Culinary God in Wilderness

Chapter 426: Chapter 262: The Culinary Lure (Part 2)

The meat was tender and had no gamey taste. Instead, it had soaked up the savory fish broth and the sour heat of the pickled peppers. It tasted a lot like iguana, but with an added layer of softer, stickier skin.

Her worries eased, and since she was starving, she didn’t stand on ceremony with Lin Chen. She picked up a large helping of sliced crocodile belly with her chopsticks and swished it quickly through the boiling fish broth.

Once the slices had changed color, she lifted them all out at once and dipped them into her bowl of seasonings.

The steam instantly released the aroma of the herbs in her bowl, a rich, fresh citrusy scent shooting straight up her nose.

She lifted a full chopstick’s worth of thin meat slices, coated in red and green seasonings. The surface of each slice had a layer of translucent, gelatinous crocodile skin. Once cooked, it lost its frightening appearance entirely, becoming exceptionally tempting instead.

She had just tasted the crocodile meat, but upon seeing the sheer quality of this particular bite, Erica could feel her mouth watering uncontrollably. In just a few seconds, it was nearly overflowing.

’This smells incredible!’

Before she knew it, the meat was already in her mouth.

"Hmm??!"

Though both were thinly sliced, the textures of the crocodile and fish meat were worlds apart. One was tender with a slight chewiness, while the other was so tender it practically melted, creating two completely opposite sensations.

The thinly sliced crocodile belly also had a distinctly different texture from the tail meat she’d eaten earlier.

The crocodile tail had a texture similar to oxtail—fine and delicate.

The texture of the crocodile belly was incredibly unique, unlike anything she had ever tasted before.

It came from the belly, so it should have had a distinct, fatty aroma, but the scent of fat was very faint. It was like eating a piece of bacon that wasn’t cooked until fully crisp.

Not that it wasn’t crispy, but more like it had just finished cooking and hadn’t yet started to get that charred crispness.

For North Americans and Europeans alike, undercooked bacon is unacceptable, and she had always thought so too.

But what she was chewing wasn’t bacon. It was the tender belly meat of an American Crocodile.

As she chewed, the three fragrant herbs—basil leaves, lemongrass, and coyote cilantro—gradually released their aromas. Combined with the salty umami of the oyster sauce, the sour heat of the pickled peppers, and the fresh spice of the raw chilies, she found that the more she chewed, the more she accepted it. It was surprisingly, inexplicably delicious.

Lin Chen picked up some of the crocodile belly to try for himself. Sure enough, the texture wasn’t quite what he’d expected.

It wasn’t tender and fatty like thinly sliced pork belly. Instead, the texture was somewhere between a lean cut like sirloin and a fattier one like flank.

When thinly sliced and then quickly cooked in the broth, the meat didn’t become stringy like the oxtail.

After they finished the belly meat, next came the front and hind leg meat—cuts known for their intricate marbling and tendons.

Once they had eaten all of those, they started cutting meat from random parts of the carcass.

As Erica got used to the process and the textures, she became quite skilled at cooking the meat, learning the right amount of time to cook each different cut.

The two of them sat around the radiating charcoal fire, the fish broth bubbling before them. They ate like this for over half an hour.

"*BURP~*"

Erica licked the last drop of rich broth from her coconut shell bowl, then leaned back unceremoniously, her hands resting on her slightly bulging stomach.

"Wow, the dipping sauce really makes it so much better. I can’t wait to see what a real hot pot is like. I wonder just how good it can be..."

"I won’t spoil anything else, but I can tell you about the different kinds of hot pot broths."

Sweating from the meal, Lin Chen put down his chopsticks and began to count on his fingers.

"Spicy tallow, spicy vegetable oil, tomato, mushroom, green Sichuan peppercorn, clear broth, red sour soup, pork stomach and chicken, pickled fish, tom yum, coconut chicken, congee base, golden sour and spicy, sukiyaki, herbal, curry, fermented grain vinegar..."

