The Unparalleled Alchemy Kitchen of Food Halberd

Chapter 13: Chef Basics

In this way, Wan began his apprenticeship as a chef, coming here during the day to learn to cook, and returning to Shen Huan’s mansion in Guangzhou at night to rest.

A month later, Li Cangsheng’s visit to friends ended, said goodbye to Lan Lao and returned to Shangjing, and Wan Wei followed him back to Shangjing.

Wan Wei still went to Li Cangsheng’s mansion to learn to cook during the day, and returned to the Shen family’s ancestral residence at night, he did not mention the lucky secret he heard from Lan Lao in front of Shen Wei, but took more time to accompany Shen Wei for a walk and chat.

……

Since Wan Wei’s body age is still young, Li Cangsheng does not give his chef much time to practice basic skills, just making a simple dish such as egg fried rice every day, and then adding one hour of knife practice every day.

The rest of the time was arranged by Li Cangsheng to let Wan Wei identify various ingredients around the world, including some partial ingredients and ingredients that are not commonly used.

Every few months, Li Cangsheng will improve the practice time of Wan Wei’s knife work, and in the third year, he will add the practice of turning pots and other basic skills of cooks, as for the mastery of the fire… Even Li Cangsheng had to admit that Wan Wei was not inferior to him in this regard.

A little boring, but very fulfilling, Wan Wei completely treated cooking as when he first learned alchemy, and before he knew it, time flew by, and three years had passed….

At the beginning of the year, when Wan Wei went to visit Lan Lao in Guangzhou, he showed his hand, and for the first time in three years, he made dishes in front of people other than Li Cangsheng and Shen Wei, and Lan Qingxin said in amazement, “Your knife skills are no less than those three-star chefs who are famous for their knife skills in the world”.

For that simple egg fried rice dish, Lan Lao gave the ultimate that could not be surpassed among his peers, and the taste alone was no less than the evaluation of those star chefs.

Of course, the taste can be comparable, does not mean that Wan Wei’s current level of cuisine is similar to that of star chefs, and the gap is still not small.

In the past three years of studying with Li Cangsheng, Wan Wei has also clearly understood the division of the way of cooking:

Generally speaking, the first link is to make piers, that is, cut vegetables, which is a necessary condition for exercising knife skills, this link alone takes two or three years to complete, and it takes seven or eight years of training to reach the level of a special chef.

The second part is familiarization with flavor shapes. To make a good dish, you must first know and understand its flavor shape, cold dishes and hot dishes have dozens of flavor shapes, what dish does what taste is delicious, these must be learned and understood.

Generally, there is a big difference in this link, with those with low ambitions only needing to familiarize themselves with the flavors required for dishes that need to be made frequently after a few months, while those with high ambitions need to spend years familiarizing themselves with a variety of common dishes.

The third link is the combination of skill, beauty and ingenuity. This depends on the talent, the gifted person has strong strength, the skill is inferential, the hand feels the position, and it can be quickly mastered. And ordinary people can also reach the level of ordinary small restaurant chefs through years of hard training.

The fourth link is to learn to distinguish the temperature of oil and the heat, and some dishes need several layers of oil temperature under the pot, good color and good taste. Some dishes need to be simmered fiercely, and some need to be simmered. In this link, it only takes months or even weeks to make a dish, but to make it delicious, it is obviously impossible to do it without years of hard work.

It is better to have carving technology, a dish is ready, it also needs to be decorated, and the red flowers and green leaves accompany it. The decoration of dishes is to play your imagination, what kind of dishes and how to garnish, in order to make the dishes reach a higher level.

Good carving can make the dish flexible and beautiful, will give people the feeling of chopsticks, this is closely related to knife work, the general knife work is not too bad in this aspect, of course, to be very good still need talent.

Those who have just begun to practice these four basic skills are naturally chef apprentices, that is, chefs who are not in the flow.

And these four basic skills, can be initially mastered, even if the identity of the chef apprentice has faded, can be used as a small restaurant in the assistant cook, can be regarded as the flow, generally called a third-rate chef.

Furthermore, those ordinary housewives and the chefs of ordinary small restaurants and food stalls are second-rate chefs, of course, some excellent chefs with relatively high cooking standards (such as Kohei Joichiro in the original book) may also open their own small restaurants and hide in the city.

A chef at this level can already go to some small and medium-sized hotels as an assistant chef or even a sous chef, and some of the more outstanding housewives can also reach this level.

After that, the chef division is beyond the level of “flow”, and is called a high-class chef, which is a level of cuisine that can hold the position of head chef in small and medium-sized hotels and the position of sous chef in large hotels.

On top of this, there is a threshold of the chef’s way – special! Level! Kitchen! Division!

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