Shokugeki no Imitation Chef

Two days had passed since the preliminaries. On the second night, when Liu Maoxing left the cooking building of the Hokkaido branch and walked to the opposite hotel, he turned around and looked at it and said, "Everyone has been doing really well these two days! There is often a cooking room The lamp of my house stays on all night..."

"Of course, among the remaining 80 or so students, absolutely no one wants to fail the assessment because of their own slack at this time." Erina said.

At this moment, Fei Shazi, Erina and Liu Maoxing are returning to the hotel together...

Fei Shazi interjected at this time: "Counting you, A Xing, and Ms. Erina, a total of 87 students in the class of 92 entered the second year, which is better than last year."

"If it weren't for the 'Central Gourmet Organization', I am afraid that the number of second-year students promoted this year will break through to three digits... But it is not a pity. 'Exit', so as not to waste resources! You must know that the average investment in each second-year student of the college will definitely be more than ten times that of first-year students." Erina still looked aloof.

Indeed, many culinary students who passed or failed joined the "Central Gourmet Organization". Otherwise, if more than 200 people all participated in the assessment, Erina felt that it would be possible for 30 or 40 more people to pass...

But as she said, this is not a pity, because they will be lured away, and they don't have the consciousness to become a truly powerful cook psychologically, and they are not the type Yuanyue wants to cultivate!

"By the way, when will you go to the preparation area tomorrow?" Erina asked Liu Maoxing.

The official match will start at 10:00 am the day after tomorrow, and the time limit is still three hours, but you can go to the venue not far from the venue in advance. In the cooking field in the preparation area provided by the organizer, start preparing "semi-finished products" such as broth that need to be completed in advance.

During the finals, the control of "semi-finished products" is extremely strict. During the preliminaries, you can also bring some broth and the like, but in the finals, you must use the most primitive ingredients and spices for cooking...

After all, the final itself has no theme. If there are restrictions, I am afraid that many descendants of ramen restaurants will directly bring the broth from their home ramen restaurants, and then only do some simple cooking and serving of noodles.

In this way, the original meaning of the competition will be changed, it will become a simple competition for the secret recipe of the ramen restaurant, and the age limit for the contestants will also become a decoration...

What does age have to do with cooking and serving noodles? If there are no restrictions, no matter how old the people who come are, it will have no effect!

Therefore, it is stipulated that any form of pretreatment must be carried out in the venue provided by the organizer.

There are also competitions that simply compare the signature recipes of various ramen restaurants, and that is the "Ramen Street Storefront Battle" held every three years, which will be more intense than the current competition in the youth group.

The current "Sapporo Ramen Competition" itself is a competition to inspire young ramen chefs, so in the finals, they will try their best to do it themselves...

Of course, some wines that have been produced for several years or even decades can be brought into the venue directly.

One is that those things cannot be completed on site, and the other is that the "semi-finished products" with such a long production cycle usually have a strict process and are not difficult, and most importantly... the use of such "semi-finished products" will definitely be very difficult, It is a reflection of the player's own ability.

In addition, they will make broth on the spot, and three days is enough.

It is also for this reason that in the cooking building of the Hokkaido branch, the students of Yuanyue students are working hard day and night, preparing to take out the ramen noodles they have earned in a year in the finals, while the contestants other than Yuanyue students, Have rarely come here.

On the first day after the preliminaries, there were still some contestants who came to practice their hands. From the afternoon, there were almost no outsiders. Except for the cooking room occupied by the students of Yuanyue Academy, the crowd was even more neglected...

On the one hand, it is because the ramen that other contestants will use in the finals has been decided long ago, and there is no need to innovate anything on their own. Then I entered the cooking field in the preparation area and began to prepare the final ramen.

Fortunately, the organizers are also prepared. In the morning before the start of the finals, the semi-finished products prepared in the waiting area, such as broth, will be kept by the competition. The semi-finished products I have prepared these days...

And at this time in the morning, the players can rest for themselves.

Otherwise, you have to know that in the finals, just like in the "Hokkaido Seafood Pastry Contest", there will be many spectators present. The scruffy appearance full of stubble may hinder the image...

Although many cooks can shave themselves with a kitchen knife, but usually the more passionate cooks are, the less likely they are to do so!

Although Liu Maoxing and the others don't have ready-made recipes, there must be some things that need to be prepared in advance. Because of the special nature of the competition, the control of semi-finished products in the finals of the "Sapporo Ramen Competition" is too strict...

