“Nicholas, you’re really flying out to a random city to meet a doctor?” asked Long Suah.

“You don’t understand, my cousin Lie actually found someone with talent!” Nicholas was surprised that Pao Lie found someone interesting. However, what if the doctor and Pao Lie colluded to get themselves both on TV? It was something he needed to visit and verify himself.  If Li Yun could really name all the ingredients in the dishes just by eating it, it would be sensational news all over the food world.

“Your cousin? The annoying one that keeps bothering you to film at his location?” Long Suah was a bit skeptical. She was known as a food connoisseur, professional eater, and host of Great Chef. Born with a silver platter, she had the opportunity to eat cuisines from all around the world. Eventually, she made her career entirely from touring the world and eating from different locales. “You’re going to agree to have the next season in a small city?”

“Yide is small, but it’s near Panda City,” Nicholas replied.

Although Yide was not a huge city, it was close enough to Panda City that the production crew could use Panda City as a base as it was home to Sichuan-style cooking.

After six seasons and a sharp decline in ratings, most of the original producers had jumped ship, leaving Nicholas and Long Suah to helm the seventh seven as the producers. Nicholas was rather fine without the other producers, as he would be in control. As a Michelin star chef and star of the show, he wanted to inject new life for the seventh and potentially last season of Great Chef.

His proposal for the new format of the competition show will be based more on the food rather than the personalities of the contestants. Viewers had been lamenting on the deteriorating quality of the casts, but what they were suffering from was the nostalgic feeling of watching the first season.

Another big complaint was the third food critic. For the past seasons, the other producers had invited musicians, actors, or famous actors as the third critic to increase viewers. Most loyal viewers wanted someone from the industry and who was knowledgeable about food. The third judge had recently declined for the next installation, and they needed to find a replacement.

The new environment and talented guest food critic might not be enough to save the show, but it might be enough to generate buzz. Not only that, Dr. Li was handsome enough that using him as a replacement for the third guest critic wouldn’t affect the show negatively.

“Panda City would be fun,” Long Suah hadn’t been there before, the scenery should be gorgeous. “So who is this doctor?”

Nicholas showed her the clip he recorded during his face to face conversation with Pao Lie. Long Suah was shocked that she recognized the people in the clip.

“Song Meilin?” Long Suah knew her from social gatherings. “This doctor, Dr. Li?”

“Ms. Suah knows them?” asked Nicholas. “Ms. Song is a small-time celebrity, but are you a fan?”

“Not exactly, but this will be interesting…”

****

Nicholas arrived to Yide City with an assistant and was greeted by Pao Lie, who promised to give him a short tour of the city.

“No need, let’s go meet Dr. Li,” Nicholas responded sharply.

“Okay cous!” Pao Lie was used to Nicholas’s sharpness, and drove him directly to his restaurant.

Pao Lie messaged Li Yun of Nicholas arrival. As the phone dinged, Li Yun ignored the incoming text. He was thirty minutes away from Yide city and working inside a pharmaceutical factory built around 2010. Next to the factory were four main greenhouses that used to grow just Achillea wilhelmsii or yarrow.

 The factory was surrounded by smokestacks, giant pipes, and tanks used to extract the compounds and compress them into tablet forms. Unfortunately, due to failed health and safety inspection and lack of marketing strategy, the company that owned the factory folded two years ago.

It was extremely difficult to sell the property as it was seen as an eyesore and the farmland had not been used or managed in years. Li Yun got a good deal after bargaining with the previous lease owner for the remaining 23 years. As the renovation had recently been completed, everything looked bright and clean. 

There were new hired workers performing simple task like filling the greenhouse with fresh soil. The soil that Li Yun had bought from different regions. It filled the planters that were spaced evenly in rows. There were also vertical areas to maximize the vertical space of the greenhouse. The other workers were beginning to sow the seeds.

