Chapter 136: Soy Sauce Plan B
## Corrected Full English Text (Numbered Lines – NO CHINESE CHARACTERS):
Youthful teenagers act with impulsiveness and motivation, especially toward novel things.
Ouyang Yating and the other two proposed for the first time that they wanted to make ancient food, and the three of them were now pumped up with chicken blood to start preparations.
Flour and salt were definitely not enough, so Ouyang Yating and Ainuo began contacting suppliers to replenish them.
Wheat bran needed to be sourced from the third production escort ship, and since production escort ships were in close contact with each other, this task fell to Liang Gong.
After the assignments, it turned out that Xiang Chuan, the club president, was the idlest again. Although she, having experienced student life, understood the three’s current state of wanting to accomplish something, she, now evolved into a corporate slave mindset, followed the principle of avoiding extra trouble and chose to slack off.
There was no way around it; they couldn’t just pull out the Geegle page in public to search for recipes directly, right? Xiang Chuan had quietly searched for some information on information turbulence and contactees over the past one or two months, knowing that contactees greatly taboo others intruding into their contact channels, and ordinary people also didn’t want to be constrained by contactee-related management regulations.
Simply put, pulling out Geegle directly in front of the three, even if they were very interested, would harm these three promising youths if it caused them to be bound by management treaties.
Xiang Chuan could only skip the post-dinner break time for watching live streams, slip back to her room alone, and start searching for detailed recipes for making wheat bran soy sauce.
There were methods, but the proportion formulas and such were hard to find. Fortunately, Geegle allowed seamless browsing of foreign websites, so besides Huaxia domestic video websites, she also searched overseas video websites and finally gathered the data she wanted.
It was only then that she discovered that what was actually needed to improve the texture of wheat bran soy sauce was lactic acid bacteria and yeast. She was afraid that the wheat bran soy sauce, once made, couldn’t have its texture improved and would end up with a poor texture soy sauce. She recalled the soy sauce bought in her childhood when the family had little money—two mao per jin in plastic oil drums—that taste was something she didn’t want to remember further. Wheat bran was already much cheaper than soybeans, so she automatically equated low-quality soy sauce with wheat bran soy sauce in her mind. But now knowing that the flavor improver could be made with flour and milk, that worry vanished.
However, a new challenge arose: how to extract lactic acid bacteria from fresh milk?
As a result, Xiang Chuan appeared at the breakfast table the next day with dark circles under her eyes, startling Mr. and Mrs. Xiang Weiguo, who thought their eldest daughter had insomnia.
With money plus the multiplicative speed of modern productivity, the order placed Tuesday afternoon arrived by Wednesday noon when Xiang Chuan and the others returned home to see the familiar containers from the past two months in their yard.
With experience from soybeans, making the wheat bran version soy sauce was naturally no problem, so the processing steps were handed to the three club members, while Xiang Chuan was now entangled with the lactic acid bacteria issue.
From a modern person’s thinking, “yogurt contains lactic acid bacteria” is common knowledge, and “making yogurt requires lactic acid bacteria” is also common knowledge for some kitchen hobbyists or health food video creators, but the latter was something Xiang Chuan only realized in the past two days.
—It turned out it wasn’t that milk could produce lactic acid bacteria, but that lactic acid bacteria were needed to make yogurt!
In a complicated mood, Xiang Chuan had to retreat to her room to search for methods to make lactic acid bacteria. Fortunately, in the 21st century, modern people—aside from Asians being oppressed by 996 and 007 work schedules during office hours—had exceptionally high hands-on ability and sharing desire at other times. Since soy sauce recipes could be found, lactic acid bacteria were naturally no issue.
Half a minute after retreating to her room, Xiang Chuan found a method to make natural lactic acid bacteria.
The good news was that it only required two materials, one of which was water.
The bad news was that the other material was rice or millet, and it took a week to make.
“…Would rice flour work?” Xiang Chuan’s brows furrowed almost into the shape of a river character.
She had this expression because last month, craving rice, she thought even just making fried rice with salt, eggs, some chicken, and beef would be nice. Full of confidence, she searched around but couldn’t find rice in the available ingredient list or even the medicinal materials list.
After asking her parents, she learned that whether rice or wheat, they were processed into powder form at the production escort ship’s processing plant for easier packaging and storage before being shipped to the main ship, so raw rice wasn’t available on the main ship.
—Just try with rice noodles then.
In self-abandonment, Xiang Chuan pulled an empty glass jar from the guest room; it was leftover from making yeast before. The two large jars of yeast in the warehouse refrigerator were barely enough for the family of four plus four moochers, and the other jars had been cleaned for standby use—perfect now.
The first step in 21st century tutorials was to wash rice, but facing rice flour that had surely been sifted countless times before packaging, that wouldn’t do, so Xiang Chuan applied her previous yeast-making experience—knead the rice flour into dough!
Place the dough at the bottom of the glass jar, add warm water, and seal.
Mission accomplished… not really.
Xiang Chuan recalled the four large black glass jars she had just seen in the courtyard, then looked at the glass jar in front of her only half her height, knowing without guessing that these definitely weren’t enough. But the rest could just be directed to the little chefs.
After cleaning the glass jar, as Xiang Chuan prepared to step back to the courtyard for a nap, she paused, remembering that besides lactic acid bacteria, yeast was also needed. Needless to say, the family’s yeast would again fall short, so she had to continue frantically directing the little chefs to propagate more yeast.
Originally, making extra yeast or lactic acid bacteria was fine; excess yeast could go to the club activity room for learning, and lactic acid bacteria could make old yogurt or fruit yogurt to relieve the greasiness of a month of big fish and meat.
No loss either way.
“Club president, you’re back.”
By the time Xiang Chuan returned to the courtyard, it was already past four in the afternoon. Ouyang Yating and the other two had already placed the prepared fermented soy sauce mash in the warehouse, and after tomorrow’s process, they could wait a month for the soy sauce to be ready.
“Yeah, no rice, it exhausted me.” Xiang Chuan plopped down in her seat, taking a big gulp of fruit milk—chilled beverages after fatigue were so refreshing.
“Have we finished all the extracurricular research topics?” Liang Gong asked hesitantly, mainly because these past few days he felt like he was just repeatedly handling wheat bran, soybeans, and such, without much sense of reality in making gourmet food.
“Only after the wheat bran version soy sauce is done, right?” Xiang Chuan replied. “The research report probably won’t be submitted until next month.”
“As long as the research results are submitted within half a year, it’s fine. After all, some club research topics are long-term projects; communicating with the school and submitting on time counts as completion,” Ainuo explained.
Half a year—that was enough time to make soybean soy sauce twice over. Xiang Chuan sighed inwardly; modern education was really too lenient with club education. If math weren’t so overly difficult, she would quite like this learning style.
The main conflict character setup for the mid-to-late stages was finally done; it could only be said that inspiration comes from life.