"In my case... probably after lunch tomorrow! It is said that after entering the preparation area, you can only prepare food yourself. And there is still a short section of Sapporo Ramen Street. I will go after the 'sweeping' is over." Liu Maoxing said.

Erina rolled her eyes and said: "You really can eat! Sapporo Ramen Street is one of the thousands of ramen restaurants in Sapporo. There is a competition every three years. The top 100 shops can enter... That is to say, you only need two In half a day, you tasted ramen from 100 ramen restaurants?"

Liu Maoxing has spent a lot of time in the "Sapporo Ramen Street" these days. The reason why he still comes to the cooking room every day is mostly because of the ramen shop in Sapporo No. 1 Ramen Street, although because of the rules of the side street, The daily business hours are relatively fixed, but few of them are open for more than six hours a day. Basically, most of the stores are closed in the afternoon...

"Not at all... I only tasted three or five kinds of signature ramen from each restaurant! And thanks to the cooperation of many ramen restaurant owners..." Liu Maoxing said "modestly".

nonsense! If every ramen restaurant sweeps up the menu, it is estimated that the chefs of the ramen restaurant will be frightened!

Even now, every ramen shop tastes three or five kinds of ramen, and many master ramen chefs will be willing to cooperate with him after knowing Liu Maoxing's identity, and make as small a bowl of ramen as possible, but Liu Maoxing can eat it in two and a half days. It is definitely equivalent to the food intake of fifteen burly men for three days!

In "Sapporo Ramen Street", there is already a legend of "big stomach king"...

Especially when the master chefs on Ramen Street talked about this to each other, and later found out that the "King of Stomach" Liu Maoxing actually "mopped up" his own ramen shop, and then patronized the shop next to him, these masters also became more concerned. Shocked.

When Liu Maoxing took care of the first restaurant, he was presented with a chart. After that, every time he finished eating, the boss would put a stamp on the corresponding position of the chart. There are a total of 100 stamp slots and he is almost collected...

This also means that now Liu Maoxing is about to achieve the achievement of having tasted the signature noodles of all the ramen restaurants in "Sapporo Ramen Street"!

Looking at the nearly full chart, Liu Maoxing thought to himself: This kind of almost zero-cost activity is indeed more able to mobilize people's "vanity"...

There are also many veterans who will "live" in Sapporo for a period of time in order to make this achievement, and the successful ones among them often need two or three months...

Of course, Liu Maoxing is not trying to get the chart together, but to absorb "nutrients"!

"Fei Shazi and I should go to the preparatory area every morning. Do your best! Don't forget your bet with other people. There are 92 people in the first competition area to enter the finals. Besides me and Shiratori Acorus, there are also There are 89 people who have a bet with you. Have you been spending every day on Ramen Street these days? In the cooking room, you just practice knife skills over and over again. Have you thought about what kind of ramen to use in the finals? Be careful not to really lose to anyone other than me!" Erina said with some dissatisfaction.

"Hahaha, don't worry... Anyway, Senior Dojima has already taken over the bet! Ahem, I mean, I'm ready!" Liu Maoxing said.

"..."

Seeing that Erina was still suspicious, Liu Maoxing added: "Don't worry, I'm ready...but it's not 'Ramen'!"

"Not ramen?" Erina muttered, but Liu Maoxing didn't explain much.

In fact, according to the positioning of "Japanese-style ramen", Liu Maoxing's "Guanyin sitting lotus noodles" cannot be completely regarded as "Japanese-style ramen", although his dragon beard noodles are really "pulled", but "Japanese-style ramen" It has nothing to do with "la", it mainly refers to "hot noodle soup"!

But Liu Maoxing's "Guanyin Sitting Lotus Noodles" are noodles in cold soup...

"Although other types of noodles, such as mixed noodles, cold noodles, and braised noodles, are not unacceptable, but in the finals, out of the ten judges, usually half are the long-established Tachao restaurants in the 'Sapporo Ramen Street' Master chefs, they will not accept other types of noodles too much.

And because they are not gourmets, but pure cooks, or ramen chefs, their professionalism is unquestionable when rating 'Ramen', but once they compare 'Ramen' with other dishes, their Subjective will will definitely be biased uncontrollably! " Erina reminded.

"This is the way to show my strength! And... I believe the judges will agree with my 'Ramen'." Liu Maoxing said confidently.

Erina also knew that Liu Maoxing didn't need others to worry about this, and since she had already chosen a look, she probably wouldn't give up just because of someone else's words.

"Well, let's see who is more stubborn, you or them..."