Li Yun had finished creating the two concepts TCM-based pills, the Huifu-01 and Huifu-02. The first formula was prescription based and the second formula was supplied only to hospitals to use during emergencies for an aneurysm. With a factory, they were both relatively simple to produce. There wasn’t a need for a special extraction method as the combination of the medicine could be boiled down in high heat and combined with a neutral binder.

Greenhouse one was dedicated to mass-produce specific plants for the TCM formula. Greenhouse two was for tropical based plants. Greenhouse three for sub-tropical and greenhouse four for temperate. In addition to separating by climate, Li Yun had to separate it by zones to prevent cross-contamination. He was already having the contractor build two new greenhouses for additional plants.

Vertical gardening technology had been improving due to necessity, giving people space to grow food in cities where land prices were rapidly rising. Farmers were also benefitting, increasing production per square meter. In the future, production will likely be counted per cubic volume.

After inspecting the greenhouse, Li Yun drove to the restaurant to meet up with Pao Lie and Nicholas. Li Yun was surprised that Pao Lie closed the restaurant down just to prepare the dish for Li Yun to test.

“Don’t you feel like a celebrity?” Rouxi asked as she took a seat next to him.

He shrugged in response, it was just a free dinner to him. He needed to save every coin with the amount of money he was pouring into the company.

In the back, Chef Kaiyi watched as Nicholas prepared mapo tofu. The dish was created during the Qing dynasty by an elderly woman known as Ms. Chen. To be a successful dish, it must be numbing, spicy, hot, fresh, tender, aromatic and flaky. The best kind of mapo tofu was made with the greatest simplicity.

Nicholas had brought along a secret recipe that was passed down from his family. He had all the well known food connoisseurs tried it, but no one had been able to identify the ingredients. If Li Yun could identify even 12 out of 16 ingredients in the mapo tofu, then he would hire him immediately as the guest judge.

Nicholas finished cooking the meal and served it in a wide bowl. Rouxi and Wu Ling smiled just smelling the burning hot chili. They both ate theirs carefully as they couldn’t eat too much spicy food.

Everyone thought that Li Yun would chow down the food like usual, but Li Yun was extra careful. Unlike Chef Kaiyi, he wasn’t familiar with the sauce and ingredients that Nicholas had brought along. He couldn’t underestimate this dish even though it looked very simple compared to Chef Kaiyi’s mapo tofu.

Grandma Pao’s Mapo Tofu, as Nicholas called it, consisted of tofu, chili oil sauce and spring onions garnishing. There was no ground beef. 

Li Yun tasted the sauce first by itself. After the first taste, he waited for his stomach to digest it and flipped open his notebook to an empty page, and started to write the name of the dish first. Nicholas had called it Grandma Pao’s Mapo Tofu.

As Li Yun drew in the simple structure of the compounds entered into this bloodstream, he labeled the simple components that were obvious. There was xiaoxing wine, the rice wine that Rouxi liked to use for cooking. There were also fresh Sichuan peppers, heaven-facing peppers and canola oils.

Li Yun saw the usual combination of Sichuan chili pepper, boardbean, salt and flour. Rouxi had made mapo tofu before using a similar soybean paste, but hers were storebought. The one Nicholas had used contained no preservatives.

From what he could remember from Rouxi’s commentary, this particular reddish brown fermented paste was known as Doubanjiang. Fermented in the Pixian region for more than three years, there were layered unami textures and flavors that could not be imitated anywhere in the world. If the boardbean wasn’t from the Pixian region, then the exact profile of the chemical compounds could not be seen.

As for Li Yun, what gave it away was the amount of amino acid entering his bloodstream. Doubanjiang’s complex flavor profile came from the amino acids, such as glutamine, glutamic acid, aspartic acid, and asparagines, giving it the savory body, lower sour taste, and hint of bitterness. 

“The flavor profile is bolder than a regular Doubanjiang,” Rouxi commented. 

“The doubanjiang is fermented for 10 years?” Li Yun asked.