Chương 37: Hell's Grill and a Liquid-Nitrogen Ballet

"Has he lost his mind? What's he going to do with liquid nitrogen? This is dinner service, not a chemistry class!" In the control room, the director nearly leapt from his chair watching the monitor. On screen, Owen and another crew member were laboriously rolling a half-man-high silver canister out of the cooler, white vapor wisping from its mouth, looking like some kind of hazardous material out of a movie.

"No idea… but my god, look at the ratings!" The assistant director pointed at another screen, where the live ratings curve had shot up like a rocket, climbing at a near-vertical angle.

"'Burning Kitchen,' 'liquid nitrogen,' 'Potato Guy' — they're already top ten trending on social media!" The director's eyes lit instantly. He grabbed the radio, his voice trembling slightly with excitement.

"All cameras, listen! All cameras! Lock onto the Blue Team kitchen! I want every detail of what happens next, 360 degrees, no blind spots! This could be the most insane thing in the history of Burning Kitchen!" Insane. That word was, at this moment, in every Blue Team member's head too. They watched Chris, the man who'd just led them out of the mire, now performing a series of operations they couldn't begin to understand.

He had Jessica wrap all the salmon scraps she could find tightly in plastic, layer over layer, pressing it firm, rolling it into a thick cylinder — like a giant white sausage. Then he pulled on heavy cryo gloves and goggles and carefully opened the valve of the nitrogen canister. Hisss— White, freezing vapor poured from the mouth like the gates of hell flung open, instantly shrouding the whole counter. The kitchen's temperature plunged, and everyone felt gooseflesh rise on their skin.

Chris lowered the salmon roll straight into a foam box filled with liquid nitrogen.

"This…" Sarah stared, slack-jawed.

"Won't that ruin the fish?"

"Shut up. Watch." Jack's voice was low, his eyes fixed on Chris's every motion, afraid to miss a single detail. The salmon roll, touching the minus-320-degree nitrogen, immediately gave off a faint crackle — the sound of the water in the fish crystallizing in an instant. Barely a dozen seconds later, Chris lifted it out with long tongs. The salmon roll was now hard as a stone, its surface coated in white frost.

"Knife!" Chris called. Owen instantly handed over his sharpest Japanese chef's knife. Chris didn't use a board. He stood the "popsicle" upright on the stainless steel, steadied it with his left hand, gripped the knife in his right, and the blade rose and fell. Shk! Shk! Shk! Shk! A clean sound, like cutting ice. In the cold vapor, four round fillets — perfectly even in thickness, faces smooth as mirrors, beautiful pink marbling — were cut off with precision.

He'd used liquid nitrogen to reshape a pile of formless fish scraps and cut them into perfect fillets. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. This was beyond everyone's understanding of cooking. It looked more like precision industrial machining.

"Plate! Ice!" Sarah woke as if from a dream and hurried to hand over the ice-filled plate. Chris set the four "frozen fillets" on the ice to keep them from thawing too fast.

"He did it… he actually did it…" Jessica murmured, watching the scraps she'd thrown in the trash reborn in Chris's hands, her eyes full of disbelieving admiration. But Chris's performance was far from over.

"Jack! Grill temperature!"

"It's maxed! The needle's about to blow!" Jack shouted back. The grill before him glowed red, the air above it warping with heat.

"Good!" Chris lifted the plate of frozen fillets and walked to the hellish grill.

"What's he doing? He's going to sear salmon on the grill? Doesn't he know salmon's delicate — it can only go in a pan?" Leo, in the second-floor lounge, watched the monitor and couldn't resist a sneer.

"No… look…" Captain Ethan's expression was graver than it had ever been. Chris didn't throw the fillets straight onto the grill. First he brushed the scalding grates with a thick layer of clarified butter. Then he set the four frozen fillets, at a specific angle, gently onto the grill. Sizzle— The sound was even more violent than the steaks earlier. The extreme clash of ice and fire. A fillet hundreds of degrees below zero against a grill seven hundred above.

The huge gap formed a golden, crisp shell on the fillet's surface the instant it touched, while the interior, still frozen, held its tenderness perfectly. It was an extremely sophisticated "reverse cooking" technique. Standard cooking heats from outside in; Chris was using the extreme temperature gap to force "searing" and "thawing" to happen at the same time, on different planes. His command of heat had reached an inconceivable level. He used no timer at all, relying entirely on his own instinct and experience.

About ten seconds after the fillets hit, he flipped them decisively. The other side formed the same beautiful crisp shell. Then he made a move that dropped every jaw again. He cut the grill's flame but didn't remove the fillets. He only slid them to the relatively cooler edge of the grill, using the residual heat to let warmth seep slowly, gently, into the interior, completing the final "thaw" and finish.

"This… this is walking a tightrope," the director said backstage, palms sweating.

"If the residual heat's a touch too high, or the time a touch too long, the inside overcooks and turns dry and stringy." But Chris's expression was extraordinarily calm. He seemed able to see the path of heat through the fillet, to hear the sound of the fish fibers relaxing. About a minute later, he lifted the four salmon fillets off the grill with a thin metal spatula. With his knife, he cut a small opening in the side of one.

Perfect, clean strata — flesh transitioning from caramel at the edge to pink within — appeared before everyone. The skin charred and crisp, the interior just barely set, juices full, tender as tofu. It worked! The Blue Team kitchen erupted in a cheer they couldn't hold back. Chris paired the four perfect fillets with the lemon butter sauce and asparagus Jessica had long since prepped, and plated them swiftly.

"Table twelve's food is ready," he said calmly to the runner. [Ding! An epic-grade crisis handling detected! Hidden quest "Crisis intervention" rating raised to "Perfect"!] [Ding! Sub-quest 3: Win their hearts complete. Current team acceptance 95%.] [Ding! Main quest "Blue Team's Victory" phase-one completion 99%! Service success rate projection revised to 99%!] A string of chimes burst in his head. Chris let out a long breath, feeling the strength all but drained from his body.

The work just now had cost him enormously, in mind and in body. But he knew he'd won. He'd won the Blue Team precious time, and he'd thoroughly won every teammate's heart. He raised his head and looked at the electronic display on the wall. The green bar for the Blue Team's output, after a brief stall, began climbing wildly again. And the red number for bad reviews was still "1." On the other side, the Red Team's green bar was still ahead, but its rate of climb had slowed noticeably.

Their bad-review count had gone from "0" to "2."

"What's going on? Did something break on the Red Team?" the director sharply noticed. The camera cut at once to the Red Team kitchen. There, captain Ethan was raging at his teammate Leo.

"I told you to watch the oven temperature! Look at what you baked! Are these lava cakes? These are chocolate-flavored volcanic rock!" Ethan pointed at a tray of cakes burnt black, shaking with anger. Leo looked aggrieved.

"I… I got pulled in by the Blue Team's liquid nitrogen, and I… I lost focus for a second…" The scales of victory, imperceptibly, had begun to tip toward the Blue Team.