“Well, I wonder if it’s really related to your cooking skills whether you can get the shape of the pomegranate toffee right or not. I don’t think it is,” she said.
He replied, “It’s not a matter we can discuss.” “Yes, it is. You know what? Each part of this mission determines our fate. If the mission is wrong, our fate can also go wrong. Don’t you get it?”
She got upset with him. But he rather felt about it. He felt as if he felt lighter when she shouted at him in an angry voice.
At the same time, he was mistaken. He wondered if she might like him. But strictly speaking, he was not handsome enough to draw her attention, or he didn’t do anything to please her enough. It would be correct to say that she got angry as a friend of his.
So he repressed his excited feelings coldly and said quietly, “Well, my life has been battered by things like that, so I’m not embarrassed at all. Maybe my life will be the same in the future.”
In fact, he thought this kind of variable was nothing, compared with one that he would continue to face in his life. She looked at him with a dissatisfied expression for a moment, but it was presumptuous for her to say anything more.
He wrapped the band around her cut finger and went back to his place. Then he started getting the shape of the pomegranate toffee right again. At first, he couldn’t even inflate it like a ball properly, but he seemed to have mastered it to some extent. The shape of the pomegranate toffee inflated like a balloon was quite good.
It was around that time when Michael entered the kitchen. He appeared with a particularly haggard expression. He then stood in front of the kitchen island blankly for some time. He was smart. He already knew that if he just picked the knife thoughtlessly, he would end up making the dish that wasn’t much different from what he failed yesterday.
“Joseph,” he called Joseph.
Joseph, who was washing the dishes with Min-joon, looked at him.
Michael said in a low voice, “I don’t know what I am lacking in.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t give you an answer.”
“I know, but I just want to tell you about my anguish. It’s so different from what I thought.”
“You can’t cook just by thinking,” Joseph said quietly.
What he said seemed nothing special, but it was the best advice he could give Michael.
Michael quietly pondered over his words. He then grabbed the knife with a sigh.
To be honest, it was quite unusual that Miachel acted like that. Since he showed a detached attitude until now, Joseph thought he would act like he used to. But Michael was clearly different now. He was obviously frustrated that he could not reproduce Joseph’s dish.
Watching him, Min-joon seemed to know why, though.
“It’s the first time that you can’t cook the way you want.”
Michael remained silent. He didn’t mean to ignore Min-joon’s words. Actually, he was so enervated that he could not respond. No matter how hard he tried, he could not bring out the same taste as the one Joseph made.
Cooking was science. Michael’s theory was correct. However, no matter how good the theory was, nobody could prove it properly if their tools for experiments were of poor quality.
There was a big gap in the cooking skills between Michael and Joseph. It was like a disaster for Michael. He somehow managed to get what he wanted in academic research so far. But cooking was different. The more he challenged, the more he felt there was a wide gap between him and Joseph, so he found the cooking mission this time very burdensome.
More precisely, he found it very burdensome that he might not win.
“Yeah, I was arrogant…” Michael muttered bitterly.
He had to admit that he was lacking and arrogant. When he stood out among the Grand Chef participants who were rookies, he was mistaken that he was a genius cook just like he was a genius in academia. But he clearly realized that he had limits as a cook at this point. After all, he was the same rookie as other participants here.
After all, one’s cooking skills were determined by how they control heat and cut in the kitchen. In other words, cooking skills were not decided by how smart the chef was, and as a result, the gap in cooking skills could not be narrowed overnight.
They had one common misconception about Michael because he said he came to the Grand Chef to make some memories, which was that his attitude toward cooking was not as serious as his attitude toward this competition. But that was not necessarily true. Michael loved to cook. It was one of the hobbies that he was most passionate about, so he wanted to stand out among others as much as he did.
His desire to stand out among other participants was not as simple as people thought. He felt that he should be the best among them. Just like he was picked up as one of a handful of top experts in physics that he was immersed in, he wanted to be ranked among the top chefs as far as cooking was concerned the moment he got interested in cooking.
But he hit the wall in this competition. That was how far he could go in cooking. He showed the limits of his cooking skills. As an amateur, he had nothing to feel regrets about. After all, he didn’t even spend as much time cooking as the judges in front of him now. If he wanted to catch up with them, it was no more than his greed.
Nonetheless, he seemed to have lots of regrets.
Anyway, each of the three finalists was done cooking, and they soon headed to the judges, carrying their dishes. This was the moment when they had to prove not how well they cooked, but how much they caught up with their judges. It was also a moment when some of them would have to pack their stuff and go home.
‘Fake monsters’ stood in front of ‘real monsters.’
Six of them would be reduced to five soon.
The first one who had to show his dish was Michael who was assigned to remaking Joseph’s appetizer. He stepped forward with Joseph’s signature dish, the mullet dish. He didn’t look as confident as before. Watching his face full of regrets, Joseph asked in a low voice, “It looks like you didn’t cook as well as you wished.”
“Well, I couldn’t do it well.”
“Yeah, I understand. I know someone who has spent decades mastering how to cut well. You can cook it well overnight as you wish.”
“But I made the best dish I could.”
Michael pushed the plates to the judges with a determined expression.
Min-joon looked at Michael with an interesting expression. He found it very strange that Michael, who looked so relaxed and complacent, was so serious at the moment. At the same time, it was rather funny that when he became serious, he was most dissatisfied with the dish he made.
Min-joon slowly put the mullet carpaccio salad into his mouth. When he chewed the stems of the young leaves, he could feel the chewy texture of the mullet that curled up in his mouth. Whenever he chewed the flesh, the scent of vinegar and lime soaked into the mullet subtly made the inside of his mouth fragrant.
His dish was good up to that point. Actually, Min-joon found little difference between Michael’s and Joseph’s. But Min-joon soon realized why Michael could not feel confident in this dish, compared with Joseph’s.
‘The taste of pineapple…’
There was something wrong with the pineapple taste. It didn’t taste fresh.
Min-joon looked at Kaya. As if she felt the same, she was frowning a bit. She made such an expression while trying to check the taste, but it was enough to make Michael look down.
Pineapple was part of the sauce Joseph used instead of tomato juice. In that process, he crushed the pineapple subtly enough to maintain its original savor while bringing out its juicy taste perfectly.
But Michael didn’t. Min-joon took it for granted. In general, cooks were in charge of cutting at most restaurants, but sometimes, at least demi chefs took the job in order to bring out the ideal taste of a dish. Cutting might not look important, but sometimes it determined the taste of the dish completely.
Even though Michael was smart, he wasn’t perfect in technical stuff like cutting. Of course, compared to the ordinary people, he was far better, but Joseph’s dish was not the kind of one that he could bring out its taste properly with his current cooking skills. After all, the level of the sushi chefs was determined by how they cut raw fish and how they pressed boiled rice, which all took place in a second.
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