On the third day, after Liu Maoxing completely "conquered" Sapporo Ramen Street according to the original plan, he took a trolley to push in, which seemed to be more than ten times more than ten times the amount of ramen, and entered. Preparation area.

The supervisors of the competition are no longer surprised by this, and the ingredients brought by the other contestants seem to be too much, but Liu Maoxing is the most exaggerated among all the contestants.

Moreover, what Liu Maoxing brought in was not only the ingredients, otherwise even if it was for more than a hundred people, he could not have brought it in directly. The most important thing is that he also brought a lot of tools for modifying the cooking table, as well as steel plates and steel bars. The most eye-catching are four glass panels as big as the walls!

When Liu Maoxing carried them all by himself and fixed them around the cooking table, he couldn't help but attract the attention of many inspectors and other contestants in the same field.

Some of them were students from Yuanyue who were assigned to a cooking room. At this time, they also didn't know what Liu Maoxing was doing, and it took so much trouble...

However, some students couldn't help but think of Liu Maoxing's special "cooking table" in the finals of the "Autumn Trials"!

While the people on the competition side were checking the ingredients he was carrying, Liu Maoxing also went to modify his own cooking table first!

After that, he can apply to exchange his modified cooking table in the preparation area with the cooking table he used before the final...

"The size of this modification can't exceed the red line around here?" Liu Maoxing confirmed with the staff once.

Around each cooking table, there is still a circle of red lines, the range is much larger than the cooking table itself. At this time, the limit area of ​​the cooking table modification or enlargement of large-scale equipment...

For the next 18 hours, Liu Maoxing remodeled his cooking table in this way, while preparing various sauces, and "pre-processing" many auxiliary materials, such as dicing and mincing.

That's right, a sauce, not a soup!

And it looks like there's more than one sauce?

Until 6 o'clock in the morning on the day of the competition, the results of the "preprocessing" of the contestants will be sealed. Those who need to use the modified cooking table, or have additional large-scale equipment to be used, the staff of the competition will transfer these to the competition field. .

The contestants can take a break at this time and adjust their mental state. After four hours, the competition will officially begin!

Although the "Sapporo Ramen Competition" is only a competition for the youth group, in order to reflect the importance that the organizer of Sapporo attaches to the youth power of ramen culture, the finals will be held in the largest square in Sapporo every year...

In the days before the competition, a windproof curtain will be drawn around the square, and proposed spectator seats will be erected around it, with the contestants' cooking tables in the center of the square.

Sapporo people are also very familiar with this arrangement, because not only the "Sapporo Ramen Competition", but also the "Sapporo Ramen Street Storefront Battle" held every three years...

The latter will last for a week each time, and the form is similar to the "School Festival" of Yuanyue College. , rent a storefront at "Sapporo's No. 1 Ramen Street".

The "Sapporo Ramen Contest" usually enters the finals, and it will be the successor of the ramen shop in Sapporo's No. 1 Ramen Street, or the successor of a strong competitor's shop. It is held twice every three years. In the third year, a dispute will be held at the same time. .

If an unknown ramen shop suddenly gets a very good result in the "Sapporo Ramen Contest", it will be considered a signal that it will rise and become a strong competitor in the "Ramen Street Storefront Battle"!

One reason is that being able to achieve results in the "Sapporo Ramen Competition" must mean that the store has made great progress in terms of recipes. A shortcut to gaining everyone's attention during the "Battle for Ramen Street Storefronts" this year.

For example, if a contestant from a store other than "Ramen Street No. 1" suddenly wins the championship, there will definitely be many diners who are willing to visit their stall when the "Ramen Street storefront battle" starts next year.

At the same time, this is also a spur to the ramen shops that are already in No. 1 Ramen Street in Sapporo. If they don't pay attention to the innovative thinking of young people, they will be eliminated in the preliminaries, which will be a kind of harm to their popularity!

However, in order to mobilize everyone's enthusiasm, the "Sapporo Ramen Contest" as a youth group competition also accepts entries from ramen shops in other regions and private contestants.

That's why all the first-year students of Yuanyue College signed up this time, and just as Liu Maoxing expected, the number of people who entered the finals this year broke the record in the past ten years, with a total of 292 people participating in the finals on the same stage!

Nearly 30% of them are the first-year students of the 92nd class of Yuanyue...

It has to be said that in the preliminaries, when this kind of test of on-the-spot creative ability, Yuanyue's students have a great advantage even if they are about five years older than themselves on average, and they are in the opponent's good project!

