Chương 144: Ice and Fire, Head to Head

The contest timer began to tick, and Group A's fight to the death formally raised its curtain. In the American kitchen, the mood was tense and orderly. After two rounds of grinding it out together, the three of them had reached a wholly new level of coordination. They no longer needed much talk — a single glance, a single gesture, and each understood the other's intent. Kira began her appetizer first — "Gentle Fire."

She put dozens of kinds of shellfish — mussels, clams, scallops — together with fish bones and vegetables into a huge copper pot, added only a little white wine and aromatics, and began to braise it slowly over a flame close to "extinguished." The process demanded extreme patience. A touch too much heat and the broth would go cloudy; a touch too little time and the freshness wouldn't come.

Kira stood by the pot like a priestess guarding a sacred flame, never leaving its side, skimming off the scum now and then, her focus pushed to the absolute limit. On the other side, Ethan had already lit his custom charcoal grill. Inside it was binchōtan from Japan — steady in heat, near smokeless, the byword for top-tier grilling. He performed a complex "position management" on the huge tomahawk lamb chop over the grill.

Now he set the chop over the fiercest center of the fire, forming a char crust on the surface fast, locking in the juices; now he moved it to the cooler edge, letting the heat seep slowly into the interior. His movements were full of rhythm, as if he were not grilling meat but conducting a dance of flame. What he chased was that perfect gradient from outside to in — from char-crisp to a tender pink. And Chris was working on his dessert, the one so charged with meaning. Smoked potato ice cream.

First he steamed the potato and passed it again and again through the finest sieve, making sure the purée held not one rough grain. This was the most important lesson he'd taken from his last failure. Only the finest texture could make a silken ice cream. Then he mixed the purée with milk, cream, and egg yolk, heating it precisely to 82°C, bringing the custard base to a perfect emulsion. The most crucial step was the smoking.

He didn't use a modern device like a smoking gun — he lit a small block of applewood and set it in a sealed container. Only when the container filled with the rich fragrance of fruitwood did he place the cooled custard base inside, letting it rest in the smoke for twenty minutes to absorb that distinctive flavor in full.

"Kira, is the consommé strained?" Chris asked, pouring the smoked custard base into the ice cream machine.

"Done — clear as crystal." A trace of pride was in Kira's voice.

"Ethan, how's the core temperature on the lamb?"

"Fifty-four, resting now. One last touch of fire before pickup and it'll hit a perfect medium-rare, fifty-five." Ethan's answer was as precise as his handiwork. Their coordination was seamless. Across from them, the French kitchen presented an utterly different scene. Their stations were near enough cold. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! No open flame, no steam, not even much sound.

The three chefs worked like a team performing precise surgery, terrifyingly quiet. Raphaël was making his appetizer — "Frozen Tomato Consommé." He blended a crate of dead-ripe tomatoes in a high-speed blender, then used a high-speed centrifuge to separate the pulp from the consommé. The consommé that came out was pale gold, crystalline, giving off the purest fragrance of tomato. He poured it straight into liquid nitrogen, making a granita with the texture of shaved snow.

His second was working the Brittany blue lobster. His knife moved fast as lightning; while the lobster still twitched faintly, he had already drawn the meat out whole, sliced it thin, and seasoned it in the simplest way with lime juice and sea salt. The other chef was making the chocolate sphere they called the "ice core." He poured melted chocolate into a spherical mold and, by turning it without pause, formed a thin, even shell. Then, with great care, he filled it with liquid nitrogen through a small hole.

A single soft " hiss" — and the whole surface of the chocolate sphere froze over in an instant with a layer of white frost. Everything they did ran counter to "fire." With cold, with raw food, with liquid nitrogen, they built a world completely opposed to fire. It left the spectators and judges present in a state of intense curiosity and confusion. They could not imagine at all how a menu like this — with "no fire" — would interpret the theme of "Fire." The moment of pickup came at last.

The American team's three dishes were sent up first. Kira's "Gentle Fire," that bowl of shellfish consommé, clear to the bottom yet holding an explosive freshness, snapped the judges to attention. Ethan's "Raging Fire," that tomahawk lamb chop, char outside and tender within, its cook faultless, full of primal carnivorous hunger, drew loud cries of delight. And last, Chris's "Ember Fire." That plate of smoked potato ice cream looked utterly unremarkable.

But when the judges lifted a small piece with their spoons and set it on their tongues, every expression changed. The texture of the ice cream was unbelievably silken, melting the instant it touched the mouth. What spread first across the tongue was the plain sweet fragrance of potato; then an elegant, deep smokiness rose slowly from the depths of the throat and lingered, refusing to fade.

The stroke of caramel beside it, melted by the residual warmth of charcoal, carried a faint bitterness that neatly cut the sweetness of the ice cream. Cold and hot, sweet and bitter, plain and deep — every contradictory flavor reached an unthinkable harmony in this dessert. An old French judge, after tasting it, even closed his eyes, let out a long sigh, and said softly, "C'est incroyable… I have never tasted anything so warm in a frozen dish."

Chris heard the line, and the great stone hanging in his heart finally came to rest. He'd done it. He hadn't only made up for the regret of the finale; he'd lifted this dish to a wholly new height. But when the French team's "Absence of Fire" trilogy took the stage, the whole hall sank into silence once more. That frozen tomato consommé, with its ultimate cold, woke people's most primal memory of the tomato — and made them long, in the chill, all the more for the warmth of the flame.

That raw lobster, with its ultimate freshness, challenged the very definition of "cooking," and could not help but make one wonder: what, exactly, did the intervention of fire give an ingredient — and what did it take away? And the last dish, the "ice core" chocolate sphere — when the warm sauce was poured over it, the chocolate shell melting in an instant to reveal the still-frozen core within — that violent impact on both sight and taste stunned everyone.

Raphaël had completed his interpretation of "Fire" in a way close to performance art. He had not depicted fire, and yet he had made everyone feel the presence of fire. It was creativity of genius rank. In the final moments of the contest, Chris activated the system's "Data Eye" and ran one last scan over both teams' works. On the system panel, two sets of data popped up. The American team, "The Three Stages of Fire," composite completion estimate: 94%, grade: A.

The French team, "The Absence of Fire," composite completion estimate: 96%, grade: A+. Numbers don't lie. Even though they'd performed to their utter limit, in the system's judgment they still came up, overall, just that little bit short of France. Chris's heart sank. He knew they'd given everything. But their opponent was simply too strong. In this head-to-head clash of ice and fire, the scales of victory and defeat seemed already to have begun to tilt.