I Successfully Made Pizza Bread
Squish, squish.
Kneading the pizza-bread dough was more fun than I'd expected. Feeling it come into being under my hands, newly created, gave me the strange sensation of playing God.
"This is hard. Sooo hard~"
Jiyu was busy sculpting some kind of bizarre worm. She'd clearly forgotten we were supposed to be making pizza bread. Then again, she'd already turned out a few pieces, so maybe she was just moving on to something else.
Yumi, true to her crisp and capable self, was producing an enormous amount of dough. Eat all of that, and I was certain you'd be too full to take another bite.
That was when my eye caught the flour I'd dusted over the plastic sheet on the desk earlier. There wasn't much of it, but it was more than enough for the prank I had in mind.
A little devil's grin tugged at my mouth. Careful that Jiyu and Yumi wouldn't see, I closed my hand around the flour, feeling the soft white powder against my palm. Then I quietly stepped up beside Jiyu, pretending to look for something.
"Hm?"
She must have sensed me there. She turned, and I smeared the flour across her face. Her cheek went pure white.
"Hehehe!"
I laughed and bolted. The moment Jiyu realized her cheek was coated in flour, she grabbed a handful of her own and came charging after me.
"Hana! Stop right there!"
She clearly meant to plaster my entire face. I darted this way and that on light feet. I might not look it, but back in my school days I'd made a real art of pulling aggro and running for it. I shook her pursuit easily enough—and ran smack into a wall.
"We do not play with food."
"Eh..."
The teacher stood in front of me, visibly furious, blocking the way. I'd been so busy outrunning Jiyu's short little arms and legs that I hadn't watched where I was going, and this was the result. I was caught on the spot and marched straight back to my seat. Sure enough, a prank had to be played with an eye on who was watching. Jiyu sneaked a glance around, reading the room, then slid quietly back to her own seat. As the victim, she didn't seem to be in any trouble at all.
Her face had gone white with flour, but there hadn't been much of it, and one wash took care of the whole thing. Back in our seats, we put our minds on the bread again.
"Shape this part like so~ then spread the dough out nice and wide."
With the baker's help, we somehow coaxed it into the shape of pizza bread. Staring at the appetizing little things, I couldn't help swallowing. Making them had burned through a lot of energy, and I was hungry.
"All right, I'm putting the bread in the oven. You might get hurt, so don't pick up the trays—just stay still. Teacher will put them in!"
The teacher went from table to table, loading the pizza bread we'd made into the oven. The trays were big, and a child could get hurt hauling one. Still, these were third graders; I was pretty sure they could handle a job like that on their own. I didn't say so.
"Hana, I know it's pizza bread, but didn't you put in way too much sausage?"
Yumi said it while eyeing the one I'd made. I'd packed in so much sausage that calling it sausage bread would've been perfectly fair. I threw my chest out and answered without a shred of shame.
"I like sausage! So I put in a lot!"
The teacher and the baker had given us plenty to begin with, so I'd piled it on thick. Even after Jiyu sneaked bites of the sausage itself, there was still some left at our station. Three of us were baking, and they'd handed out enough for about five people. I already knew the school was rich, but you could feel it in little things like this. I'd heard the tuition alone was outrageous.
It wasn't named Byeolbit for nothing. A school founded by the Byeolbit Guild—sooner or later, one way or another, a person might be able to scrape together some connections there.
Ding!
The oven announced it was done, and a delicious smell came drifting up. The pizza bread had baked just right for eating.
"It's delicious!"
"I wish every activity from now on was just like this!"
"Right!"
Jiyu, Yumi, and I mumbled it through mouthfuls of the pizza bread we'd made ourselves. Mine tasted incredible—better, it seemed to me, than anything you could buy at the market. Maybe that was only because I'd sweated over it with my own hands.
Byeolbit Wine had launched. Word that Byeolbit Foods had a new product rang out across the whole country. The price came to about eleven dollars a bottle—well within what ordinary people could afford to drink. It didn't cost much to make, either, so from Byeolbit Foods' perspective there was no particular reason to sell it dear.
The plan, of course, was to raise the price once everyone was thoroughly hooked on the taste. You've seen how it goes. The usual corporate excuse: prices were going up, they would say, because inflation left them no choice.
Byeolbit Foods was still a rookie that had only just stepped into the wine market, so it needed time to prepare. Other products were already on the drawing board, along with all sorts of promotions. As a latecomer, it was trying this and that, working through the business of spreading its name.
In the wine market, Byeolbit Foods was a beginner through and through. Plenty of obstacles lay ahead. Even so, there was confidence enough to clear them. The wine tasted exceptional; even with no special push, it was the sort of bottle that would catch on sooner or later.
There are restaurants like that. The shop doesn't sit on a busy main road where the crowds already pass. It can be tucked away in some lonely back corner, and people will still come find it. Byeolbit Wine was meant to be the same.
"Today we're reviewing a brand-new release—Byeolbit Wine!"
Sihyun, a wine YouTuber with thirty thousand subscribers, was recording a broadcast. It wasn't a massive audience, but set beside other wine YouTubers, that subscriber count ranked near the top.
The modest numbers were inevitable. There simply weren't many people who liked wine. Ask college students to name their favorite drinks, and first and second place were always beer and soju. Wine's ranking was lodged somewhere in the deep sea far beyond.
Wine came with too many inconveniences. For one thing, it was expensive for students. The average bottle ran close to fifteen dollars. Spend the same money on beer or soju, and you could drink several times as much.
Buy the soju or beer at a big-box mart instead of a restaurant, and the gap grew even starker. The price of a single bottle of wine would get you ten bottles of soju. So wine had, before anyone quite noticed, stamped itself in people's minds as a refined hobby. For college students in the years when they drank the most, it had become a fringe choice.
"Ahem... khm..."
Sihyun cleared a throat and started the recording over. The voice had cracked. That was the advantage of a recorded broadcast. Go live, and a flub was the end of it, but a recording let you try endlessly until the take you wanted showed up. That was why Sihyun preferred to record the reviews.
"The price is eleven dollars, almost the same as other wines! And they're running a ten-percent-off event all month, so picking some up now would be a smart move. If—and only if—this wine actually tastes good."
Sihyun angled the Byeolbit Wine label so the camera caught it cleanly. The elegant design made it obvious how much care had gone into it. Set beside the labels of far more expensive brands, it didn't fall short.
There was a major domestic automaker whose cars could be beautifully designed and still look cheap and awful the moment the logo went on the hood. Design mattered. In that sense, Byeolbit Wine's design earned a passing grade.
"Word is, Byeolbit Foods recently scouted all sorts of famous designers—and this is where that pays off."
Bottle in hand, Sihyun turned it this way and that for the camera, capturing the general look of Byeolbit Wine.
"Wines with great design are a dime a dozen, though. What matters most is the taste. You know the saying—pretty on the outside, nothing worth eating? No matter how fine it looks, if the wine itself doesn't taste exceptional, the whole thing's a waste. I've seen a lot of bottles like that lately, so I'm really hoping this one doesn't disappoint me."
After the long stretch of talk, Sihyun steadied a breath, worked the cork free with a corkscrew, and carefully poured the wine into a glass.
"The aroma gets a passing grade."
The words came with the rim of the glass at the nose. Then Sihyun lifted it and took a small sip.
!!!
Sihyun's eyes went perfectly round, as if something beyond all description had just hit.