Chapter 133: Chicken Noodle Soup
Making soy sauce starter is not easy, and it consumes food grains. This is also why ancient Chinese people preferred to eat monotonous salt and sugar rather than prioritizing soybeans to make seasonings. If it weren’t for the fact that the delicious flavor of soy sauce pickling could be stored for a long time, it is estimated that before the near-modern era achieved abundant grain harvests, neither the government nor the people would want to mass-produce this seasoning.
After scaled production, the price of soy sauce became extremely low, to the point that starting from the late twentieth century, every family in Huaxia could not do without soy sauce. In modern life, where one only needs to pay a few more yuan than for salt and sugar to buy a bottle of soy sauce, people gradually forgot how difficult it was to obtain soy sauce at the beginning.
Xiang Chuan didn’t expect that she would actually have to experience the hardships of her ancestors 30,000 years later, when technology was extremely advanced.
Why does it feel like I’m living more and more backwards? Xiang Chuan wrinkled her face and looked at the cooked soybeans in the glass jar with a complicated gaze.
After four hours of simmering, the soybeans had become so soft and tender that gently rubbing them with her hand could loosen the inside into starch bean paste. After turning off the heat and letting it cool slightly, Xiang Chuan had Da Xing pour in the weighed flour, then used the built-in mixing function of the cooking pot to stir them evenly.
The ancient method required using trays, but since transmigrating here, Xiang Chuan had only seen bamboo in the botanical garden, so she ignored the trays. The day before, she had Liang Gong contact the glass factory to help make a batch of tray-shaped containers, replacing the fine slits in the middle with small holes made by hand, and considering the difference in material between glass and trays, Xiang Chuan specifically had Liang Gong instruct the glass factory to poke more holes at the bottom. Today, upon receiving the finished product, Xiang Chuan nodded to herself: Not bad, modern glass product manufacturing technology is really good. These densely packed small holes should be enough no matter how you look at it!
She put on heat-resistant gloves, picked up a small portion of weighed bean paste and placed it into the glass tray, skillfully shaping it into a form that was thin in the middle and slightly thicker at the edges—just like she had learned when helping to brew sweet wine during holidays back at her countryside hometown.
Ouyang Yating and the other two followed her example and spread out the bean paste. Although the shapes weren’t as pretty as the ones Xiang Chuan made, they met the starter-making specifications. Apart from the ugliness making Xiang Chuan’s eye twitch, she couldn’t find any other faults.
The glass trays with the starter ingredients spread out were placed into the warehouse by Da Xing, where ventilation and temperature were set.
However, four hundred jin of soybeans was no small amount, and since it was done outdoors, apart from Da Xing, the other AI equipment couldn’t help at all. By the time the artificial sun in the sky set and Mr. and Mrs. Xiang Weiguo were about to get off work, the four people plus one AI had finally finished rubbing and placing all the starter. By the end, Ouyang Yating and Ainuo even felt like vomiting at the smell of beans.
After doing physical labor for an afternoon, everyone decided to take a shower first before preparing dinner.
But after coming out of the shower, they discovered that Mr. and Mrs. Xiang Weiguo, Xiang Qi, and Xiang Xue were already sitting at the dining table, looking at them—especially Ouyang Yating and the other two—with curious gazes.
Daughter/sister/sister she actually brought classmates home again! And three at once!
Mr. and Mrs. Xiang Weiguo looked at the three polite children greeting them and couldn’t help but sigh that the information turbulence had really brought great changes to their eldest daughter. They had already been very happy when the usually quiet eldest daughter previously brought back Chou Manman. Today, upon hearing from Lisa that three more classmates had come to tinker with the soybeans she had bought before together with their daughter, they were momentarily incredulous about all three.
Regarding the three’s request for overnight stay that afternoon, conveyed to the couple through Lisa, the couple gladly agreed. They had some understanding of the backgrounds of the members in their daughter’s club since its establishment, and two of them could even be said to live in the same residential area as them, with good evaluations of their character, so the couple agreed.
