Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 1 - Chapter 4.3

3

I’ll start from the conclusion I had reached: The poitan was a grain, in all likelihood.

Naturally, this was all just me guessing, as I didn’t have any way to research it properly. But at any rate, thanks to that hypothesis, I was finally able to find a way to cook it.

The big hint had been “nutritional value.”

It actually wasn’t anything all that complex in the end. Heck, even an elementary schooler may be able to figure it out.

The protein and fat came from the giba meat. The vitamins and dietary fiber came from the aria, which was a green vegetable. So then where were the carbohydrates coming from? When that question came to mind, I finally had my revelation.

I didn’t know how exactly the bodies of this world’s people were laid out. But we looked so similar that applying a bit of my world’s common sense shouldn’t be a problem.

At the very least, I could see that Ai Fa was incredibly healthy. Her skin was simply stunning, and her finely toned body was probably stronger than mine, frankly.

For her to be in that sort of shape, she had to be eating a properly balanced diet.

So, I knew that Ai Fa ate meat, as well as vegetables. In that case, it would be weird if she wasn’t eating her carbohydrates. I mean, to start with, those are our source of energy. I couldn’t imagine that Ai Fa, who had more strength and energy than most wild animals, wasn’t eating any carbohydrates whatsoever.

“The poitan is a grain, which makes it a carbohydrate.”

The other big hint that helped me reach this conclusion was the poitan’s texture.

The first time I ate it, I thought, It’s almost like someone went and dissolved flour in water.

Flour. In other words, milled wheat, which was a type of grain.

There was no need to roast it or parch it or bite into it raw. I mean, the answer had been right before my eyes from the very start.

I should have paid more attention to the eating habits of the people of the forest’s edge. Boiling it was the one perfect answer, after all. When it was heated to a high temperature, the poitan’s astringency was released, and it dissolved into the water. That allowed it to meet the base qualifications of being edible.

It was just muddy water without any taste like that, though. It was ultimately still roughly the same as flour dissolved in water. But if you dissolve flour in water, then all you need to do is turn it back into flour.

Thanks to that thought process, I realized how to overcome the poitan.

I heated the poitan in a small amount of water to make a sort of mushy poitan broth, then heated it further right up to the limit. By heating it just up until when it was about to burn, I was able to make it into a sort of slime-like batter. Then I exposed it to sunlight for an hour, finally hardening it into a solid shape.

I broke that apart and gave it a taste, and... it was just a powder, without any real flavor to it.

It really did resemble flour... And in that case, it meant I could treat it like it was flour.

My hunch really had hit the mark.

I dissolved the powdered poitan in water, then heated it, but I didn’t boil it the way I had with the original poitan, so instead it sputtered and started to burn a bit. It really did look just like okonomiyaki with nothing added to it.

I only had a little bit of my sample batch left, so I went ahead and cooked up the slime that hadn’t been exposed to sunlight, but that was no good. All that happened was the moisture evaporated, leaving just a burnt powder behind.

Apparently completely drying it out once was the real clincher.

I had no idea what sort of change was going on in the poitan’s molecular structure or whatever, but I didn’t really feel the need to know that, either.

At any rate, I’d figured it out. At least for my purposes, this was the right answer.

And also... When I finally accepted that I had won out over the poitan, I was overcome by a great, uplifting sense of joy. If I had a “flour” to act as a bonding agent, then I could take on the challenge of making hamburgers right away, even though I had put it off for later.

A “bonding agent” referred to a food that helps to connect together the minced meat. Normally, you would just use egg yolks or breadcrumbs or something.

Naturally, it was still possible to make hamburgers even without any bonding agent. Heck, I’d heard adding it in was something that was unique to Japan in the first place. I’d also heard people say all sorts of stuff, like “As long as you add salt, you’ll be fine,” or even, “You don’t need to add anything at all. Just mix it all up.”

But at any rate, the Tsurumi Restaurant used a bonding agent in theirs, and I had no experience making them without any, so I just couldn’t come to grips with the idea of making them that way.

If I had a bonding agent, though, well that was a different story.

I could take on steam-grilling or teriyaki anytime I wanted, and I honestly didn’t think it would be that much harder than making a stew. So in that case, I wanted to at least give it a try.

