Absinthe novel Chapter 25

The following day's morning classes were equally fun and interesting. We continued our classes on marketing with a few more case studies on food products. Our food science classes in the afternoon were even more fascinating as we moved on to studying about the taste receptors in our mouth.

Instead of joining the kitchen for dinner service, we stayed at Chef Maxwell's R&D kitchen. We were joined by Tita Gay Abundance, a team of makeup artists, and a team of photographers. I thought it was only an interview, but it ended up being a photo shoot as well. The whole session took up our class time with Chef Maxwell. It was almost 9 PM when we finished and Chef Maxwell bid us goodbye.

Jiwoo took a couple of shots for his IG account during the photo shoot. He tagged me on all of them, and my phone was once again filled with thousands and thousands of notifications.

The rest of the week flew by just as fast. That Thursday evening, though, Chef Maxwell surprised us with something that almost made us go crazy.

"As I mentioned last Monday, I will be testing how your palates have improved. That test will be tomorrow."

The four of us exchanged nervous looks.

"I have prepared here four different flavor pastes. You are to taste them, guess their ingredients, and replicate the flavors you detect by preparing your own dish to be presented to me tomorrow.

"Now, please come over here and choose which flavor paste you will be replicating."

We went to Chef Maxwell's table and chose our own flavor pastes at random. We headed back to our stations after that and listened to Chef Maxwell explain that we were to spend today's class trying to figure out the flavor paste and designing our menu for tomorrow.

I looked around and saw Nico, Vivi, and Jiwoo already tasting their pastes and jotting down some notes. I hastily unscrewed the cap and had a taste.

Shit. I was in big trouble. I couldn't really discern what the taste was. It tasted like smoked salmon, but it was very, very subtle, almost as if there was no salmon in it. But if it wasn't salmon, then why did I taste something fishy?

I looked around again and saw that my classmates were just as flustered as I was.

"The flavors incorporated into your flavor pastes are the standard ones in haute cuisine. They are not the typical flavors used in cooking. However, all of them can be found in the pantry. You should spend the rest of your day trying out different ingredients from there to see if you can replicate the tastes."

I took out different fish fillets from the pantry as well as the smoking machine. Looking at the time, I figured that smoking all the fishes would be useless. I decided to choose those with the least flavor and removed the strong ones like tuna, mackerel, and red snapper.

I laid out small cuts of the fillets and proceeded to smoke them. After about 30 minutes, I tasted them and found their smoke taste to be of a totally different flavor profile.

How could I be so thick? Of course Chef Maxwell would incorporate a special flavor into the smoke! I was not used to smoked foods both in the Philippines and in Korea, so I had totally forgotten about smoke flavors.

I dashed back into the kitchen to find Jiwoo choosing fruits from the produce stand.

"Fruits?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," he answered without looking at me.

I proceeded to get the smoking flavors and picked applewood, pecan, cherry, maple, and alder. All the other types of wood there—hickory, oak, mesquite, walnut, and blackberry—are known to provide intense flavors to barbecued meats.

"You got smoky flavors?" Jiwoo asked.

"Yeah. I just can't get the taste right."

"Difficult test, isn't it?" I could tell that Jiwoo's demeanor had changed.

"Yup, pretty challenging even for someone like me who's been eating gourmet dishes for a long time."

"Lucky you," he said. "I guess it's really advantageous to be that rich, huh?"

"What?"

"Never mind," Jiwoo said dismissively as he headed back to his station, leaving me alone in the pantry.

The rest of the class progressed in an unusual noisy silence. It was silent because nobody was talking, but at the same time, it was noisy with all the sounds of footsteps going around the place, the clang of metals as ladles hit against pots, the motors of blenders, and the hiss of steam.

At the end of the class, I was only able to identify the smoke—it was tarragon. And it was not your typical smoking technique, which was cold smoking a fillet of sole fish and incorporating the smoke of charring tarragon.

Now there was an indefinite number of other flavors that I needed to correctly identify and recreate. It looked like the others were nowhere near finishing, either.

"Time's up. You may leave." Chef Maxwell announced. "I'm going ahead if you guys have no plans of going," he added when he noticed that none of us made any moves to clean up.

As soon as Chef Maxwell had gone, Nico spoke.

"I'm pretty sure mine is based on pork belly and apples. I'm just not sure about the other herbs used in this."

"Mine's a strong flavor of coconut and roasted apricots," Vivi commented. "I can taste the uneven caramelization from roasting. But like Nico, I'm not done identifying the rest."

"I guess we can continue trying out the rest of the flavors at home," Nico added.

"Yeah!" said Vivi. "Wanna go shopping for ingredients? The gourmet ingredient store is open twenty-four seven, right?"

"Count me in," I said. "I was barely able to identify that stupid smoked fish taste. Who would have thought of using tarragon to cold smoke sole fish?"

Vivi and Nico laughed.

"Yeah," said Vivi. "I could tell that yours was pretty hardcore."

"What about you, bro?" Nico asked Jiwoo. "Will you join us?"

Jiwoo shook his head. "I got some errands to run."

"Alright, bro. Good luck to all of us!" Nico said. "Come on. I'll drive."