Chapter 518: Downgrading the Star Rating?
Twenty minutes was not actually very long.
But if you multiplied it by two hundred and forty, that became a completely different story.
Converted into the time flow inside the training space, it turned into three full days and nights.
Three days and nights in the dead of night, dancing without stopping— ah, wait, wrong script.
Qi Han, a true master of time management who could stretch one minute into two hundred and forty minutes, used those twenty minutes in the training space to accomplish something major.
For the first time, he attempted to downgrade a 3 Star recipe.
In simpler terms, he wanted to turn a 3 Star dish into one without extraordinary phenomena or special effects, yet still retaining a flavor very close to the original—far more delicious than ordinary 2 Star dishes.
In other words, a low-spec version of a 3 Star dish.
This was an idea that had suddenly come to him in a flash of inspiration.
At first glance, downgrading a dish sounded simple. One only needed to deliberately make a mistake during some stage of the cooking process. Once the dish became imperfect, naturally it would no longer produce extraordinary phenomena or special effects.
Cooking perfectly was difficult, but intentionally messing up was easy.
However, that approach would not work in practice. Errors in the cooking steps would not only eliminate the phenomena and special effects—they would also drastically damage the flavor itself. That would no longer be a low-spec version, but simply a defective product.
Therefore, if he wanted to remove the phenomena and special effects while keeping the flavor nearly unchanged, the only method was to lower the age of all the ingredients across the board, reducing every thousand-year-tier ingredient down to the hundred-year tier.
This was not easy at all.
For example, suppose a dish used a two-thousand-year Heaven and Earth treasure together with a fourteen-hundred-year spirit beast ingredient. Reducing both ingredients while preserving the original balance of flavor and nutrition was not as simple as dividing both ages by ten and turning them into two hundred years and one hundred forty years respectively.
The nutritional accumulation of ingredients did not scale proportionally with age.
For the same ingredients, perhaps the Heaven and Earth treasure only needed to be reduced to the two-hundred-year level, while the spirit beast ingredient might need to remain at the four-hundred-year level in order to maintain the same flavor and nutritional balance as before.
Thus, while the ingredient types could remain unchanged, choosing the correct revised ages required repeated experimentation.
This time, the dish Qi Han chose to downgrade was Wensi Tofu.
The reason was simple: among the three 3 Star vegetarian dishes, its ingredient complexity was the lowest.
Whether it was the "clear broth" made through countless steps and multiple ingredients, or the many Heaven and Earth treasures fused together in Dinghu Shangsu, lowering the ingredient ages would trigger extremely complicated chain reactions that required enormous amounts of time to test.
Since this was his first attempt at downgrading a dish, there was no need to start on nightmare difficulty.
By now, Qi Han's foundational cooking techniques had gradually reached the Perfect level, and he had cooked Wensi Tofu countless times before. Every single step was already engraved into his memory. Under such circumstances, downgrading the dish became much easier.
Three days was just enough for Qi Han to complete the process. He had even prepared the tofu in advance for cooking.
After all, the entire process of making tofu required several hours, and there was no way the culinary showdown would allow enough time for that.
Did preparing the tofu beforehand count as cheating?
Of course not. After all, tofu itself was simply an ingredient.
At Qi Han's request, Ru Yi quickly prepared all the ingredients for the downgraded version of Wensi Tofu.
Qi Han was already intimately familiar with this dish. Although the ingredient ages had changed, the ingredient types remained the same, so there were not many differences in the cooking steps.
The only particularly time-consuming part was probably simmering the chicken clear broth.
Previously, the low-heat simmering process required around three hours, but the culinary showdown could not wait that long. Therefore, this time Qi Han used a pressure cooker. Under high steam pressure, the water temperature could exceed one hundred degrees Celsius, reducing the simmering time to under an hour without affecting the flavor of the broth.
Very soon, Qi Han became busy inside the kitchen.