Hamburgers were what was referred to as a processed food. It was a type of cooking that didn’t keep the meat in its original form. To me it was pretty much the most standard dish imaginable, but to the people of this alternate world, it was sure to come across as some sort of profound mystery.

Just how much would I surprise Ai Fa if I could pull this off...?

As that thought ran through my head, I could feel my heart throbbing in my chest like a lovesick maiden.

◇

After many twists and turns, it was finally time for dinner on my fifth night in this new world.

“The shape has changed quite a bit, but this is a poitan. It still doesn’t have much flavor in and of itself, but if you chew into it alongside meat, it should be plenty passable.”

I had placed the sliced onions atop the three little giburgers, and slathered on plenty of the sauce that I made with a fruit wine base. And then there were those round little okonomiyaki-looking baked poitan. They were about 30 centimeters in diameter and roughly one centimeter thick.

“Well then, let’s dig in!”

Ai Fa once again ran a finger on her left hand alongside her lips, then muttered something inside her mouth. Then she grabbed her bowl and spoon, and unsurprisingly looked scrutinizingly at the giburgers.

While sneaking a glance at her, I went ahead and scooped up some of a patty with my own wooden spoon.

Yeah, there didn’t seem to be any issues in terms of firmness. And I was seeing from the cross-section that it was insanely juicy, so this was looking like it may have turned out really well.

Still, the issue remained of whether or not the ingredients would prove to be compatible. I mean, I couldn’t imagine there were that many people out there who would make a burger with boar meat. My guess was that meant boar meat wasn’t all that suited to being cooked up as a hamburger.

Boar meat was softer than pork, but that probably only held true when you were boiling it. I mean, I’m pretty sure the fat content was the reason, but at any rate, boar meat just got softer and softer the more that you boiled it. But if you ate it after using some other cooking process, you’d probably categorize it as a pretty tough meat.

Naturally, if you followed the proper steps when preparing it, it wouldn’t end up all that tough. But still, it would probably never be softer than beef or pork.

And besides, beef was considered the easy choice when making a hamburger. The next choice after that was to use a mix of beef and pork, which was quite popular in its own right. I haven’t really heard of a pure pork hamburger before, though. And seeing how boars were the ancestors of pigs, their meat was unsurprisingly similar.

So boar meat absolutely wasn’t suited to being made into hamburgers, and giba meat had the exact same taste. Just how would a burger made with giba meat turn out, then? Even if I did manage to surprise Ai Fa, would I end up being satisfied with how it turned out? At any rate, that fight was already on.

Using the wooden spoon, I tossed the chunk of giburger I had scooped up into my mouth. The meaty juices were still so hot that it felt like they may end up burning me as they spread through my mouth.

My initial impression was... That’s sweet.

What the heck? It was seriously sweet. Was boar, no wait, giba meat’s fat this sweet?

Alongside that mild sweetness, there was also the slightly quirky taste of the meat, and the fragrance of the fruit wine sauce... Yeah, it was tasty.

Sure enough, the meat had a pretty chewy texture for a hamburger. It was still like this even after I minced it up so carefully...? Still, it wasn’t an unpleasant texture. Rather than the sort of thing I’d say was overly tough, it was something that you could really bite into. And when you did bite into it, even more juice came spilling out and filled your mouth with deliciousness.

Ah, but that won’t do...

I really did have a much stronger fondness for meat with a quirky taste than most folks. Whether it was boar meat, or lamb, or duck, I loved those sorts of powerful flavors. And so I earnestly did think this was delicious... but I couldn’t really offer an objective opinion.

Seriously though, it was crazy good!

I added in some sliced aria and a heaping helping of sauce, and brought it all into my mouth.

It was delicious. Just so, so tasty...

I’d probably end up thinking exactly the same thing about a boar meat hamburger, I’d imagine.

It was a bit embarrassing giving such high praise to something I made, but it really was good.

If I were to give one critique, it would be that I really would like to try it with thicker patties. As is, the thoroughly cooked outsides just had a lot more relative importance to the dish when compared to the juicy inside. That was the one thing I could think of that was bugging me.

I bit off a chunk of poitan, and sure enough, that was good too.

The ideal would be to have some white rice, but it really was essential to have meat, vegetables, and carbs. Well, that may not be the case in other countries, but it was at least true of the one I was raised in. And it was the case for the house I grew up in, too. You needed meat, carbs, and vegetables. If any of those were lacking, it couldn’t be called an ideal meal.

