Chapter 342 - You Can’t Touch Pitch Without Being Defiled (3)
Chapter 342: You Can’t Touch Pitch Without Being Defiled (3)
When the two headed to the kitchen, there were already some people out there preparing breakfast. Among them were Brian and Laura. Kaya waved at Laura, and Brian made eye contact with her for a moment then turned and stood before the kitchen counter they were using.
Min-joon muttered while touching the Sous vide machine, “But the Grand Chef organizers seem to have made a lot of money, given they have the Sous vide machine ready here.”
“Well, it doesn’t cost much.”
“It’s still a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Oh, I think this model is a little less than two thousand dollars.”
“Have you memorized all the models of the Sous vide machine?”
Kaya shook her head as if she was surprised by his remark.
At that moment, Laura approached and asked in a curious voice, “Are both of you making this? Since the machine has been running since I arrived, I was wondering who was making it here.”
“Well, I have a recipe that came to Kaya’s mind at dawn when she was drunk yesterday.”
“What kind of recipe is it?”
“Wait a minute. I’ll show you after making it all,” he said with a more excited expression than Kaya’s. Laura smiled at that. Watching him, she recalled Kaya who looked embarrassed when he was praised yesterday. Who said lovers were bound to take after each other? Obviously, Kaya and Min-joon were such a couple.
“Today, let me help you as an assistant. So, use me as freely as you can. I’m confident that I can manage the workload of three men,” Min-joon said.
“Don’t you know you have been my assistant all along?” Kaya said, smiling at him.
The recipe that Min-joon showed her was incredibly attractive enough, so he could not still believe she came up with it when she was drunk.
“Take out the potatoes and set the venison. Let me make the sauce.”
“Okay.”
They didn’t have to talk any more because both knew the recipe. So, they already knew what to do at any particular moment.
They read each other’s minds. He was fast with his hands, but she was faster than him. Obviously, it was Min-joon who spent every day in the kitchen. Even though Kaya was in a restaurant, she was called for at various restaurants, so there was nothing wrong even if her hands were not faster than his.
It was the difference in their characteristics rather than their cooking skills. When Min-joon cooked an elaborate dish, Kaya cooked a splendid dish. So, when they cooked, there was something like feminine beauty in his fingertips, while masculine beauty was felt in her fingertips. And their strange combination was quite attractive to make their cooking together such a charming spectacle. In no time, the kitchen was filled with people watching the duo
cooking.
What Kaya did first was to melt the butter in a pan, mix onion and garlic, caramelize, then fry the mushrooms. After caramelizing the mushrooms, Min-joon put red wine in a pan and turned the heat to the maximum, and simmered the sauce by half. In fact, this was the trickiest part of cooking because it was really hard to make this by simply following the recipe. Although it was difficult for Kaya to check by guesswork whether the sauce on the pan was simmered by half or not, she did it accurately.
The reason was simple. Kaya’s sense of the heat was so perfect that even Joseph admired it.
In addition, Min-joon was as sharp as Kaya as far as measuring the sauce accurately was concerned. He was backed up by the system window, above all, so his sense of measurement had become sharp while he was relying on it.
And there was another thing people could find in their cooking.
“Wow, they are clicking with each other so well, even though they are not in the same team.”
One of the participants muttered in a voice as if he was so impressed. And nobody disagreed with him because he was right. Min-joon and Kaya made such great teamwork that they looked like a couple who had been cooking together all their lives.
Yesterday when the participants cooked under Min-joon’s direction, they showed great teamwork even though they gathered together for the first time. But they could show it because Min-joon managed and supervised all of them. What they most admired now was that the two didn’t talk at all to each other while cooking, as if they read each other’s minds. Sometimes, they mentioned the ingredients, but sometimes, they didn’t even say anything. Instead, one of them prepared what the other wanted and helped each other at the right time.
The reason they could show such fantastic teamwork was basically because they cooked everyday at home, but the more important reason was because they fully understood each other, and each other’s cuisine. Since they knew how and when to cook, they had no reason to conflict with each other.
And now, they were showing the participants the outstanding results of their teamwork.
“What a great couple…”
When someone muttered like that, Laura nodded before she knew it. Then she glanced at Brian. Brian looked blank as if he was beaten with a hammer.
