You started by roasting the golden sesame-like hoboi seeds, and then mashing them up. Then you filtered them and let them ferment for a while, after which you filtered them once more. That was the basic process.
“When you’re finished, you should be left with a small amount of this oil here. It’s far more fragrant than reten oil is.”
There was a glass bottle on top of the table in front of him filled with a brownish liquid. Bozl removed the cork, then he passed it around to everyone. When I gave it a sniff, I found that, sure enough, it smelled just like sesame oil.
“It has a strong aroma, so I can’t say what sort of dishes it would pair well with, but it provides an entirely different flavor than reten oil or milk fat, so I believe it will prove quite useful,” Bozl said with a smile, his gaze shifting my way. “I believe you raised the idea of extracting oil from hoboi seeds before, Sir Asuta, so do you have any idea how it could be used?”
“Well, I thought it would be good as a flavoring in the tau oil sautés I prepare, and it could also go well in soups.”
“Hmm. Would it be possible for you to prepare a sample dish?”
I was supposed to just be watching today, so that was a rather unexpected request, but I was happy to share my knowledge to help make Genos more prosperous, so I agreed and got started.
Since I didn’t want to take too long, I decided to go with a simple stir-fry using karon breast meat, aria, pula, and chamcham, plus tau oil, sugar, nyatta spirits, myamuu, and keru root for flavoring. After rubbing some salt and pico leaves into the breast meat, I sliced it into thin pieces, then stir-fried it with the vegetables and hoboi oil. Once it was cooked about halfway through, I added the seasonings, then let it cook the rest of the way.
The flavoring I was using was pretty much the same as the twice-cooked pork-style dish we served as a daily special at the stalls, but this time, I had cut the karon meat into strips so it came out closer to pepper steak. Making enough for everyone to have a bite took quite a lot of effort, so I ended up asking the other chefs from the forest’s edge to help, which they had no problem with.
Bozl took a bite of the finished dish, and when he spoke next, he sounded really impressed. “My, this is quite splendid. It’s hard to believe this is your first time using hoboi oil.”
“Well, there was a similar kind of oil back in my home country.”
When I took a bite as well, I found that the hoboi oil had managed to give the dish the feel of Chinese cooking all on its own. If I had added some chatchi starch to make it a little thicker, I figured it would have been pretty much perfect. That would be everything I needed to prepare a dish I could proudly call twice-cooked giba.
“This really is delicious. You used quite a few seasonings, but rather than getting in their way the hoboi oil seems like it’s making their flavors even better,” Myme whispered to me, her eyes positively sparkling. Reina Ruu and Toor Deen looked deadly serious, but also satisfied as they tried the sample dish too.
Rimee Ruu, meanwhile, grinned brightly and said, “It’s so tasty!”
“Yes, it is indeed good. If you were to add a few more herbs, I’m sure it would become quite popular in the castle town,” Timalo said, his brow deeply furrowed.
Next to him, Varkas breathed a sigh. “So you truly are capable of making high-quality dishes with karon meat after all, Sir Asuta. Still, you were even able to use a live fish before, so I suppose that is only natural.”
“Ah, yeah. I actually had the opportunity to help out at one of the post town’s inns recently, and I had to cook a lot of karon and kimyuus for that,” I replied.
Varkas’s sleepy-looking gaze shifted to aim directly at me. “Is that so? If you had sent word, I would have come to have a meal there.”
“I imagine it would be quite difficult for you to visit an inn in the post town, Varkas,” Bozl said with a placating smile. Varkas was supposedly very bad with crowds. If not for that, I would have loved to invite him to come to one of our banquets at the forest’s edge. “Well, at any rate, I would say this did a fine job of demonstrating the unique flavor of hoboi oil,” he continued. “If any of you wish to use it, though, we will need to purchase a large amount of hoboi in order to produce it.”
“Indeed. Fortunately, the people of Jagar would very much like to purchase fuwano and fruit wine from Genos. We still have a great deal of surplus fuwano in the Turan pantries, so expanding our business dealings with Jagar would be quite beneficial,” Polarth said, seeming quite satisfied with how the study session was going. “Now then, we shall finish with the ingredient from Sym known as shaska. Sir Varkas is the only one who knows how to work with it, so please, go ahead.”
“Yes, of course,” Varkas said. He then looked over at Tatumai and Shilly Rou, which was apparently their cue to bring a large bundle that had been sitting on the table beside them over to him. The shaska that had been used to make part of the meal we’d had at The Silver Star had to be inside it. Varkas had used it in a dish that was like tan tan ramen without broth, but this would be my first time seeing it before it had been prepared.
“These are shaska seeds. This is the form they are in when they are delivered from Sym.”
On that signal from his master, Tatumai portioned out the contents of the bundle onto a number of plates, and when I saw what shaska actually was, I had to stop myself from shouting in surprise.
The shaska was a bunch of small oval-shaped grains. About five millimeters long and three millimeters wide. Slightly transparent, but a very pure white in color. In other words, this ingredient looked incredibly similar to the rice that I was familiar with from back home.