—they're ingredients for the pizza bread!"
"Hnnn..."
Jiyu sank under the sharp rebuke Yumi fired at her. I smiled at the sight. Watching the two of them bicker was oddly healing. I tore off some dough of my own and wrapped it around a sausage. If you snipped the dough with scissors, you could make the little sausage border that sat around the outside of the pizza bread. It was secretly fun enough that I found myself concentrating without even meaning to.
"Mmm..."
Kim Sehee turned a bottle of wine made by Starlight Food this way and that, studying it from every angle. They had brought her a prototype before the wine went on the market. The staff were predicting it would easily surpass French wine, famous the world over for being the best. They had grapes this good. It would have been strange if it didn't.
Kim Sehee carefully poured the wine into a glass. Listening to the employees made her heart race. Of course, she had no intention of believing it surpassed French wine until she tasted it herself. For Starlight Food, not even a few months old, to overtake wine refined across thousands of years was still premature.
If they had started winemaking from the ground up, it would have taken a very long time, but acquiring a winery had saved them a great deal of that time. The current plant could handle demand well enough for now, yet Kim Sehee was already looking to the future and building additional wineries.
If demand for Starlight Wine surged, they would inevitably reach a point where the factories had to be expanded. It was simpler to think of this as merely getting there a little early.
"The color is beautiful."
She had no expert knowledge of wine, but Kim Sehee could tell that the wine she was pouring was beautiful. The way you could look at a beautiful person and know at once that they were beautiful, without anyone having to teach you, this wine's color made even Kim Sehee—who knew next to nothing about wine—recognize that it was lovely.
"The taste will exceed your expectations even more."
The employee who had brought the wine said it while looking at her. Kim Sehee answered with a smile, then slowly raised the glass, telling herself she was drinking it as a consumer would.
With so little knowledge of wine, she could slip fully into a consumer's point of view. Most people who drank wine knew hardly anything about it. Sommeliers were rich in knowledge, but how much did ordinary people really know? If you could merely tell which foods went with red, white, or sparkling, you already counted as well informed among regular people.
Kim Sehee took a light sip. A fragrant aroma spread through her mouth, and the intense taste of grapes stirred against her tongue. Her eyes flew open. As expected, Hana's plants had never once disappointed her. If even the mass-market version tasted like this, they could redraw the entire wine market from the ground up.
Of course, with the brand still weak, it would not sell easily overseas. A name built up over thousands of years was a massive wall you could not simply step over. Starlight Wine, whose name was not even a year old, could not surpass the wines of famous brands. The taste was clearly superior, but luxury goods were not called luxury goods for nothing.
There were consumers who paid dozens of times the cost of the materials for nothing more than that luxury name.
Still, even a dog ate half its meal at its own house before it left, and Kim Sehee felt certain this wine could become the best-selling wine in Korea.
"The other wines aren't in production yet, are they?"
"No... they're still aging. Nothing official has come out yet."
For now, Kim Sehee intended to sell two kinds: a mass-market wine and a premium wine. The mass-market one, true to its name, was meant to reach the market with very little aging. Hana's grapes had shortened the aging time to an extreme, as if they were begging to be drunk as soon as possible.
The premium wine she planned to age for a long time, the way other wines were. If even the lightly aged mass-market version already boasted a taste this outstanding, she could hardly imagine how delicious the premium would be. A flavor that would slap the cheeks of those foreign wines everyone praised as exceptional.
"I'm looking forward to next week."
Distribution was already taken care of. Starlight Food had built its own lines, so all they had to do was slip the wine into that network and sell it. This one was meant mainly for convenience stores, and the price would be set to match. They would sell it cheap at first. Once consumers were thoroughly hooked on Starlight Wine, raising the price would leave them no choice but to follow.
Feeling a slight buzz begin to rise, Kim Sehee smiled in satisfaction.