The Game of Life-Chapter 833 - 832 Its Time to Show Real Skills
Chapter 833: Chapter 832: It’s Time to Show Real Skills
Chapter 833 -832: It’s Time to Show Real Skills
Jiang Feng, whose tactics were incomprehensible, was even more bafflingly watching the other contestants cook.
He was literally spectating.
Jiang Feng and Wu Minqi were like two audience members who had strayed onto the stage, sitting on little stools with their heads propped in their hands, watching the other chefs cook, occasionally having to move their stools to give way to Sun Maochai and Sun Jikai.
The other chefs, noticing Jiang Feng and Wu Minqi’s state:
Looking down on us?
Jiang Feng was not just watching for fun, he also discussed with Wu Minqi.
“Qiqi, look at that main chef from New York Light. Have you noticed that he hasn’t dared to glance at Chef Arno even once, not even a peek?” Jiang Feng whispered, pointing to the bearded main chef of New York Light.
Both with big beards, both burly men, yet why is he so timid?
“The main chef of New York Light is in charge of desserts,” Wu Minqi obviously noticed more.
“Desserts?” Jiang Feng couldn’t help but look at the ingredients in front of the bearded main chef, eggs, meat, vegetables, fruits, and various bottles and jars that might be spices, seasonings, or perhaps colorants, nearly piling up into a small mountain.
With such rich ingredients, Wu Minqi actually said he was responsible for desserts.
A high-end term that was unfamiliar to Jiang Feng suddenly emerged in his mind.
“Molecular gastronomy?”
“Might be.” Wu Minqi didn’t understand molecular gastronomy either; the menu in the top-tier restaurant under Chef Arno’s lead had always been more rough, wild, primal, with no place for such delicately refined cuisine as molecular gastronomy.
For Chef Arno, it had always been about juicy, succulent meats, whether grilled or slow stewed; that was the true essence of cuisine.
The contestants from these four restaurants, especially the four chefs from New York Light, were under the most pressure.
People like Jiang Feng, whose teammate was so awesome that he was already pondering the final dishes before the semifinals had even started, virtually dismissed the semifinals completely.
Chef Arno was the same, but it wasn’t that he disregarded the semifinals, he disregarded everyone.
The chefs from the Chinese restaurant knew they were just there to make up the numbers, and they were very relaxed about it. They were entirely in the mindset of taking a look around and visiting abroad, incidentally picking up some culinary tricks to take home, treating the semifinals like a paid vacation.
New York Light felt differently; they believed they could make it to the finals.
As the most expensive restaurant in America, New York Light had, under Chef Arno’s leadership, faintly taken on the title of America’s number one Western restaurant. Even after Chef Arno had moved on, this title hadn’t yet changed hands. Under the halo of being the top in America, the bearded main chef of New York Light naturally thought their restaurant was a hot favorite to win the championship.
Of course, it was just being a hot favorite to win, and even in his inflated estimation, he didn’t think he could compare to Chef Arno. After all, just last year, he was still Chef Arno’s subordinate in the kitchen, only there to take orders.
The bearded main chef felt he was bound to make it to the finals.
Taifeng Building and the Chinese restaurant were just there to follow along.
In order to show off his talent to the fullest extent, and also to prove to the boss that although he was not as good as Chef Arno, he was definitely better than all the other chefs in the restaurant, and was truly the deserving main chef. Most importantly, he was more easygoing than Chef Arno, never scolding the boss. Next year, they’d better give him a raise; the bearded main chef made a lot of plans before the semifinals.
They ultimately chose plan F.
In the semifinals, they went all out and advanced beautifully and smoothly, but in the finals, they performed half-heartedly and suffered a dire defeat, surrendering the white flag.
The Bearded Main Chef decided to pull out his trump card during the semifinals, staging a comeback with molecular gastronomy, grape juice chicken egg pudding.
This was a dish that was so complex and difficult that even if his boss pointed a gun at his head, he would still argue a few points before making it, a top-tier luxurious molecular gastronomy.
In this dish, the grape juice wasn’t grape juice, the egg wasn’t an egg, the pudding wasn’t pudding, and even the sauce used for garnish wasn’t sauce, nor were the decorative lemon leaves actual lemon leaves.