"And the clear broth alone can be subdivided into chicken, pork, or beef bone broths. Basically, there’s a huge variety of flavors, and each one is a totally different experience."

At first, Erica thought he could list three or four at most. After all, there’s a limit to how much you can innovate with one type of food. Even with the most common foods—hamburgers, fried chicken, french fries—there are only so many flavors on the market.

But as he listed name after name—some of which were foreign terms she didn’t recognize—she roughly counted more than twenty different flavors.

’If they can come up with that many flavors for just the broth, how many different ingredients and seasonings must there be?’

Just imagining the sheer number and scale made her heart pound with excitement.

She spent so much time in the wilderness for work, surviving on convenient, ready-to-eat meals, that every time she was on break, she had to rush to a city for a few big feasts just to feel alive again.

The thought of eating good food had become her main motivation to keep working.

Seeing the eager sparkle in her eyes, the look of someone who wanted to rush to a hot pot restaurant that very second, Lin Chen smiled faintly and stroked his chin thoughtfully.

’So that’s how it is...’

’This girl has had me wrapped around her finger for days. Now I’ve finally found her weakness.’

’It makes sense. How did I not think of something so simple before? Most women are foodies. It’s practically a genetic trait, just like gender.’

’Especially Western women. They’re only exposed to a few types of food growing up, so their horizons and imagination are limited. You could say French cuisine is the pinnacle of Western food.’

’So if a new culinary style suddenly appeared, one with the prestige of French cuisine but with infinitely more variety and flavor profiles... wouldn’t it be easy to win over one little foodie?’

With this thought in mind, he began to elaborate on the basic concepts of hot pot for Erica.

He talked about its origins, the major regional styles that had developed over time, their unique characteristics, and so on. Erica listened, completely dumbfounded.

She had first thought hot pot was a single dish, then she realized it was a style of dining.

Now, however, she couldn’t categorize it at all.

It had soup, vegetables, meat, drinks, desserts, fried foods, and staples. You could even watch performances while eating. It completely transcended the concept of a "dish." It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it a separate culinary system in itself.

"Something this complex must be the most intricate ’cuisine’ in all of Daxia Cuisine, right?"

"What are you talking about?" Lin Chen gave her a strange look. "Great Xia officially recognizes eight major culinary traditions, each representing a different province. But in reality, even within the same province, the food varies from city to city."

"Most everyday dishes aren’t that complicated, of course. But when you get to the high-end styles, or the ancient imperial court cuisine... I’m not just bragging, but the complexity is absolutely number one in the world."

"Hot pot just has a wide variety of ingredients; the cooking technique itself isn’t that complex. It’s too much to explain, and you wouldn’t get it anyway. You’ll just have to see it for yourself someday."

He deliberately left things vague, wanting to keep her in suspense.

And it worked. Even though he hadn’t described any specific dishes in detail, Erica found herself inexplicably swallowing her own saliva.

’Two more days. Just hold on for two more days. I can do it!’

As much as she wanted to eat, she was even more eager to witness the moment Lin Chen’s score was tallied to see what rank he would achieve.

’If someone at his level can’t even get first place, just how ridiculous is the person who can?’

It was a question not only on her mind, but on the minds of nearly every viewer as well.

After they finished eating, he used the leftover bamboo to build a large smoking rack. He arranged all the crocodile meat neatly and evenly on a grill grate, then built a small roof over the top to protect it from rain, leaving an opening on one side for the smoke to escape.

After finishing all that, he felt sticky all over and wanted nothing more than to soak in a nice, hot bath.

"What are you looking at me for?"

"Shouldn’t you be back at your camp smoking your own meat? Why are you hanging around here?"

"Can’t I watch and learn how you built your smoking rack?"

Erica put her hands on her hips, annoyed. She circled the smoking rack a few more times before finally, and slowly, taking her leave.