Even during the preliminaries, many judges found that, not to mention the "monsters" of the top ten, there are also many "little monsters" under the top ten...

Of course, in the finals, the judges were still not optimistic about them.

Because if in the preliminaries, they were fighting against professional ramen chefs whose average age was five years older, then in the finals, they were fighting against many well-established ramen chefs!

Although it is impossible for most of these young contestants to perfectly reproduce the secret ramen at home, it is not that these 16-year-old boys who are not professional ramen chefs can achieve more than 60 points in a few days. of……

Because it was a competition for commercial purposes, the opening ceremony was far more fancy than the internal competition of Yuanyue Academy.

As soon as they came up, there was a group of ramen babes in sexy clothes, and they twisted for a while...

The master of ceremonies who appeared later was also a charming lady Yu. Although she was dressed conservatively, she probably had an E!

Rei Kawashima was particularly upset by the excitement shown by the boys of Yuanyue Academy...

"Dear live ramen lovers, ramen lovers in front of the TV, and ramen lovers on the webcast platform! Do you miss Nono? If you miss me, you can come to No. 1 Ramen Street to participate in the "Ramen Taste" event, or the 'Big Eater' event, collect the badges of all the shops in Ramen Street, and you can have dinner with Nono!"

It has to be said that compared with the "predecessors", Rei Kawashima is still far behind in terms of professional skills such as super hot atmosphere when serving as emcee, timing, and personal temperament.

But what I have to say at the same time is that the planning of the "Dinner with Nuonuo" event is too unscrupulous!

The Big Stomach King event is a one-stop event. Within two hours, I ate the enlarged version of the signature noodles of ten Ramen Street shops. Except for Liu Maoxing who is "extraordinarily talented", even if someone from the Sumo Hot Pot Research Institute finds them Come, it may not be able to complete...

As for the "Ramen Tasting" event, it is similar to what Liu Maoxing has done in the past three days. It seems that it does not need much money, but in fact, if a "normal person" wants to complete it, even if he eats ramen every day, it will take three months!

Although ramen is delicious, most ramen is also very affordable, but people who live in one place for three months must have a lot of money. Living in Sapporo for three consecutive months, how much consumption can they drive?

Just give this "Nuo Nuo" a little appearance fee, and let her have a high-end candlelight dinner with her! Whoever planned this kind of event must be very smart...

Of course, now Liu Maoxing just wants to confuse the planner!

The next time we do this kind of event, why don't we put up posters at all the ramen shops?

That's right, Liu Maoxing had already completed the "Ramen Tasting" event without his knowing, although he only knew what the stamps given to him by the ramen bosses were after hearing Nuonuo's opening remarks!

No wonder some bosses smile strangely when they look at themselves...

Even if Liu Maoxing doesn't turn his head to look now, he can still feel a few gazes looking at him with "bad intentions"...

It seems to expose the real reason why I have been eating ramen non-stop for the past three days...

Just when Liu Maoxing was about to pretend that he didn't know anything, Nuonuo said on the court again: "Hey, there seems to be one of the contestants in today's competition who has completed the 'Ramen Tasting' event, and he is a tenth student from Yuanyue Academy. You are a top student! Let’s work hard during the competition! Afterwards, no matter what results you get, Sister Nuonuo will accompany you to celebrate at night!"

For a moment, countless eyes were cast on Liu Maoxing, and the fierce eyes that were originally aimed at him seemed to be more aggressive!

Liu Maoxing curled the corners of his mouth stiffly, and said to himself: What a disaster!

Why does everyone know it's Liu Maoxing? nonsense! The ten heroes of Yuanyue Academy, if not Liu Maoxing, could they still be Erina? What kind of imagination does it take to think that Erina will go to Ramen Street for three consecutive days "in order to have dinner with Nono"?

Besides, seeing that Erina stared at Liu Maoxing with "bad eyes" from the very beginning, can she guess something?

For a while, the native player from Sapporo couldn't help but sigh and feel uncomfortable with Liu Maoxing. What he sighed was that this guy has such a big appetite, and he achieved his goal in three days! Although many of them are from Ramen Street shops, but because they have been in the preparation area for the past two or three days, they only know about it now...

The sad thing is, not only does this guy want to compete in everyone's best "Ramen", but even Sapporo's "Ramen Baby Queen" wants to drink it?

As for the players from Yuanyue Academy, they are already used to it, regardless of his appetite, or the "quality" of attracting bees and attracting butterflies wherever he goes, and deserving of walking at night and being covered in sacks...