The dessert required a total of over 60 ingredients, took more than 5 hours to prepare, and the cooking process resembled a chemical experiment more than cooking, with not a single measuring cup, test tube, syringe, or pipette missing. Every moment required measurement, and focus was needed at all times.
The Bearded Main Chef’s cooking process, akin to a chemical experiment, reminded Wu Minqi of some unforgettable painful memories from her brief college days.
“Fengfeng, have you ever eaten molecular gastronomy?” Wu Minqi suddenly asked.
“No,” Jiang Feng shook his head. He couldn’t afford that, “but I think molecular gastronomy is quite interesting. It uses visual deception to achieve the ultimate taste experience, similar to chicken bean curd. And isn’t it the same with those vegetarian dishes? They make tofu look like meat and even taste like it.”
“But I think it looks more like doing an experiment than cooking.” Wu Minqi suddenly felt thirsty, looked around, and noticed that while there were stools prepared at the cooking station, no water was available.
“What’s wrong?” Jiang Feng asked.
“I was just looking for some water. It seems like there’s no water on our side, only on the judges’ side.” Wu Minqi felt somewhat helpless.
“No worries, Qiqi. You sit here. I’ll go over to the fruits and get a couple of oranges to make some orange juice for you,” Jiang Feng got up to grab the oranges.
As soon as Jiang Feng stood up, the camera operator noticed him and immediately switched the camera to him, closely following his actions.
Then the camera operator watched as Jiang Feng picked a few oranges, made two glasses of orange juice, one for him and one for Wu Minqi, and continued drinking the juice nonchalantly as if they were spectators at the competition.
Camera operator: ???
Are these two really here to compete?
When Jiang Feng started drinking the orange juice, the competition had only been going for an hour.
It wasn’t that time was moving slowly, but everyone else was bustling about eagerly, while Jiang Feng and Wu Minqi sat idly by, doing nothing like spectators, even starting to drink juice and asking Sun Maochai and Sun Jikai if they wanted some juice as well.
The busy atmosphere of others highlighted their idleness.
The urgency of others underscored their wasting of time.
Jiang Feng felt that the clock on the big screen was moving slowly, ticking away, wondering when it would reach halfway so he could go to the ingredient area and start making the Phoenix Egg.
Most crucially, Jiang Feng was getting a bit hungry.
He hadn’t eaten lunch.
And he had barely eaten anything for breakfast.
These past few days, Jiang Feng had done nothing but make soups, drinking lean meat soup in the morning and beef soup at night, for several days in a row. This morning, when he saw the lean meat soup he had made, he didn’t feel like drinking it and fed it all to Da Hua, only taking a few sips himself.
He didn’t think much of it initially; skipping meals for a day didn’t matter. What was crucial was that he had just passed by Chef Arno’s cooking station while picking oranges a little while ago, and Chef Arno, a passionate carnivore, always made something heavily meaty regardless of the competition. When Jiang Feng passed by, Chef Arno was frying a steak.
A fresh, tender, juicy steak with beautifully distributed marbling, fried in butter.
It smelled amazing.
When Jiang Feng passed by, he nearly went over to ask Chef Arno for a piece to try a few bites.
More than an hour had passed since the competition started, and the chefs in each team had basically started cooking.
Some were preparing sauces, others marinating meat, boiling ingredients in advance, or steaming dishes.
The aroma of the food began to waft from the stoves at the competitors’ cooking stations.
Chicken, duck, fish, beef, lamb—various types of poultry and meat vied for attention.
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Jiang Feng was hungry.
He felt he couldn’t just sit around and do nothing.
The competition still had over four hours left, and if he stayed hungry for another four hours, who knew what the Phoenix Egg would turn out like.
The organizers hadn’t specified that the dishes had to be tasted by the judges, and competitors were not forbidden from tasting them first.
He had plenty of time. Once the ingredients were prepared, he could produce not just one batch, but twenty batches within the allotted time.
Jiang Feng made up his mind.
All of a sudden, he stood up so abruptly that it almost caused Wu Minqi to spill her orange juice.
“Qiqi, let’s go pick some ingredients!”
“Ah, but I haven’t finished my orange juice yet,” Wu Minqi thought Jiang Feng wanted to drink some other kind of juice since he had already finished his glass of orange juice.
