The Gourmet Customizer

Creamy Soup with Cattails and Clear Soup with Bird's Nest are originally two separate dishes in the canon of famous recipes.

The Creamy Soup with Cattails has a vibrant color and a fresh, savory, and smooth flavor. Its broth is milky white, and the cattails are light, soft, and tender.

The Clear Soup with Bird's Nest features a pristine white and tender bird's nest, with a mellow, light-yellow broth.

These two soups are extremely prized yet common dishes at banquets. They can be said to represent the entirety of Jinan cuisine.

In fact, the quality of these two dishes can single-handedly determine the success or failure of an entire banquet.

The reason they are considered headline dishes is that anyone with even a little expertise can tell the overall quality of the banquet with just a single sip.

But Su Chen had innovated upon the original techniques for these two dishes, creating the Clear and Creamy Dual Dish!

Half a jin of peeled cattails and some flowering greens were both cut into one-and-a-half-inch lengths. The dried bamboo shoot slices were also cut an inch and a half long, but into thin strips.

Shiitake mushrooms were thinly sliced, and the ham was cut into thin, slanted diamond shapes. Su Chen prepared all these ingredients himself.

All in pursuit of the ultimate texture for this dish.

He added water to a pot, placed it on high heat until it was very hot, then added the cut cattails, flowering greens, shiitake mushrooms, and dried bamboo shoot slices.

'Activate Skill, White Jade Hand!'

The moment the ingredients entered the pot, Su Chen unhesitatingly activated his most incredible Skill!

'No point holding onto a royal flush, only to have it go to waste. You play your ace when you get it!'

The water in the pot had just begun to boil when a stream of prompts flooded his mind.

'The ingredients are blanched, but the ham slices need a few more seconds.'

Coupled with White Jade Hand's natural immunity to heat and cold, Su Chen's movements became much faster.

In another clean wok, he heated some scallion oil over high heat until it was just warm, then turned off the flame. He poured in the clear soup and creamy soup that had been simmering overnight.

[Simmer-Reduction: Max Level]

'You really think I just sit around in the practice room all day doing nothing?'

Thanks to Wang Xiaoyi's appearance, Su Chen had unsurprisingly leveled up again recently, gaining the new passive Skills [Simmer-Reduction] and [Marination].

And during this time, aside from learning how to cook, Su Chen's main focus had been raising the proficiency of all his culinary skills to Max Level!

He simmered the dual soups in the wok for five minutes until they began to thicken slightly. Then he added fine salt, ginger juice, and all the previously prepared ingredients. He stirred gently with a ladle and finished with a few drops of scallion-pepper Shaoxing wine.

"Ah Bao, bring me my secret weapon!"

Liu Ahbao's eyes burned with fervor. "Right away!"

He could never really understand the dishes Boss Su used to make, but he could actually follow what he was doing with this one.

This was the classic method for making Creamy Soup with Cattails. As far as Ah Bao knew, the heart of this dish was the soup base, and he had once tasted a small sip of Boss Su's creamy soup.

It was no exaggeration to say that it was the most delicious stock Ah Bao had ever tasted!

As for what Su Chen called his "secret weapon," it was actually somewhat comical.

When he had first tried making this dish, Su Chen felt that having two soup dishes at a banquet was a bit repetitive and didn't quite fit the profile of a high-end feast.

So, how could he showcase his incredible creamy soup while also subtly revealing that his clear soup was just as amazing?

This line of thinking led to the birth of the dual dish. And the so-called secret weapon was actually very simple: a sheet of oil paper.

Su Chen stood a pre-cut sheet of oil paper upright in the middle of a large soup bowl, then poured the freshly made Creamy Soup with Cattails into one side.

The slightly viscous creamy soup pressed against the oil paper without a single drop seeping through. It occupied half the bowl, quivering delicately in a way that stirred the appetite!

With this step complete, it was time for the second part.

It would be no exaggeration to call Clear Soup with Bird's Nest a luxury item among Chinese soups. It inherited all the hallmarks of Tan Family Cuisine.

Exquisite ingredient selection, generous portions, meticulous workmanship, perfect heat control, and a mellow, rich flavor!

To make this dish well, the choice of ingredients had to be impeccable. It required pure, natural, unbleached bird's nest cups.

To be honest, Su Chen couldn't bring himself to use such an ingredient!

So what was he to do?

Su Chen picked up a peeled white radish and immediately used his Wild Blade Technique. The sheets of radish he shaved off were even finer than the shreds for Braised Dried Tofu, with a thickness comparable to the slivers in Wen Si Tofu!

Just holding up a single slice of radish, you could see light passing through it!

He then cut the thin radish sheets into fine shreds and soaked them briefly in water.

"Boss, are you making... Vegetarian Bird's Nest?" Ah Bao asked in surprise. Before this, he couldn't have imagined how two completely unrelated dishes could be fused together.

"That's right." Su Chen drained the soaked radish shreds and coated them in dry cornstarch.

Each radish shred had to be coated with enough cornstarch to look a full size thicker than before!

He then spread all the radish shreds evenly on the bottom of a metal tray and placed the entire tray inside a bamboo steamer.

"Boss, this... I remember Vegetarian Bird's Nest is Teacher Jianguo's specialty. Outside of the Nanyuan Hotel, very few places know how to make this dish."

Ah Bao had studied for a time in Lu Province years ago. While learning Tan Family Cuisine, he had trained at the Nanyuan Hotel and had met Teacher Jianguo once.

This Clear Soup with Vegetarian Bird's Nest was Master Li's signature creation.

"Correct. When prepared, the vegetarian bird's nest becomes pearly white and smooth, and it bobs perfectly in the clear soup. It can even look more elegant than real bird's nest. The key is that the flavor of the vegetarian version doesn't clash with the cattails."