Culinary God in Wilderness

"We usually just eat this mixed with rice," Lin Chen said, picking up a piece for himself to try. He frowned slightly.

"It’s a pity. No beer or huadiao wine, no green onions, and no spices like dried chilies, star anise, cinnamon bark, bay leaves, or licorice. The flavor’s a bit lacking, but it’ll have to do."

"Huh? This stuff is delicious, and you think it’s just okay??"

"After the competition ends, come by my stall. I’ll let you taste what real braised beef brisket is like."

"I mean, come on. If you keep this up, how am I supposed to survive the next two months?"

"If you can’t handle it, then don’t. Why not just go home and eat something nice?"

Lin Chen shrugged nonchalantly and moved the beef brisket off the fire. Any longer and it would turn to mush. Letting it sit in the residual heat would be enough.

After a rest of a little over half an hour, the sky had grown quite dark, looking like night could fall at any second.

The water on top of the potato mash had become quite clear, though it still had a faint yellow tint.

He carefully poured off all the water from the top, leaving a thick layer of yellow potato sediment at the bottom of the pot.

Using the Engineer Shovel, he scraped out the potato sediment, layer by layer, stopping only when he revealed the white starch hidden beneath.

"If I had some gauze, I could have filtered out the potato pulp right from the start when I was grinding it. That way, only pure starch would have settled. For now, I’ll just have to make do."

"There is another way to filter the potato starch, but I don’t think you’ll want to hear it."

"What way?"

Andre looked at him curiously.

"Using your underwear as a filter."

"..."

The corner of Andre’s mouth twitched. He wasn’t actually that shocked; after all, he’d often done the same thing to filter water in the wild.

’It’s one thing if I’m making it for myself to eat, but to eat something filtered through someone else’s underwear... yeah, I’ll pass.’

’He figured Lin wouldn’t want to eat potato starch filtered with his underwear, either.’

A single sentence was enough to plunge the yard into silence.

Lin Chen silently scraped out the rest of the potato sediment. He inevitably took some of the starch with it, but that didn’t matter. ’It’s all going into our stomachs in the end, anyway.’

He melted more snow, poured it over the starch, and stirred it before letting it settle for a second time.

The starch from the first settling had a mottled color, not a pure white. But a second settling would refine it to the proper white of normal starch.

After pouring off the murky water again, what remained at the bottom of the pot was a thick, firm paste of pure potato starch.

While it was settling, Lin Chen used birch bark to fashion a simple, washbasin-sized strainer.

The process was simple enough: shave off the rough outer layer, leaving the smooth inner bark, then punch some holes in it.

He curved the large sheet of bark, sealed the ends with smaller pieces, and stitched it all together with steel fishing line to form a makeshift strainer.

He boiled a pot of snowmelt, adding a little at a time to the potato starch. He kneaded the mixture until all the clumps were gone, forming a loose slurry. The consistency was right when it would relax back into a paste if left alone, but would drip in a steady stream, like honey, when lifted.

Too thick, and it wouldn’t pass through the holes; too thin, and the noodles wouldn’t hold their shape. He had to control the water content perfectly to achieve the consistency of a non-Newtonian fluid.

He added a spoonful of salt to the water for some base flavor. Once it was close to a boil, he grabbed a large lump of the potato slurry, plopped it into the birch bark strainer, and began to slap it forcefully.

SLAP, SLAP, SLAP...

With each slap, the mass of starch sank deeper, finally embedding itself perfectly in the strainer.

With each slap, the viscous slurry slowly began to ooze from the holes below.

At first, the slurry was so thick that the paste came out in coarse clumps. Once paste was oozing from all the holes, he stopped slapping, gave the strainer a sharp downward jerk, and then lifted it.

The dangling strands of paste snapped off cleanly, and the thick clumps fell back into the main bowl of slurry. He then quickly moved the strainer over the pot of boiling water and resumed slapping.

He had to stand while doing this to control the strainer’s height. The higher he held it, the thinner the potato noodles, and the lower he held it, the thicker they became.

This was Lin Chen’s first time doing this, so he was a little uncertain. Fortunately, he quickly found the perfect height.

With every slap, chopstick-thick strands of potato noodles dripped into the boiling water. They visibly transformed from the pure white of raw starch into a faint, translucent white, their texture turning smooth. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"Andre, use your chopsticks to nudge the potato noodles that have floated to the top. Just start from the end that went in first and slowly scoop them out."

"You got it!"

Andre had never seen noodles made this way before—or rather, potato noodles. He enthusiastically took his chopsticks, walked to the opposite side of the pot from Lin Chen, and gave the water a stir, quickly finding the beginning of the noodle strands.

"Where do they go once I fish them out?"

"Put them in the skillet. Lay down a layer of snow first. The heat from the noodles will melt it into ice water, which saves us the step of giving them a cold rinse."

The two worked together with perfect coordination. One continuously pressed out the noodles while the other leisurely fished them out.

While Andre wasn’t much of a cook, he could handle basics like boiling pasta, so he could tell when the potato noodles were done and when they were still raw.

But as long as Lin Chen kept extruding the noodles at a steady pace and the fire remained stable, they all cooked at roughly the same rate.

Wild potatoes didn’t have as high a starch content as cultivated ones—only ten-odd percent. After adding water, the slurry only weighed a little over two kilograms.

Soon, all the slurry was used up, resulting in two skillets filled to the brim with noodles.