“It’s not about juicing, we are going to pick the ingredients for the Phoenix Egg. You go to the mushrooms section and grab all the very fresh, just-picked mushrooms and bamboo shoots you can find, and also get a few eggs. I’ll pick the fish meat from the seafood area.”
Jiang Feng and Wu Minqi split up and began selecting ingredients separately.
When they just reached the market, the camera operator didn’t quite react quickly enough and didn’t film them, focusing on others instead. Given Jiang Feng’s history, the camera operator thought he wanted to grab something to eat for himself again. It was only when Wu Minqi seriously started picking a basket full of mushrooms and Jiang Feng was meticulously choosing fresh fish at the seafood section that the camera operator, as if suddenly awoken from a dream, realized they were finally starting to compete and quickly turned the camera on them.
The ingredients for the Phoenix Egg actually bore the distinct characteristics of both Tan Family Cuisine and Jiang Family Dishes.
Jiang Feng, not sure if it was due to the limitations of the era, found that many dishes from the Tan Family and what he knew of Jiang Family Dishes often like to combine flavors of the mountains and the sea.
Delicacies from the mountains and the sea were how people in the past interpreted deliciousness, also born from the inconvenience of transporting rare ingredients over long distances to create one dish.
The Phoenix Egg was a dish that the royal family dined on during the New Year, naturally combining the delicacies of both land and sea.
Fresh mushrooms and fresh fish meat.
When Jiang Feng first learned this dish, Peng Changping had told him that the ingredients for this dish were actually not fixed and very flexible. The meatballs were made from fish meat chopped to a mince and mushrooms cut very finely, beaten and kneaded into fine, handmade fish balls. The choice of mushrooms and fish meat was not fixed; it could be freshwater fish or sea fish, one type or multiple types—whatever was good and whatever was fresh was used.
This was a dish that could change over time.
Because the most important part of the dish was not the meatballs but the fresh egg liquid that was coated just before the dish was finished.
The meatballs provided the taste, the egg liquid provided the soul.
Peng Changping, when making it, had told Jiang Feng that the perfect Phoenix Egg, as legend had it, was done by Jiang Chengde, a pity he had never seen it with his own eyes.
The perfect Phoenix Egg, from the moment the egg liquid was added to the pan to when it perfectly coated the meatballs, took only a few seconds. In those few seconds, the egg liquid needed to evenly cover each meatball, be half-cooked, then thickened with cornstarch and quickly served. During this entire process, the egg skin on the surface of the meatballs could not be damaged, and there should be no leftover egg liquid in the pan.
Peng Changping always thought this was just a myth because he couldn’t do it.
At that time, Jiang Feng really wanted to tell Peng Changping that it was not a myth, but real, because he had seen it with his own eyes. It looked even more proficient than when Jiang Jiankang made scrambled eggs with tomatoes, constantly preparing batch after batch without pause.
Of course, Peng Changping was unable to do it because he didn’t master the technique of flipping the big spoon. Mastering the true technique of the big flip, essential to the Jiang Family, was very difficult without breaking the egg skin, leaving no egg liquid, and achieving a perfect thickening.
Jiang Feng felt it was time to show Peng Changping the true skill of making the Phoenix Egg.
He couldn’t do it as perfectly as Jiang Chengde, barely managing not to break the egg skin and getting the thickening passable at best. It was impossible to leave no egg liquid.
But he could demonstrate to Peng Changping how to use the big flip to finish off the Phoenix Egg.
He also wanted to show off a thickening technique he had just figured out that morning.
It was time to let everyone know what real thickening looked like!
With that in mind, Jiang Feng cheerfully started chopping the fish, humming a tune to himself in his head.
He was afraid to hum out loud in case others overheard him.
“Fengfeng, should these mushrooms be cut and separated individually or mixed together?” Wu Minqi came up to Jiang Feng, holding a tray of thoroughly washed mushrooms.
“Keep them separate for now, I haven’t decided which ones to use yet.”
Wu Minqi: ?
Wu Minqi glanced over her shoulder at the big screen.
There were only four hours left in the competition, and her Fengfeng still hadn’t decided what ingredients to use for the dish.
Now the question was, what exactly had her Fengfeng been thinking about while drinking his orange juice just now?
Shouldn’t this kind of thing be planned in advance?
