Chapter 43: Cooking Contest Battle - Soup, Meat Edition
The next category is soup. This is a genre that doesn't allow for much creativity. But when I look around the city, I check to see what kind of food is available. It's a good reference for the future. I choose a dish that doesn't exist. If this dish doesn't really exist in this world, it's probably okay.
Well, the dish the other person made was consomme soup. Since there was no consomme base, it was homemade from bouillon. This is a lot of work, isn't it? If it's elaborate, it takes days to make a bouillon. By the way, bouillon is the Japanese word for soup stock.
Evaluation is all 10. Well, making consommé soup from bouillon is a masterpiece. It took a lot of time and effort. But it's just an ordinary consommé soup! By the way, I also made this bouillon.
Now it's my turn! First of all, here are the ingredients for the bouillon.
Chicken stock, onion, carrot, cabbage, daikon, celery and shimeji mushroom.
Next, here are the ingredients for the consommé.
Minced chicken, onions, carrots, celery, egg white.
And here are the ingredients for the dish to be made.
Chicken thighs, potatoes, carrots, onions, broccoli, shimeji mushrooms, milk, consommé, salt, pepper, butter and flour.
Can you guess what I'm making? It's a classic winter soup dish, the opposite of curry.
Let's make it. First, pour cold water into the pot from the bouillon, then add onions, carrots, cabbage, daikon, celery and shimeji mushrooms and turn on the heat. The blonde handsome man put them in boiling water, but that's not the way to do it; if you put them in boiling water right away, the proteins in the vegetables will break down and the soup will not have the flavor of the vegetables.
Therefore, I started with cold water and slowly heated it to bring out the flavor of the vegetables in the soup. Then, after the water comes to a boil, add the chicken stock and boil it down while removing the scum and the bouillon is complete.
Now the next step is to make consommé. First, chop the onions, carrots and celery. Next, in a deep-bottomed pot, mix the minced chicken, onion, carrot, celery and egg white. The mixture should look like a hamburger. Roll it into a meatball and put it in the bouillon. Simmer for a while and the consommé is ready.
Now let's do the real thing.
First, cut the chicken thighs into bite-sized pieces and season them with salt and pepper.
Cut the potatoes into quarters, cut the carrots into heart or star shapes and cut the onions into wedges.
Separate the broccoli and shimeji mushrooms into small bunches.
Melt the butter in a pan and fry the chicken thighs first until they change color.
When the color changes, add the onions and saute again.
Add the flour and saute further, then add the consommé soup, potatoes and carrots.
When the vegetables are cooked, add the milk, broccoli and shimeji mushrooms and bring to a boil. Finally, season with salt and pepper to taste and it's ready to serve.
Well, that was a long time...I guess you can appreciate the value of consommé or soup stock when you actually make it. The dish is cream stew.
I wasn't sure if it was curry or cream stew, but unfortunately I wasn't confident in my ability to make curry roux by hand. After all, it uses a lot of spices. So I chose the stew without hesitation. The judges were surprised again and so was the blonde handsome man.
That's right, people who are not immune to white soup dishes would be surprised.
I put the stew on a small plate and served it to the judges. When they ate it with trepidation, all of them involuntarily said, "Hmm...delicious". Somehow, the stew is the first thing that makes me feel relieved.
The judges gave me an overwhelming victory with all 20. I'm making consommé, too. The judges also pointed out the mistakes that the blonde handsome man made. Yuck.
The chef who specializes in soup says to the poor blonde handsome man who is still unconvinced.
"If you have a problem with it, try this dish"
The blonde handsome man trembles as he eats the stew. That's freaky.
"I, Impossible..."
He´s trembling. Yeah, I won't forgive you if you drop the plate.
Next up is Lily's favorite meat dish. If I had tried hamburger steak, I would have won, but I dared to go head-to-head with him. As someone who used to work part-time at a teppanyaki restaurant, I'll take this challenge!
As expected, my opponent was a grilled sirloin. The only seasoning is salt and pepper. I can feel his dedication.
I'll be cooking the same grilled meat, but with beef sirloin, fillet, rump, pork loin and lamb thigh. I chose a total of five types of diced steak.
According to the manager of the teppanyaki restaurant, you can't go wrong with beef sirloin, filet and rump when it comes to teppanyaki.
The pork loin is for people who don't like oil and the lamb thigh is for women. As with the first recipe, we made several tare (sauce). First, I made the yakiniku sauce.
The ingredients were soy sauce, onions, sesame oil, chili pepper, garlic and vinegar. I also prepared salt and pepper, yuzu kosho, wasabi soy sauce and grated ponzu.
I also prepared the vegetables to go with it. I chose cabbage, onions, carrots and potatoes.
The cabbage was cut into chunks and served raw, not grilled. It's also delicious grilled, but I chose raw so it could be eaten right away. The onions were sliced into rings and served grilled. The reason I grilled the onions is because they become sweeter.
The carrots were cut the same way as the stew and the potatoes were sliced into rings. It would have been nice if the potatoes could have been cut in a star shape, but they would have crumbled and been difficult to eat, so I chose regular slices.
Finally, I grilled the meat and served it on the griddle.
The result was an overwhelming victory for me with a total of 20. The five different ways of eating the five different tasting meats were highly evaluated. The grated ponzu was particularly clean and highly rated. In addition, the use of the accompanying vegetables to add color to the dish was also well received.
Lily was happy, drooling profusely. Ion and Setia have been evacuated. That's a good point. That's three wins in a row for me. As for the match, I've already won, but I have no intention of cutting corners. I'm going to defeat the blonde handsome man once and for all.