Chapter 443: The Pinnacle of sichuan cuisine — boiled cabbage in clear soup!

French cuisine often emphasizes plating and color, and as fellow Totsuki graduates, Gin Dojima and the others already understood Kojiro Shinomiya’s culinary skills.

Therefore, during their Shokugeki, Gin Dojima and the others focused more on Seiya.

The Giant Cabbage from the Gourmet World’s Vegetable Paradise can grow to the size of a small building, but the Giant Cabbage at Totsuki Resort is only about two meters tall.

However, compared to normal cabbage, this was still a true behemoth.

Besides being delicious, Giant Cabbage, a dream ingredient, also has a peculiar characteristic: it is quite difficult to process.

This is because if you only remove one leaf at a time, the entire Giant Cabbage will rot and wither.

Only by simultaneously removing two leaves each time can the Giant Cabbage be completely peeled, and the time interval must be precisely controlled, otherwise the remaining cabbage will be ruined.

Because of this, the heart of the Giant Cabbage is the most valuable and delicious part.

While processing this Giant Cabbage is not as complicated as handling a puffer whale, it is still a time-consuming and delicate task.

However, Seiya's method of processing the Giant Cabbage completely astonished Gin Dojima and the others present.

Seiya, holding a kitchen knife, leaped high into the air, even clearing the two-meter-tall Giant Cabbage, followed by a burst of knife lights exploding in the air.

The next second, rays of light instantly enveloped the surface of the Giant Cabbage, and to everyone's stunned expressions, it bloomed like a lotus flower.

“Mad Bull Azure Dragon Cut—!”

This is a secret knife technique of the Dark Culinary World, perfectly embodying the ancient saying of 'butchering an ox with ease'.

Even a huge buffalo can be butchered and separated in an instant; this is also one of the techniques that Seven Star Knife Rehn excels at.

When they saw the two-meter-tall Giant Cabbage instantly disassembled and blooming like a lotus, revealing its crystal-clear heart, Gin Dojima and the others were dumbfounded.

Although they had heard Inui Hinako say before that Seiya's knife skills and fire control were both incredibly impressive, reaching a level of perfection.

But they never expected Seiya to be this formidable!

They could also quickly process the dream ingredient Giant Cabbage, but they definitely couldn't do it as effortlessly and quickly as Seiya.

This level of knife skill was no longer just impressive; it was terrifying.

“Damn it, this kid is only sixteen, right? Did he start training his knife skills in his mother’s womb?”

Mizuhara Fuyumi originally thought that Inui Hinako had exaggerated Seiya's knife skills, but seeing the scene before her, she realized that Inui Hinako had even understated it.

After processing the cabbage heart he needed, he then picked up the meat of the Five-tailed Egret and, with dazzling knife skills, peeled and deboned it, completely separating the breast meat from the leg meat.

Afterward, he set up a large pot, put the Five-tailed Egret meat, Jinhua ham, pork tenderloin, and other ingredients into the pot to stew, and finally blanched them.

Originally, stewing these ingredients would require several hours of slow simmering, but Seiya secretly used a physical cheat to directly shorten the stewing process.

Then, during the stewing process, Seiya took out green onions, ginger, matsutake mushrooms, dried longans, and other spices and put them into a spice bag.

After the blanched broth was poured out, Seiya once again put the most essential five tail bones of the dream ingredient Five-tailed Egret, along with the previous bone structure and the spice bag, back into the broth for another long period of stewing.

During the second stewing process, Seiya took out green onions and garlic, finely chopped them, and boiled them into green onion and ginger water. Then, he separately minced the Five-tailed Egret's breast meat and leg meat, adding the green onion and ginger water to create the ingredients for 'sweeping the soup'.

“Sweeping the soup” refers to using minced meat to absorb impurities in the soup. This sweeping process must be repeated multiple times until the minced meat completely absorbs all impurities from the soup, making the broth look as clear as plain boiled water.

During the sweeping process, the minced meat not only absorbed the impurities from the original broth, but the flavor of the meat ingredients also further infused into the soup.

And as Seiya completed the ultimate broth, Kojiro Shinomiya on his side also finished his dish, “Chou Farci.”

Chou Farci is a French regional dish, made by wrapping various minced meats and vegetables in cabbage leaves and steaming them.

This dish typically uses pork tenderloin as the filling, but this time Shinomiya used the breast meat of the dream ingredient Hunger Bird instead.

He filled it with morel mushrooms, asparagus, and foie gras, sautéed in butter for fragrance, then added a mousse made from chicken breast, butter, eggs, and heavy cream, and steamed it all together.

As a top chef, Kojiro Shinomiya clearly did not make the same mistakes as Yukihira Soma did before.

Even with dream ingredients, he used and paired them with great ease.

And the “Chou Farci” he prepared received unanimous praise from the Totsuki Elite Ten graduates. Even Erina's discerning God Tongue could not find any fault with this dish.

When it was Seiya's dish's turn to be served, everyone looked at the single cabbage heart in the bowl before them with bewildered expressions, until Seiya stepped forward with a kettle and poured the “water” from the kettle into the seemingly unremarkable cabbage heart in the bowl.

The already crystal-clear cabbage heart, under the pouring of “hot water,” unfolded like a lotus blooming in a summer pond.

And the Totsuki graduates present, including Erina, were not ordinary people; as Seiya poured water over the cabbage heart, they smelled the rich, almost tangible, umami aroma in the air.

“This is concentrated broth! But how can one make broth as clear as plain water?!”

Looking at the extremely clear soup in the bowl, in which the cabbage heart was submerged, if it weren't for the incredibly enticing aroma emanating from the clear soup, Erina and the others would have even thought it was just plain boiled water.

But through the taste, Erina and the others could clearly smell a variety of rich ingredients and components in the soup, yet visually, the soup appeared as clear as water!

“This dish is called ‘boiled cabbage in clear soup,’ one of the national banquet dishes, and one of the pinnacle dishes of China’s sichuan cuisine.

Originally, calling it a vegetable dish might be a bit forced, but the heart of the dream ingredient Giant Cabbage is no ordinary stuff, and paired with such an exquisite clear soup, it complements each other perfectly.”

After scooping a mouthful of the clear soup with the cabbage heart into her mouth, Erina, who possessed the God Tongue, immediately froze on the spot. The ultimate umami flavor of the dream ingredient Five-tailed Egret and the refreshing sweetness of the Giant Cabbage were perfectly combined and exploded on her taste buds simultaneously.