Chapter 287: Chapter 188: The Eye of Discrimination Is So Useful! The Reward for the First Round of the Contest! [Seeking Monthly Tickets]
Did he guess the right question? After hearing the requirements of this round, Lin Xu subconsciously looked towards a certain Little Mushroom Head in the audience who had skipped class to join in the fun.
Sitting below, Geng Lele stuck out her tongue; she hadn’t expected her casual remark to actually come true. But this was nothing to be happy about. Because Boss Lin had said he wasn’t good at these tasks. And now a similar topic had come up, and it was even more difficult than the day they ate barbecue; this round was doomed!
Shen Baobao, sitting beside her, also wore a look of shock. She hadn’t expected her Xu Bao to be so unlucky. She had been looking forward to seeing him win the championship, but how could he encounter such an unfavorable topic in the first round? Would he be eliminated because of this?
"What’s the matter, girl? Why such a grim face? Are you worried about Xiao Xu?" Han Shuzhen asked curiously, seeing Shen Jiayue’s anxious expression.
Although this round of competition looked quite strange, her son-in-law was so capable that he would surely win, she thought.
"He’s not good at these things!" Shen Jiayue’s face was filled with distress.
She had even started thinking about how to console her Xu Bao.
「At the competition site.」
The other contestants, after hearing the topic, immediately tasted the bowl of soup in front of them.
The thirty contestants participating today came from the Chinese cuisine departments of ten foreign hotels, all of whom were young people under the age of twenty-five.
Before coming, they had also sparred internally within their own hotels.
Those who were selected were the strongest contestants, aiming to defeat Lin Xu of Fishing Platform, so that their hotels could step on Fishing Platform in their promotions.
Nowadays, major foreign hotels have to be self-financing.
To attract more social customers, they had to be creative in their marketing efforts.
And the easiest way to make a splash in marketing was naturally to step on their competitors.
The taste of the soup was very bad.
The contestants tasted it with gritted teeth and closed eyes, and then, with the pen and paper provided by the staff earlier, they earnestly wrote down the seasonings and spices they could identify.
Guo Xinghai and Wei Qian were also tasting and writing down the seasonings as they went along.
This was Lin Xu’s weak point, so he had to try his best to list as many seasonings as possible to score high and ensure their group’s score didn’t look too bad. As long as he wasn’t eliminated this round, maybe he could catch up in the next round.
Everyone was earnestly tasting and writing.
Only Lin Xu had his attention focused entirely on the system page in his mind.
Use special tool Experience Card! he recited silently.
The special tool ten-minute Experience Card in his item bar immediately activated automatically, and the system’s prompt sounded again:
"Please select the special tool you want to experience."
Is there even a choice? Besides the Eye of Discrimination, do you have any other special tools in your special tool bar?
Lin Xu immediately chose the Eye of Discrimination.
Very soon, the system’s prompt sounded again:
"Eye of Discrimination experience successful, experience duration: Ten minutes. After ten minutes, the experience effect will automatically end."
No sooner had the voice faded than Lin Xu felt a cool sensation in his eyes.
He looked around but didn’t trigger anything. However, when he looked down at the soup in the bowl, rows of text immediately flashed before his eyes:
"A bowl of broth made by stirring salt, Flavoring, Chicken Essence, Chicken Powder, White Sugar, Brown Sugar, Baking Powder, Cheese Powder, Scallion Powder, White Vinegar, Cooking Wine, White Pepper powder, Black Pepper Powder, Sichuan peppercorn powder, Sichuan peppercorn powder, Star Anise Powder, Chili Powder, Cumin Powder, Clove Powder, Angelica dahurica Powder, Grass Fruit Powder, cinnamon powder, Buckwheat Flour, Matcha Powder, pickled bamboo shoot shreds, Sesame Shredded, Peanut Shreds, preserved vegetable shreds, and 70-degree hot water. Level: Not up to the lowest rating standard."
Lin Xu frowned. My goodness! With these ingredients, even if his senior brother came, it would be difficult to do. In the last cooking competition, Geng Lishan used a worn-out kitchen knife to intimidate the contestants. Now, making the seasonings this complicated, is this another form of intimidation? Two kinds of pepper powder, two kinds of sugar, various powders, and various shreds—trying to taste them out with the tongue? What a joke!
After finishing his grumble, he took a small sip from the bowl in front of him. Well, even though it tasted awful, he still had to taste it to blend in and not stand out too much. Otherwise, how would he write the answer on paper? Rely on guessing?
As soon as the soup in the bowl touched his mouth, rich and diverse flavors like sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and rotten flooded his palate.
Oh, dear!
Lin Xu suppressed the urge to vomit and quickly wrote down his answers.
At the consultant’s seats beside the audience, Xie Baomin heaved a sigh of relief when he saw this. He had been worried for Lin Xu when he first heard about the content of the competition. His junior brother was indeed a bit lacking in the basics. His understanding and recognition of seasonings were also quite superficial. Unfortunately, this kind of challenge that tested fundamental seasoning skills was quite common in culinary competitions. Some troublesome judges even deliberately added stinky or rancid ingredients to increase the difficulty of identifying the flavors.
After the competition began, while others were tasting and writing, Lin Xu was stunned in place, making Xie Baomin even more worried. He feared his junior brother would give up and hand in a blank sheet.
Now that he saw Lin Xu starting to answer as well, he finally felt relieved.
"Xinghai said that when he went to Lin Xu’s house for barbecue last time, they used dry seasoning made by Old Dai. They guessed the ingredients randomly, and Master Lin didn’t get any of them right... He’s quite weak in this area," Guo Weidong said with concern.
When there wasn’t a team score, everyone just treated it as a competition. But now that there was a team score, everyone would naturally become serious because it was related to the reputation of Fishing Platform.