Chapter 46: Cooking with Chef Raze part 1
When Elaine and Ella finally returned with everything they could find, Raze took it and then asked for their assistance in the kitchen. He chased all the other maids out and got ready to start.
"What exactly are you going to make?" Elaine asked. She had bought all the ingredients and yet couldn’t figure out what it was.
Raze gave her a smile, picked up the apron, wrapped it, tied it around his waist, and then spoke, "Well, it’s really simple. I plan to make fried chicken, pasta, mashed potatoes, and steak," Raze said.
Those words reached Elaine and Ella’s ears, and they had absolutely no idea what he had just said.
"What the hell are all those? I believe I’ve heard of steak, but what are the rest?" Ella asked.
’Hmmm, I can’t tell them that they’re all culinary delights from my home world, which I managed to see inside a cookbook from my mystical library. So I’ll just say—’
"They are dishes that I am inventing," Raze said and picked up a bowl.
"Inventing?" Elaine said, stunned. "Young master, now shouldn’t be the time you start inventing," she said.
"Don’t worry about it, I’ll be blowing all your minds," he said and then tossed the bowl toward her. Elaine caught it with ease. Raze saw the way she caught it, three fingers pinched at the edge. He raised a brow. ’That was a pretty clean catch,’ he thought.
"Wash the potatoes you got inside that bowl. We’re about to go crazy," Raze said. She looked at the bowl, didn’t say anything else, grabbed the potatoes, placed them inside, and poured in some water.
He picked another bowl and tossed it at Ella. She was taken by surprise but managed to catch it after a few tosses. She looked at Raze with wide eyes.
"Elaine bought some cattle. Our town doesn’t rear cattle, so it’s certainly a cattle beast. The meat will be heavily gamey and hard, so it needs to marinate.
I asked for a few bottles of red wine, so get one and pour it into a bowl, just enough to almost cover all the meat. Wash the meat and then toss it into the bowl of red wine.
Then I saw garlic, oil, and some salt and pepper. I need you to add a full spoon of each, ground down," Raze said. He said "ground down" because of the raw garlic and the fact that the salt here was in large crystal forms.
Ella was confused. She looked at the bowl, then the meat, then the wine. "You want me to pour wine into meat? That’s wasting the wine," she said.
"The wine carries certain properties that break down the meat and make it tender, and it also adds its own flavor. It’s not a waste if you get what you need from it," Raze explained.
Ella was still unconvinced. She looked at Elaine, and Elaine nodded. If she had learned anything, it was that somehow, whatever Raze set out to do always worked out as he envisioned it.
"Fine, I’ll do it, but this better work," Ella said and immediately got to work.
’Now that those are being set aside, I have to start making the dough,’ Raze thought. He searched through everything they bought and found the flour. It wasn’t as smooth as what he had on Earth, but it would work.
He searched for the eggs as well and found them, they had a darker shade than Earth eggs and were also bigger.
He poured the flour out and made a gap in the center, then poured the eggs inside. Ella and Elaine looked up when they saw him doing this; they had never seen something like that before.
Raze immediately started mixing and kneading the dough, making it into a soft yet firm product that would become his pasta.
"Young master, I’m done washing them. What’s next?" Elaine asked.
"Good, now dump them all in a pot and fill it with water. Make sure they boil until they are extremely soft."
She did that immediately. They might be a fallen noble house, but they still had the standard things a rich home would have, like a better stove. All they needed was wood placed in the back as fuel, and the flames could be controlled through different knobs on the ceramic frame.
As she got to boiling, Raze got to cutting his pasta up. It took a few minutes, and then he was done. By that time, Ella was done as well.
"What do we do with it next?" she asked.
"Just get any cover for it and cover it," Raze said.
"You aren’t going to cook it?" she asked.
"Not yet. We need to let it sit for a few hours and allow the wine to get into it and break it down." Elaine was still skeptical, and it showed on her face, but she did what she was asked to.
While they were doing that, Raze decided to grab the chicken, and when he did, he was stunned by their size.
"Tsk, I guess nothing wants to be little in this world," he muttered before washing them with water magic and proceeding to prepare a marinade as well.
Sure, they didn’t need it for fried chicken, but since he was working with limited ingredients, he wanted to make sure all the flavor got in.
He mixed up a bowl of olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper before throwing all the chicken into the bowl and covering it for later. He proceeded to grab the semi-dry bread he’d asked for and crushed it as much as he could into a bowl to make some sort of breadcrumbs. Then he added some oil and garlic before mixing it together, that would be the coating when he was ready to fry the chicken.
At this point, everything was in place. They actually moved pretty fast, he couid finish and go to check on the work in the town.