Chương 8: Taming the Oven

"Next week." Chris looked at the official email from the production team on his phone. The recording date was spelled out plainly: seven days from now. The deadline was tight enough to leave him breathless. Heat Control had only just climbed from C to C+. Nowhere near enough. A C+ level, in a place like Burning Kitchen, could at most keep him from making rookie mistakes. To win — to make a judge of Gareth Vane's caliber nod — he was still a long way off. He had to keep going.

For the next several days, Chris locked himself fully in the kitchen. He was no longer satisfied with merely "passable" slices. He wanted perfect. He began to attempt more complex techniques. For instance, before roasting, he first poached the cut slices low and slow in salted milk. The idea came from the traditional method of Gratin Dauphinois.

The lactose in the milk would give a more beautiful caramel color during the later roast, and a low slow poach would soften the potato's internal structure a step ahead, shortening its time in the oven and letting him control the final texture more precisely. His first attempt failed. He poached the milk too long; the slices were already too soft going into the oven and came out a mushy slop.

The second time, he controlled the poaching time and temperature precisely, but after pulling the slices from the milk he didn't drain them fully. The excess moisture turned to steam in the oven, leaving the surfaces damp and unable to form a crisp shell.

"Details. It's all details." He logged the cause of every failure in his notebook in detail. It looked like a lab report now, covered in charts and figures. He realized that the single step of "milk poaching" alone involved several variables — starting temperature, rate of heating, hold time, the relationship of all of it to slice thickness. So he simply pulled out his old IT trade and built a spreadsheet, listing every variable. Each experiment, he changed only one and recorded the result. A clumsy method.

But an extremely effective one. The fifth attempt. He heated the milk to 185°F — the knife's edge just before a boil. Then he added the slices and held that temperature for twelve minutes. After scooping them out he didn't blot them with paper towel; he laid them flat on a rack and ran a fan over them for five minutes, using the airflow to whisk away the surface moisture fast while letting the slices' interior cool slightly.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Only then did he slide them into the oven whose temperament he had, by now, completely mastered. He launched his designed victory curve. First ten minutes: 425°F, high heat, to dry the surface fast and form a thin hard shell.

Then he immediately cracked the oven door for a few seconds to let some heat escape, dropped the temperature to 350°F, and ran a long twenty-minute slow roast, letting the heat seep gently into the potato's core. Final five minutes: he hauled the temperature back to 425°F and switched on the top element alone — Broil — for the last coloring and crisping. When the oven sang its ding, Chris's heart skipped right along with it. He pulled on oven mitts and lifted the tray out with care.

An aroma he'd never produced before filled the entire kitchen at once. Not just potato and butter, but the creaminess of the milk and a thin sweet thread of caramel woven through it. Every slice on the tray looked copied from the last. Gold surfaces flecked with deep-brown char spots, almost unbearably appetizing. He picked one up and gave it a light pinch between his fingers. Crack. A clean, brittle sound. The shell shattered like a potato chip, and inside he could almost feel that soft, fine texture.

He put the slice in his mouth. Crisp, scalding, rich with cream. The starchy sweetness of the potato drawn perfectly to life, and what lingered after chewing wasn't grease but a clean, returning sweetness. Ding! [Through systematic experiment, you have successfully optimized the heat curve of "Triple-Flavor Potato Gratin."] [Dish completion simulation: 85%] [Heat Control: C+ (62/100) → B- (68/100)] B-! His Heat Control had finally crawled up from a failing C to the same B- as his Knife Work.

Chris slammed a fist on the counter in elation. He'd done it. He'd tamed that damned oven. Now his data panel read: [Knife Work: B (70/100)] [Heat Control: B- (68/100)] [Seasoning: B (72/100)] [Plating: B+ (76/100)] [Ingredient Sense: C+ (64/100)] [Stress Tolerance: D+ (52/100)] The weak points were being patched one by one. His overall ability was already more than a tier above the man who'd been thrown out of the kitchen a week ago. But Chris didn't let the joy go to his head.

He looked at the two scores still glaring up from the panel. Ingredient Sense C+. Stress Tolerance D+. Heat and knife were technical — you raised them through repetition. But these two, especially stress tolerance, weren't solved by roasting a few more trays of potato. He had to think of something else. He went to the living room, picked up the remote, and turned on the TV. He didn't watch the news, didn't watch a movie. He went straight to YouTube and found the clip of his own elimination. He pressed play.

Gareth Vane's furious face appeared on the screen at once, paired with the roar he would never forget for the rest of his life.

"Get out of my kitchen!" Chris felt his heart clench hard, his palms beginning to sweat. Even knowing it was a recording, the humiliation and tension surged up beyond his control. He drew a deep breath and forced himself to keep watching. He watched the "self" on the screen, pale-faced, lips trembling, like a child caught doing something wrong. He watched the faint, barely-there mockery at the corner of Marco's mouth. He watched the other contestants' eyes, some pitying, some gloating.

Every second of it was torture. He didn't shut it off. He set the video to loop and turned the volume to maximum. Vane's roar and the murmur of the studio audience rang through the whole apartment. Then he turned, walked back to the kitchen, picked up his knife, and began to slice potatoes. He would complete an entire dish, start to finish, surrounded by this "noise." This was the most direct, most brutal desensitization training he could think of.