…
"Huu…"
Inside the Bright Court Pavilion kitchen on the other side, Chef Jin stared solemnly at the various vegetable leaves submerged in water inside the pot.
This dish, Emerald Jade Dew, had originally come to him as a sudden flash of inspiration long ago. After two years of constant refinement and modification, it had finally been perfected.
And it was also the dish of which Chef Jin was most proud.
He could say without the slightest hesitation that this dish was the greatest creation of his entire life, something he would never be able to replicate again.
Before entering the kitchen for the third round, Chef Song had pulled him aside and told him about a dish at Han Shi called Ginkgo Biloba Dish. There was a possibility that Qi Han would use it in the third round, so he should stay alert and not underestimate his opponent.
At first, Chef Jin had not paid much attention to the warning.
That was until Chef Song told him that the Crab Stuffed with Orange at Han Shi sold for forty gold coins, while the Ginkgo Biloba Dish was priced at one hundred gold coins.
He had personally tasted the Crab Stuffed with Orange. Although meat dishes and vegetable dishes were difficult to compare directly, he had to admit that Crab Stuffed with Orange was entirely capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with his own Emerald Jade Dew.
It was hard to imagine that a young man barely in his twenties could already create such cuisine.
And if the Ginkgo Biloba Dish was priced far higher than Crab Stuffed with Orange, then its flavor must certainly surpass it as well.
Who would have thought that Crab Stuffed with Orange was not even the other party's limit? The young man still had an even stronger dish?
For once, a trace of fighting spirit appeared on Chef Jin's face.
He had to admit that the young man named Qi Han possessed greater culinary talent than he himself did. Given a little more time, Qi Han might truly surpass him.
But not now!
He would use this Emerald Jade Dew to prove it.
As thoughts churned through Chef Jin's mind, the colorful vegetable leaves soaking in the pot before him slowly began to change. Simmered gradually over low heat, the leaves softened from their original crispness and freshness until they became tender and delicate, eventually nearly dissolving entirely into the soup.
At this point, the vegetable leaves would crumble apart with the slightest touch.
The once colorless and crystal-clear broth also slowly absorbed the essence of the various vegetable leaves during this process, gradually turning a yellowish-green color.
Seeing that the timing was about right, Chef Jin carefully removed all the vegetable leaves, leaving only the broth behind in the pot.
He then evenly sprinkled a layer of starch into the broth, allowing it to dissolve completely.
As this process continued, the yellow-green soup slowly reduced and thickened, its color becoming deeper and more translucent while reflecting a glossy, jade-like sheen beneath the lights.
If Qi Han had been here, he would have been shocked to discover that this step was extremely similar to thickening a sauce with starch—a technique that had never before appeared on Douluo Continent.
Immediately afterward, Chef Jin added cleaned and prepared cabbage leaves back into the pot, allowing them to soak completely in the thick broth for several seconds before lifting them out and arranging them onto a serving plate in the shape of a complete cabbage.
At first glance, it looked as though an entire fresh cabbage had simply been placed onto the plate.
And just like that, Emerald Jade Dew was complete.
Using the concentrated essence of hundreds of vegetables completely dissolved into the broth as a base, the dish lightly blanched fresh cabbage leaves so that the cabbage itself retained a tender, crisp, and juicy texture, while the flavors of countless vegetables permeated every bite.
Every single vegetable used in the dish was an extremely valuable rare variety, and many of them were even Heaven and Earth treasures.
Even the seemingly ordinary cabbage used at the end had been meticulously selected.
Pressing the switch for the kitchen door light, Chef Jin's face was filled with confidence.
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Tn: I updated the story once every 2 days, but if you want to see more chapter of this story ahead of time, please go to my Patreon.
Latest Chapter: Chapter 538: Walking Straight into the Trap?[1]
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[1] https://www.patreon.com/Avicebron/posts/becoming-food-in-160492301
[2] https://www.patreon.com/Avicebron/posts/becoming-food-in-160492301