Chương 175: The Time Crisis

"We are past the halfway point!" The compère's voice came down into the American kitchen like a sledgehammer and broke the excitement of The Tide Pool into pieces. Chris's head snapped up to the clock. An hour and a half. They'd spent a full ninety minutes conceiving and preparing the appetizer. The main course was still at Ethan's technical-analysis stage. The dessert didn't have a shadow yet.

"How is it that fast?" Sweat came up on Ethan's forehead. He'd been completely under, deconstructing material and working with Kira, and had lost the clock entirely. Across the floor, England had already begun cooking their main with the order of a well-drilled army. Their bench was lined with neatly arranged half-finished components, every step advancing exactly to the protocol Arthur had set. The pressure came up like a tide.

"Don't panic." Chris's voice came out unnaturally cold, and he forced his brain into gear.

"We're out of time, so we change the plan. Ethan — the core of the main, that block of P-7 protein. How confident are you?" Ethan looked at the huge slab of protein, white as plaster, and set his teeth.

"By my analysis, its internal structure is extremely even but it has almost no flavor of its own. The only way is sous-vide — hold the tenderness and let it take flavor from outside. But that needs an hour minimum."

"An hour." Chris ran the numbers fast.

"We don't have it. Even starting now, by the time it's done we'd have under thirty minutes for finishing, sauce and plating. Dessert would be impossible." Abandon the dessert? On a finals floor, handing in two courses is a formal announcement of surrender. Kira saw the size of it too.

"So what do we do? Drop the sous-vide and cook it some other way?"

"No." Ethan killed that instantly.

"Any high-heat method turns it dry and stringy. You'd be chewing wood. Low and slow is the only handling it has." The temperature in the kitchen dropped to freezing. They were in a closed problem with two exits and no good one. Either spend the time and produce a perfect main and give up dessert, or rush the main, wreck its texture, and have a dessert that couldn't save it. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Chris's eyes went along the bench while Dynamic Inference flickered through possibilities at an insane rate. Give up? No. That word wasn't in him. There was a way. There had to be a way to protect P-7's texture and buy time for a dessert. His eyes stopped on two things. One was an algae-extract gel Ethan had tested earlier: melts rapidly into liquid under heat, sets rapidly again as it cools. The other was the high-pressure processor over in the equipment bay. Normally used to tenderize meat.

An insane idea came up in his head.

"Ethan." There was a decision in his voice that allowed no argument.

"I have a way. The risk is high. Are you willing to gamble with me?" Ethan looked into his eyes, and there was a fire in them he hadn't seen before. He nodded hard.

"Say it."

"We don't cook it. We inject it." Chris explained at speed.

"Take the sauce you were going to make, blend it with the algae gel, warm it enough to run. Then use syringes and inject it evenly right through the interior of the P-7 block."

"That…" Ethan stalled.

"That would give it flavor from the inside, yes. But the injected liquid runs out during cooking, and it destroys the evenness of the texture."

"So we don't cook it." Chris's eyes went brighter.

"The second the injection is done, straight into the high-pressure processor. Pressure tenderizes, and the instantaneous pressure change also produces a subtle reorganization inside the protein structure — it locks our sauce-gel in there. And the small amount of heat the pressure generates is exactly enough to set the algae gel again from the inside."

"What we get is a block of protein full of flavor capsules. Outside it looks untouched. The flavor only releases when it's cut. Whole process, under fifteen minutes." Ethan stood there stunned. The idea was so far out it broke several rules of cooking outright. Using pressure to cook and to lock in juice was madness. And yet — in theory it looked as if it would actually work.

"Kira." Chris didn't leave Ethan time to think it over. He turned.

"While you two do the main, the dessert is mine. There's no time for anything complicated." He picked up the few future ingredients still left on the bench — a bag of nutritional supplement that looked like protein powder, a bottle of synthetic essence giving off a manufactured fruit smell, and a small tub labeled STABILIZER.

"Chris, those things…" Kira looked worried.

"Can you make a dessert out of that?"

"Yes." Simple, and hard. He had no time to explain. He had to create, out of the most basic and least promising material on the bench, something that belonged on a finals table — and finish it while Kira and Ethan finished the main. He pulled up the system. [Objective: create a dessert completable within ten minutes.] [Available: nutritional supplement, synthetic essence, stabilizer.] [Dynamic Inference engaged…] Combinations flashed through his head and were struck out one after another.

Too complex, not enough time. Too simple, no idea in it. Finally one extremely bold solution held still. Abandon form. Abandon structure. Abandon everything a traditional dessert reaches for. Chase one thing only: an idea, taken to its end.

"Kira, help me whip this supplement over ice water. Like a meringue. Ethan, when the pressure machine's free, get that essence into an atomizer." Chris fired the instructions off. Time had become the most frightening enemy in the room, and the only one they had to beat. Above the floor, the countdown ticked over to 40: 00.