Chapter 270: The Reason For The Failure
In the yard of the Xiang Family Mansion.
Unlike Xiang Chuan staring at the bread in front of her suspecting life itself, when Ouyang Yating and the other two imitated Xiang Chuan by breaking open the bread and clearly seeing the unburnt lower half, they all let out exclamations in unison.
“Is this what successfully baked bread looks like?” Ouyang Yating curiously broke off a small piece of the unburnt part and boldly put it in her mouth to chew. “Indeed, it’s very different from buns and steamed buns.”
“It’s a pity that the successfully baked part is still too little. If the whole thing were baked well, it would probably be quite stunning.”
Ainuo said, picking up the butter knife beside him and cutting off the intact bottom of his square bread. As for the charred part, he directly threw it into the trash can nearby.
This trash can would probably be busy for the next two months. Xiang Chuan thought, escaping reality.
“Sigh… Exactly where did it go wrong? Didn’t ancient Europeans bake it like this?”
Xiang Chuan opened the search page on Geegle, found some Vlogs she had saved earlier about using medieval European roasters to bake bread, and began pondering the differences.
Seeing Xiang Chuan like this, Ouyang Yating and the other two knew it wasn’t a good time to disturb her, so they quietly began discussing the taste of the half bread in hand and what to dip it in.
After a good while, until Da Xing came to notify the four that it was time for lunch, Xiang Chuan still hadn’t figured anything out.
“No need to do it alone. Send the image over for us to see too. Maybe we’ll spot the problem?”
Ouyang Yating gently patted Xiang Chuan’s shoulder and comforted her.
Xiang Chuan tilted her head: That works, maybe it’s really better than her doing it alone.
——
The Xiang Family Dining Table on the first day of summer vacation was relatively quiet.
Mr. and Mrs. Xiang Weiguo went out to work as usual. Xiang Qi rarely had a day off and was now snoring away in his room, having specially instructed Da Xing to save him a lunch. Xiang Xue and Lin Ming had a live stream of the first episode of A Bite of China tonight, so they were now holed up in the live stream room having a meeting with the operations team as well as the person in charge from the Information Bureau and Agriculture Bureau. Da Xing had delivered their lunch in advance.
So at the moment, the only ones at the dining table were the four from A Bite of China Club, as well as Li Wei who had been in the living room all morning flipping through Don Quixote.
The moment they stepped into the restaurant and saw Li Wei, Xiang Chuan felt the three behind her hold their breath. Ouyang Yating and Liang Gong were simply nervous, but the problem was Ainuo—he looked like a lion with its fur standing on end.
While waiting for Da Xing to serve the meal, Xiang Chuan secretly sized up the two and thought: Could it be repulsion between handsome guys?
However, this offbeat idea was thrown to the back of Xiang Chuan’s mind after Da Xing served the tomato cucumber cold noodles.
——
After returning home yesterday afternoon, Xiang Chuan had been pondering adding some summer-appropriate dishes to the family recipe. But thinking that mung beans had only just been planted in the experimental field, Xiang Chuan could only accept giving up the most classic summer mung bean porridge and turn her gaze to noodles.
Noodles that didn’t require boiling over a fire were undoubtedly a hot summer food. Xiang Chuan first fiddled out a bowl of tomato minced meat soup using minced beef, then cucumber slices, chopped red chili poured with hot oil, and had the little chef help fry a small steak and cut it into pieces.
This not-very-authentic tomato sauce cold noodles made a shiny debut.
When she made this bowl of noodles last night, it was right after the family had just finished dinner. But as soon as they smelled the appetizing tomato aroma, the gluttons at home all reached out to Xiang Chuan begging for food.
In the end, last night the family members all walked out of the restaurant holding their walls. Xiang Xue even exerted her strongest willpower to date to hold back from rubbing her belly like Lin Ming next to her in the live stream room.
Xiang Chuan, on the other hand, had the foresight to only eat a small bowl, then went back to her room to rest.
She had just eaten two servings of fried rice, so how could she possibly eat a big bowl of noodles like the family? She knew she definitely couldn’t finish it.
But now it was different. After a morning of brainstorming, the four were hungry. The sweet-and-sour tomato minced meat soup poured over the cooled noodles after boiling, then black pepper beef chunks added, drizzled with bright red chili oil, red and green colors, plus the natural sweet-and-sour tomato flavor—impossibly tempting.
If only there were some braised dishes like Cantonese char siu or cold mixed pig ears. Xiang Chuan slurped the noodles contentedly while thinking greedily.
Perhaps because they weren’t familiar with each other, or perhaps because the tomato sauce cold noodles were too tempting, besides the continuous slurping sounds at the dining table, there were only occasional calls for Da Xing to bring another bowl.
——
When someone nearby is crazily devouring rice, as a bystander you can’t help but eat a bit more. That’s why in the 21st Century many people open food documentaries or mukbang Vlogs at mealtime.
Xiang Chuan couldn’t escape this rule this time either.
Seeing the three beside her and even Li Wei across from her all starting to slurp their second bowl, Xiang Chuan couldn’t hold back and asked Da Xing for another bowl too.
The result was that now she really walked out of the family restaurant holding the wall.
Fortunately, Xiang Chuan had originally planned to thoroughly review the reasons for the consecutive bread baking failures with Ouyang Yating and the other two in the afternoon, so even lying on a recliner rubbing her belly to digest didn’t stop her from forwarding the Vlog video saved in her terminal to the three of them.
The video wasn’t long. The blogger had edited out the ineffective waiting footage of flour fermenting and proofing and bread in the oven, but the key steps were clearly filmed.
This was the part Xiang Chuan didn’t understand: Her steps almost exactly replicated the blogger’s operation sequence one-to-one, so why did the bread still burn?
But some things really needed a modern person to spot.
After watching the video, Ouyang Yating rewound to the screen where the blogger put firewood and black charcoal into the roaster and pointed at them, asking:
“What are these for?”
“Hm? To light the black charcoal, heat the roaster. Don’t underestimate these things—they can make the internal temperature of the roaster reach 300 degrees.”
This was what Xiang Chuan had found when planning to make that brick stove oven earlier.
“Ainuo, our roaster can control temperature, right? What did you set it to before?”
“Initially 250 degrees, 150 degrees the time before vacation, 140 degrees this time. What’s up?”
“Have you done penetration testing on those fuels? Especially for starch-based foods.”
Ainuo: …It seems not.
Xiang·Modern Physics Novice·Chuan secretly sidled up to Liang Gong and asked: “What’s penetration testing?”
Liang Gong earnestly explained:
“Simply put, it’s testing whether energy consumables can fully act on a specific substance when releasing energy toward it. For example, some energies have penetration on metal, which can be used for energy mining operations on asteroids. Another example, some energies have no penetration on cloth products, which can be used in clothing industry—printing different patterns on clothing without damaging the underlying cloth.”
Xiang Chuan nodded as if she understood, then asked:
“What Yating just meant is that the fuel we’re using now might have penetration on starch?”
“Yes, if it has penetration on a specific substance, then when releasing energy toward that substance, it produces effects far exceeding the average value. Yating and Ainuo guess this might be why our bread always burns.”
Xiang Chuan: If that’s really the reason, then it really wasn’t my fault before.
Who knew modern energy could have that kind of “super effective against XX” effect like a useless dog’s class!