And it had been a while since I had experienced this familiar dull, grainy taste.

I apparently had been craving carbohydrates a lot more than I had thought.

Poitan wasn’t as puffy as white bread or naan, and in the end it was like an okonomiyaki without anything in it, not even eggs. But even so, I couldn’t help but find it delicious.

I only had one single poitan for my three burgers. The giburgers were pretty rich in flavor, so I got the feeling that I could easily eat two more of the poitan alongside them.

I broke out in an awkward chuckle, thinking on how much I had tried to avoid the poitan. And then I got a cold, “Just what are you laughing about?” back.

That was my first time hearing Ai Fa talk in a little while.

That’s no good. I got so absorbed in eating that I stopped paying attention to her.

I reflected a bit on how stubbornly fixated I could be on eating.

“Ah, Ai Fa, what do you think of the taste?”

Looking over her way, I could see that Ai Fa had chewed off more than half of her poitan, and was already finished with her second giburger. Man, she was fast. I only just finished my first one.

After she finished swallowing what was in her mouth, Ai Fa simply responded with, “Tasty.”

“I’m glad to hear that! But it would also be nice if you could offer a bit more detailed impression...”

All I got back to my earnest request was a, “Don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to...?”

“I don’t feel like telling you my thoughts.”

“Huuuuh? Why? Are you still angry about what happened around noontime?”

“Noontime?” she questioned, tilting her head. “Ah. You mean when you lost control of yourself and acted insolently. I had already completely forgotten about that.”

“You forgot... Then why won’t you tell me your thoughts?”

“Stop asking! If I don’t want to tell you, then that’s all there is to it!”

And then, an inexplicable phenomenon occurred: Ai Fa hung her head down and seemed to try to cover her beet red face with her bowl.

“Just drop it! Don’t look at me!”

I just plain didn’t get it.

Well, whatever. Her emotions seemed to be all over the place today, so I’d just have to ask her what she thought some other time. At the very least she seemed to be dodging my questions, but she did say it was tasty... That alone was enough to make me super happy.

While such thoughts were running through my head, an unexpected voice from an unexpected direction said, “Hey, what is that that you’re eating?”

Ai Fa and I both looked in that direction, dumbfounded. It had come from the window beside the stove. It had grown pretty dark out, but I could see a small face staring at us from beyond the bars.

“Hey, hey! It smells really good! Is that giba? What’s that white thing there?”

“Rimee Ruu... I thought I told you not to come near my house.”

When I saw the surprise vanish from Ai Fa’s face as she nonchalantly said that, I calmed down a bit. If she was an acquaintance, then it shouldn’t be a problem. And it’s not like we would do anything shady, anyway.

Still, just what was the deal with this kid? She was short enough that all I could see through the window was her reddish-brown hair and round eyes, so I couldn’t even tell what her face looked like.

“No way! This is my first time seeing you in a while, so why are you being so mean? Hey...! What are you eating? What does it taste like? Who made it? Is that guy your husband, Ai Fa?”

“Don’t be stupid! Why would I go and marry this pale fool?!”

Those words inflicted quite a bit of damage on me.

But... As she was ranting and raving, Ai Fa’s face was redder than I’d ever seen it before. Hmm...

Let’s just go ahead and say those two things cancelled each other out.

“Hey, who exactly is that kid?” I asked Ai Fa, but the girl herself was the one to respond.

“I’m Rimee Ruu! The youngest daughter of the Ruu household! And also, Ai Fa’s friend!”

“Stop messing around. I don’t recall ever becoming friends with you, Rimee Ruu,” Ai Fa said in an even chillier voice than usual as she scooped up the last patty with her spoon. “I’m not fond of noisy brats like you. Now hurry on home.”

So then... The girl who called herself Rimee Ruu stared blankly for a second, and then an instant later, exploded with a, “Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” and started sobbing uncontrollably.

“H-Hey, Ai Fa, you shouldn’t act so immature towards—” I started to chide, but the wailing drowned out my voice.

She seriously could cry. I mean, I could even feel my eardrums pounding.

“But I looooooove you Ai Faaaaaaaaaaaaa!” I somehow managed to make out from within her sobs.

At any rate, that was how my meeting with the youngest daughter of the Ruu family, Rimee Ruu, went. Little did I know how it would affect my fate...