Laura understood why he was making such an expression. The way he expressed his feelings to her and approached her was wrong, but it was clear that Brian liked Kaya.
That was why Kaya’s clicking with Min-joon so well was so cruel to him right now. They were hitting it off together well, which was more impressive than their mere kissing or hugging. So, Laura didn’t have to think deeply about how depressed and alienated Brian must have felt at this moment.
‘Is there any other couple who can show their genuine affection for each other than Kaya and Min-joon so openly?’
Just by looking at the two’s dishes, she could feel how much the two understood and accepted each other. They didn’t merely understand each other. They cooked in harmony just like the cogs meshing correctly, so much so that there could be found no more perfect teamwork than theirs. So, it was hard to believe that normally they were not in the same workplace.
“How can I cook well like them?”
One of the participants asked blankly. Laura understood his reaction. Just looking at them, he might feel thrilled. He might have found the answer to his question of how to run his kitchen because he was seeing it right before his eyes.
Unfortunately, Laura could not answer his question because she also didn’t know the answer. She had never made such good teamwork with somebody until now. Even before she could find a like-minded partner, she became a head chef.
So it was Laura herself who got more complicated at that question. She also benefited a lot from the Grand Chef such as fame, prize money, popularity among people, and her rapid success.
‘Have I become a head chef too early?’
She was suddenly overcome with anxiety when she felt like she put the soil in the fire pot even before she made a frame. Come to think of it, however, Kaya didn’t have enough experience working in the restaurant kitchen like her. In that respect, she deeply thought about what distinguished her from Kaya.
Soon, she thought of several possibilities.
First, what came to her mind was talent. The difference in their talent made this difference?
But she felt miserable when she thought about it. If talent made all this difference from the beginning, she would get nowhere no matter how hard she tried.
Secondly, she thought of the power of love. Her reasoning like that was childish but plausible. What distinguished her from Min-joon and Kaya the most was that they were in a romantic relationship. And they were in a more intimate relationship than the typical lovers, which was quite visible on the TV show about the Grand Chef competition. In fact, when the Grand Chef Season 3 started, she also supported their romantic relationship.
However, what she thought was the most plausible answer was their background.
‘Neither of them received any regular education.’
Kaya learned cooking in the market, while Min-joon taught himself how to cook. And it was clearly evident on their dishes because their cooking was quite unconventional as if trying to prove that it sprouted in the wild, not in the garden that someone cultivated well.
If they had learned cooking in a normal environment, they could not have developed such cuisines. If ordinary men had been raised in the same environment as them, they would never have cultivated the same cooking skills. That was the power of learning from a good chef.
If getting training from a more skilled chef in a restaurant did not bring about good results, lots of chefs would probably not try to teach their junior chefs.
But Kaya and Min-joon succeeded. There were probably many reasons for that. They might have tried desperately, or they might have been so talented, or what they learned from their teachers might have affected them a lot more than they thought.
“Well, I don’t think I can give you the right answer because I’ve never lived their lives,” she said bitterly as if she gave up agonizing anymore. If there was anyone who could answer that question, it was probably only Kaya and Min-joon.
Meanwhile, Kaya was already taking out the venison cooked in the Sous vide machine. And at that moment, Laura’s eyes sparkled. There was not much venison. Even if they took a bite of it, only ten people could enjoy it. That was understandable because Kaya cooked it not to serve them, but to simply test her recipe.
The venison cooked in the Sous vide machine was put on a hot pan and grilled on both sides then added a juniper seasoning Kaya made with juniper berries, black pepper, and Thyme.
Now the dish based on Kaya’s recipe was almost complete. Min-joon took a potato Rosti
sautéed with melted duck fat and placed it on a plate. Then the puree he made from tangerine peels, venison cut into bite-sized pieces, and a sauce made with red wine stayed connected with each other lightly.
Interestingly, it was Kaya who was looking at the dish with a more expectant look than anyone else at the moment. Kaya moved her lips up and down as if she was thirsty, watching the slowly permeating red wine sauce sprinkled over the puree made from mandarin oranges, specifically Clementine peels.
“Oh, I can’t believe I have made this…”