On the contrary, it left Xiang Chuan, who was unprepared psychologically, depressed for an afternoon. By dinnertime, she had thrown the issue to the back of her mind and began preparing some special foods to entertain the three visitors.
While the three were still clumsily spreading starter into the trays, the hungry Xiang Chuan had already slipped back home, curled up in the corner of the kitchen with the kitchen AI’s daily menu in her left hand and her own terminal light screen in her right, lost in thought.
Because there was no way to obtain rice for the time being, Xiang Chuan, a southerner in her previous life, was forced to become a northerner for once, tinkering with noodles for over a month, finally turning the family’s food from the initial lonely dough drops into a variety of buns, steamed cakes, pies, and so on.
She had been busy with studying and her sister’s live stream room before, so she hadn’t noticed. Now looking back, she realized she was missing one of the most common noodles—noodles.
Why didn’t she cook noodles on the day she transmigrated? Xiang Chuan recalled while placing the dough in the pot to proof.
Oh, it seems it was because she was disgusted by that liquid food with a strong fishy smell at the time and urgently needed modern food, so she chose dough drops that didn’t need proofing.
For handmade noodles, the most classic is beef noodles, but the seasonings, that is, soy sauce, have just gone into the warehouse, and it takes three months to produce soy sauce, so she passed on that first. Beef could be marinated with salt and pepper, then boiled, sliced, and simply made into a plate of side dishes.
No beef, no pork, so the remaining option was chicken.
The edible fungi starter culture had just been put into experimental planting this month, and there was almost no circulation on the market. However, with Yue Xiang Group as the largest sponsor of the experimental field and Xiang Chuan as the largest contributor of the edible fungi starter culture, Xiang Weiguo naturally could secure enough shiitake mushrooms for the family to eat until the first harvest from the experimental field.
However, Xiang Chuan also dug out angelica from the family medicinal materials warehouse, threw a piece into the pot and started it. After watching the kitchen AI begin simmering chicken soup, she took out the proofed dough and started fiddling with the noodle pressing equipment.
Pulling noodles is impossible for her, who grew up eating rice noodles and had never even extruded dough, so tinkering with pulled noodles would really be asking too much.
So she chose to leave it to the machine. By having the kitchen AI press the dough with a flat iron plate that has multiple round holes, she could press out round noodles of roughly even thickness. The texture definitely wouldn’t match authentic pulled noodles, but it was good enough to eat.
So by evening, everyone discovered a new food on the dining table that they had never seen before, and no one knew how to eat it.
Mainly because—everyone really hadn’t eaten authentic noodles before!
Xiang Chuan only realized the problem when she came out of the kitchen and saw everyone in the dining hall staring wide-eyed at the noodle soup. Thinking carefully, although Empresses in the Palace featured quite a few noodles and pastries, there really weren’t many bowls of plain noodles or such. Qing Dynasty dramas are like that. But the down-to-earth My Own Swordsman should have scenes of eating noodles, right? Or did everyone forget because they were absorbed in the plot? Xiang Chuan scratched her head inwardly.
If they waited any longer, the noodles would overproof, so Xiang Chuan had no choice but to demonstrate hand-in-hand how to eat noodles. Everyone watched as she skillfully picked up noodles with chopsticks, put them in her mouth, then smoothly slurped a small strand in with a slurp and began chewing.
Everyone’s eyes widened: It can be eaten like that?
In the table manners education everyone had received, one shouldn’t make sounds while eating. The way to eat the new food Xiang Chuan brought out really challenged everyone’s moral etiquette.
But… it was just too fragrant.
The chicken soup made with chicken marinated in pepper and salt, with angelica and shiitake mushrooms added, was already enticing enough. The noodles coated with the soup aroma were nose-tempting, and beside it was a plate of boiled beef slices to mix into the noodle soup and eat together with the noodles—who knew how delicious that would be.
Before long, the dining table was filled with intermittent slurping sounds.
