Chapter 1: Gourmet Street Stall System
"Table six, one order of creamy bass fillet with shallot sauce, bass fillet cooked to seventy percent, skin must be crispy."
"Table eight, red wine sauce filet mignon cooked to thirty percent, served with buttered asparagus and roasted potato chunks."
"Table seventeen, angel hair pasta cooked to al dente..."
As the head chef rapped out orders like a rapid-fire machine gun, seven or eight chefs in black uniforms with baseball caps shouted in unison.
"Yes Chef!"
They turned and each began handling their respective ingredients.
Lin Chen skillfully scooped a ladle of clarified butter into the steaming hot skillet, seared it on high heat for seven or eight seconds, gauged the temperature with his palm, and picked up the snowy white bass fillet, placing the flesh side down.
"Sizzling"
A wonderful sound brought a collision of rich aromas as the fish quickly began to change color and set around the edges.
He knew this would be a perfect fillet.
This conclusion was drawn from years of working in restaurants: searing the fish flesh first yields a more visually appealing product with more even browning compared to searing the skin first.
Two hours later.
Exhausted after a busy day, he sat on the steps at the back door of the restaurant, pulled out his phone, and called his mom back home.
"Mom, how’s your health? How have you been lately? The surgery went well? That’s great!"
"Me? I’m doing great, the head chef praised me today, and I might get promoted by the end of the year, just a step away from being the deputy head chef!"
Hanging up, he sighed deeply at the phone screen.
Money, still short on money, looks like I have to find a part-time job.
[Ding, detecting the host is in a predicament, Great Xia People exclusive benefit has been issued, food system activated!]
[Setting up according to host’s needs... Street stall mode activated!]
[Please find a suitable location to set up a stall and sell Great Xia cuisine, accumulate a hundred positive feedback points by midnight to receive a five thousand euro reward]
[Newbie vendor automatically awarded a food truck, now credited]
Five thousand euros?!
That’s forty thousand yuan!
Lin Chen stood up abruptly and hurried to the nearest 24-hour Chinese supermarket to look for suitable inspiration.
Great Xia cuisine has eight major schools, with millions of dishes, choosing ones that suit foreign tastes is not easy, yet it’s not impossible either.
Having lived in the Romantic Country for five years, and worked in restaurants for four, he considered himself quite familiar with the people’s tastes here.
People in the Romantic Country love tomato-based dishes, and cheese-based as well, generally preferring richer flavors.
Compared to other Northern European countries, due to being a culinary nation, they are quite accepting of cuisines from all over the world.
Especially with the recent trendy meat sandwich shop that sparked quite a bit of curiosity about Great Xia cuisine among foreigners.
But since he’s setting up a stall at night, extra care is needed in choosing the products, and the location must be considered carefully too.
Abroad, it’s best not to go out after nine at night; even locals are quite cautious.
If you want to set up a stall, you can only go near the bustling commercial street in the city center; other places are ghost towns.
"Hmm, people here love tomatoes so much, I won’t make them."
Time is short, only two and a half hours left until midnight, complicated dishes can’t be done, so convenient and simple quick dishes must be made.
Checking the functions of the food truck in the system space with a thought, he quickly had an idea.
Jump on the trend!
𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎
Hastening back home, he first blanched and cleaned the pork belly, put it in a pressure cooker, added water to cover it, and then added two cans of thick soup oils to replace broth.
Normally, you should soak the excess blood away in cold water to retain the meat’s aroma as much as possible, but time is tight now, so blanching will have to do.
He prepared a twelve-spice marinade bag with fennel, star anise, cloves, grass fruit, fragrant fruit, amomum, thyme, vanilla, Sichuan pepper, cinnamon, angelica root, and white pepper, wrapped it in cheesecloth and soaked in cold water, then tossed everything in the pot together.
While waiting for the water to boil, he took another pot, oiled it with a suitable bright oil, and poured in plenty of rock sugar, stirring quickly over high heat.
In Northern European homes, there’s no open flame, they generally use induction cookers. The strength of high heat can’t compare with a professional kitchen, so there’s no worry about burning.
The rock sugar melted quickly into a dark reddish-brown color, at which point he reduced the heat and continued simmering on low.
Before long, visible froth began appearing in the syrup, and the color turned to a caramel hue.
Within seconds, the froth rapidly expanded, almost spilling over the pot, so he immediately poured in half its amount of hot water.
"Woosh"
The syrup boiled, the froth disappeared instantly, and the mixture returned to its original dark red color, with dense eye-like bubbles forming on the surface.
When the eye-like bubbles shrank, he turned off the heat, poured some out to cool, and reserved a portion to color the broth.
The broth gradually boiled, into which he poured a large amount of salt to set the base flavor; only with enough salt will the broth have taste, and only with tasty broth will the meat absorb the flavor.
Then he tossed in a few pieces of rock sugar, a bowl of white spirits, covered it with a lid to pressurize for fifteen minutes.
After doing all this, the time was already ten o’clock.
Wiping the sweat off his forehead, he pre-set the oven to an upper heat of 280 degrees and a lower heat of 240 degrees.
He poured the ingredients for the buns into the dough mixer: 500g of all-purpose flour, 3g of yeast, since there’s no lard, used butter instead, 20g, and 230g of water.
This ratio yields 11 to 12 buns, but since he’s selling, it needs to be scaled up proportionately.
Once the butter fully mixed with the flour into a pastry-like texture, he gradually added water, mixed and kneaded into a smooth dough, ready to rest.
With the current hot weather, twenty-five to twenty-six degrees, resting for twelve to fifteen minutes is enough.
To ensure a tasty meat sandwich, anyone can make the filling by following recipes, but the focus is on the buns.
Over-resting leads to the buns being soft inside, with larger honeycomb holes, creating a bread-like texture, resulting in a thick, dry crust and uncrisp interior when baked.
Therefore, slightly rested is the best state.
"Beep beep beep——"
Time’s up, he turned off the heat, leaving the pressure cooker to cool slightly, allowing the soaking process to enhance the meat’s flavor.
The rested dough was divided into 65g pieces, rolled into long strips, with one end thicker, gently flattened in the middle.
Starting from the thick end, he rolled towards the thin end, tucking the small end under the base, pressing lightly with his palm to form a bun’s prototype.
Dipping both sides in flour, he rolled them out round with a rolling pin, and then patted them down.
"Thunk"
The table made a dull yet slightly crisp sound.
Rolling round again, this time without flipping, he deftly picked it up, curled his four fingers inwards slightly, forming a bowl shape around the bun.
The significance of this step is that during baking, the bowl edge forms a steel ring color, and a chrysanthemum core appears at the bottom, which are the two essential traits of competent buns.
After rolling out a batch, he preheated a pan, bottom side of the buns touching the pan to create a chrysanthemum core, then flipped it to flatten and bake tiger stripes before putting them in the preheated oven for three minutes, taking them out, flipping them for another two minutes, baking until fluffy and crispy.