Ishura - Volume 4 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

Thank you for reading. I am Keiso. I don’t believe there is anyone who would purposefully start buying this series at Volume 4, but if there happens to be anyone who has accidently done so, I absolutely recommend going back and reading from the beginning. The title is Ishura I: The New Demon King War. It’s published on Dengeki Bunko’s Shinbungei imprint.

As we’re at Volume 4, at this point, I doubt there’s many people who would like to hear an introduction to the work or how the author’s been doing lately. For starters, I consider the afterword to have no value, thinking of it as nothing more than “some unwanted text tacked on to the back of the main story,” ever since I was a kid, and I have never once read one from start to finish before. To the point that I think, if you’re going to write one, it might as well have some sort of info that the reader’d find somewhat beneficial in their daily lives.

Thus, I will write about how to make a delicious Bolognese sauce.

Bolognese sauce is among one of the more advanced dishes within my living standards. As it requires you to cut several vegetables, control the temperature, and taste test, it is a bit of a labor-intensive recipe. However, on the other hand, if you make a stock of the sauce, you can freeze it even midway through the prep work, with its practicality being one of its strong points.

Now first, for the ingredients, you generally use three varieties of vegetables—onions, carrots, and celery—and finely chop them up into about the same size. It’s fine if the amount of any of the vegetables is radically larger than the others, and those who aren’t fond of carrots or celery can substitute them for other vegetables, however, I can’t really imagine what sort of flavor a Bolognese sauce would have if it was made with any vegetables outside of these three. Please fill me in if you discover a tasty combination for yourself.

In the above process, I said to finely chop the vegetables, but for the past three years or so, I haven’t finely chopped anything for myself. I do it all with a cooking device that, by pulling a cord, rotates internal blades to chop up everything inside its container. A truly excellent product, capable of being more finely tuned than a mixer, and producing uniform results much faster than I could with my knife skills. If you would like to purchase it yourself, at smaller capacities, it can be quite annoying and time-consuming to repeatedly take the contents in and out, so I recommend getting a larger size if possible.

Mix all the finely chopped vegetables together. With those, the Bolognese sauce is pretty much finished. All that’s left is to cook the vegetables until they’re heated through, mix in the meat, canned tomatoes, and seasonings, and that’s enough. Thus, if you divide up this sauce base and freeze it, it will really come in handy the next time you go to cook.

There are some tricks when it comes time to cook the meat. Generally, it’s fine to prepare a mixture of ground beef and pork of about ten ounces—about the same volume as the vegetables—but you do not directly add it in with the vegetables once they’re finished cooking, and instead, I ask you to cook it in an empty frying pan after moving the vegetables temporarily into a separate container. Naturally, this isn’t enough to warrant washing the frying pan first, and as for the separate container, you’re going to be eating pasta later anyway, so just move them over to that plate for now.

The ground meat can be plopped in straight from the packaging and doesn’t need to be broken up. Fry one side of the meat well in the oil left over from cooking the vegetables, and once it’s browned, keep it collected into one piece and flip it over to fry the other side. If you mix it in with the vegetables, the process of frying the whole block of ground meat becomes difficult, which is why we removed the vegetables from the pan first. When you’ve fried both sides of the ground meat nice and solid, it should look just like a very lazily put together Hamburg steak. What’s important is to fry it until it’s nice and browned, without breaking it up, as if you break up the ground meat from the start, you’ll lose both the nice browning along with the moisture in the meat, and it will become difficult to combine the fragrance of the char with the meat’s natural flavor.

Next, you break up the meat. This is also an area where you can make adjustments for taste, but I detect more of the meat essence, so to speak, when it’s broken up roughly and prefer that. When it comes to commercial, boil-in-the-bag Bolognese sauce, I get the impression there aren’t many that contain any chunks of meat bigger than a mince. This is a point where this recipe excels, and since even with regular ground meat you brown it as one big solid mass, you can make the sauce with the perfect size meat chunks for you.

Next you reintroduce the vegetables you moved aside earlier, add a can of chopped tomatoes, and simmer the mixture. From here, as you simmer off the liquid to your preferred consistency, you can adjust the taste by adding salt and pepper, or any on-hand herbs, as you like, and once you finish it off with some pasta, it’s complete.

One of the strong points of this recipe is its customizability.

I glossed over the seasoning step there, but the truth is, no matter what sort of seasonings you add in, you can usually end up with a delicious Bolognese sauce. Of course, it will taste great with just some extra salt, while for herbs, you can use pretty much whatever kinds you have available and have it come out delicious, and even if you throw in some red wine and cream, the tomatoes will bring all the flavors together on their own. Furthermore, you’re free to choose the timing and amount when freezing it for later, whether it’s after you’ve diced the vegetables, after you’ve cooked them, the actual complete Bolognese itself, or even those moments afterward where you stop and think I may have made a bit too much…, you can divide it up and throw it in the freezer—an advantage that lets you continue from wherever you left off in the preparation process next time. Naturally, finely chopped vegetables can be used just as easily in other recipes, and if you keep the prepped onions, carrots, and celery separated from each other, it gives you the possibility to use each one separately as well.

Finally, there’s one big customization I’d like to introduce as an example. It’s a technique that will let you completely change the dish if, as you’re making the Bolognese sauce, you decide you want something else, you can add in curry powder flakes once you’ve combined the vegetables and meat in place of the tomatoes, and what was once meant to be Bolognese instantly transforms into keema curry. I think it’s fair to say that this level of freedom to do everything at your discretion in the moment is a strength of Bolognese sauce.

Now then, I wrote at the beginning that afterwords are worthless, but they have an enormous amount of value to an author, and that is because I am able to use this space to thank all the people involved with the book. I would like to give my deeps thanks to Kureta-sensei for the many major jobs they handled, adding the illustrations to this volume, various promotional illustrations, and more, as well as to my editor, Nagahori, for all the wonderful advice they’re constantly providing me, to the people involved in the publishing of Ishura, and finally, to all of you readers.

In the next volume, I think I will be able to finish writing everything up to the end of the first round in the Sixways Exhibition. Once the first round of the tournament is completed, that will mean that, numerically, half the total matches will be finished. I’ll work hard to write it all the way to the end. Let us meet again. However, it must be added that, as I mentioned up top, I wouldn’t be this far into the afterword as a reader myself, so I’m not exactly sure if this message of mine will reach you all or not…