To be precise, those fleeting fragments of memory Chen Ping had recalled just now...
Contained not just one story, but a whole string of stories of the same kind.
Because situations like that played out time and time again.
Two teams of chefs selected ingredients separately for a cooking contest. If the other team took the only salt or cooking oil available, what were you supposed to do?
The answer was simply to add a few extra preparation steps. It was no big deal.
If you lacked salt, check whether the available ingredients included cured ham you could use to make stock, other salty sauces, or even jellyfish. Once processed, they could all serve as substitutes for salt.
If you lacked cooking oil, look for fatty pork belly or chicken skin, then spend some time rendering lard or chicken fat.
Of course, Chen Ping had no idea how to make a substitute for cumin powder. But what had he actually been worried about?
He had worried that, after the delicious food he recreated from Blue Star had earned him money and built a reputation for a couple of days, someone would copy it exactly.
And he himself lacked Huo Yuhao's miraculous hands, which could turn the rotten into the wondrous-making even ordinary grilled fish taste different from everyone else's.
That would leave him helplessly watching others earn money that should have been his.
So what he needed was not a portion of cumin, but a unique flavor that belonged to him alone.
A flavor that would make people shout, "Holy shit!" after tasting it, then savor it for ages without being able to figure out where it came from.
The Douluo Continent certainly had fine food too, but most dishes paid no attention to the sovereign, minister, assistant, and envoy roles of ingredients, or to layers of flavor. The meal he had eaten yesterday was no exception: chicken was chicken, duck was duck.
That probably had something to do with the Douluo Continent's culinary culture surrounding soul beasts. Soul beast ingredients were already rare, and cooking them on their own produced exquisite delicacies. How could anyone mix other flavors into them?
And as the old saying went, whatever those above favored, those below pursued with even greater fervor.
If even the highest-ranking soul masters ate that way, ordinary soul masters-and ordinary people, for that matter-naturally would not go against that culinary trend to explore ingredients with distinct layers and harmoniously blended flavors.
That gave Chen Ping an opening.
The first thing he thought of was Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, which required various stocks and a wealth of expensive ingredients, a dish celebrated in the verse, "Unseal the jar, and meaty fragrance drifts through the neighborhood; the Buddha catches its scent, abandons meditation, and leaps over the wall."
Buddha Jumps Over the Wall might look like a jumble of expensive ingredients stewed together in a jar, but Chen Ping was absolutely certain no one could reproduce it in two or three months.
And that window would be enough for him to make a fortune.
Both Chen Ping's jar and an imitator's might contain abalone and sea cucumber, duck legs and shiitake mushrooms, fat hens and pig's trotters, winter bamboo shoots and hard clams, dried scallops and fish maw.
But the flavor he produced could carry the effect of the [Pseudo Huo Gua, God of Food] buff, making people accept only his version of those ingredients and willingly pay a premium for a taste.
When making Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, controlling the heat was paramount.
Too little cooking, and you could not satisfy every palate; too much, and the ingredients would scorch.
Did they think they could stew it for the time it took to drink a cup of tea or burn a stick of incense-an hour at most-then hurriedly take it out, claim they had copied Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, and cash in on some quick money?
Some ingredients would be stewed to mush while a whole heap in the jar remained raw, guaranteed. Go ahead and eat it-one bite, and you would fall silent.
Even a simplified home version of Buddha Jumps Over the Wall required an entire day to prepare and process the ingredients.
What Chen Ping planned to make, however, was the version with the most complicated procedure, requiring at least three days and as many as seven before the jar could be opened-exclusively for the rich boys and girls at school.
He would make it only once a week, or even once every two weeks, with just a few jars available each time, hoarding a rare commodity to command a high price.
Rather than coming out to compete with these small vendors and having to worry about attracting the attention of Shrek City's local snakes.
Honestly, if his only goal was to prevent others from copying his food, Buddha Jumps Over the Wall was not the best option. Chen Ping had an even more formidable choice: Boiled Cabbage in Clear Broth.
With Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, there were still clues to the ingredients used. Even if you were not told how each ingredient had been processed, you would at least know what was in it.
But Boiled Cabbage in Clear Broth?
What arrived at the table was just a dish of clear broth and a cabbage blooming like a flower.
Fresh and delicate, with a rich, mellow aroma and a deeply flavorful broth, yet fragrant and refreshing, neither oily nor greasy-it truly was a peerless dish, bringing the extremes of complexity and simplicity into a realm of perfection.
This was no longer a question of whether someone could reproduce it in three months. Even given three years or thirty, without guidance, they might never recreate it perfectly.
But Chen Ping did not need a dish that would take others so long to reverse-engineer. The complexity of Buddha Jumps Over the Wall was already enough.
Besides, the greatest advantage of Buddha Jumps Over the Wall was that it let you see exactly where your money had gone.
When Chen Ping raised his butcher's blade to fleece his customers, the fragrant ingredients filling the jar would at least help soothe their wounded souls, letting them suffer and rejoice as they ate.
Boiled Cabbage in Clear Broth, on the other hand, was something only a seasoned gourmet could truly appreciate. Everyone else could easily feel they had wasted their money.
Since Chen Ping had yet to make a name for himself, Buddha Jumps Over the Wall naturally offered far better value for him than Boiled Cabbage in Clear Broth.
As for whether the customers could understand the meaning of "Buddha Jumps Over the Wall," Chen Ping believed they could.
First of all, the Douluo Continent used the same written language as Blue Star.
Otherwise, Tang San would never have thrown eighteen Soul-Breaking Knives simultaneously along curved trajectories back then.
The Soul-Breaking Knives had embedded themselves neatly in a tree trunk, arranged in three rows of six.
They had formed the character "三," meaning "three," perfectly, leaving Meng Yiran utterly subdued.
And the Buddha's Fury Tang Lotus that Tang San had flung around everywhere back then also had "Buddha" in its name, proving that the concept of a Buddha existed on the Douluo Continent.
In fact, on the Douluo Continent, a Buddha was defined as an exalted being complete in both blessings and wisdom.
Boundless blessings, boundless wisdom.
It described a trinity: one who had awakened, one who had attained enlightenment, and one who delivered others.
Simply put, a sacred being possessing blessings and wisdom, capable of awakening and attaining enlightenment on their own, and delivering all living beings.
So whom did that word usually refer to on the Douluo Continent?
That was right: the First-Generation Angel God.
It was easy to imagine how furious the people of Spirit Hall must have been after Tang San blew them up with a Buddha's Fury Tang Lotus and they learned what the thing was called.
But ten thousand years had passed; blue seas had become mulberry fields, and times and circumstances had changed.
Now, even in some written records, the word "Buddha" could be used to describe Tang San. In a way, that happened to fit his identity as Buddha Tang.
He really did have a karmic connection with the Buddha.
Thinking about it that way, couldn't the Buddha Jumps Over the Wall I make be interpreted as Tang Jumps Over the Wall?
Tsk.
Chen Ping clicked his tongue repeatedly and began searching the street for the ingredients to make Buddha Jumps Over the Wall.
He also brought up the system, and the first thing he saw was that his Academic Genius Points were about to fall below four digits.
Not good!
This was probably the first time in all his years as a student that Chen Ping had been so eager for school to start.
However you looked at it, Academic Genius Points were still easier to accumulate at school!
Before you continue