Volume 1 - CH 29

I explored the area while hunting stonerocks and woodhudes. As I was walking around I found it.

Thanks to appraisal I was able to spot it. It was in a place a bit further on from where the stones rocks were.

Wheat.

I found a spot growing a patch of wheat with appraisal. I’d only seen wheat a few times in my life, but these ones were a lot larger than I remembered.

…But I guess I can’t just eat wheat as it is. I would have to run it through various processes first, like threshing and milling it. I was happy to find some wheat, but all that was going to be a serious pain.

Both threshing and milling too some serious manual labour. Of course I need some for the sake of my livelihood, but I really don’t want to spend a lot of time on that.

I took a look at cooking technique after looking into various possibilities. Cooking technique also had the ability to shorten the processing of ingredients. It seemed to also be able to automatically take care of threshing and milling wheat.

It’s just that when I tried that on the meat, it was a lot tastier to do it by hand. I should probably test out how it tastes once.

One way would be to have the goblin take care of the threshing and whatnot, but is there anything else I could try? Wondering if there was anything I could do to make threshing and milling easier, I took a look at smithing technique and found something interesting.

There was this thing listed called a threshing machine. For milling there were things like a millstone. …I could make something called a foot thresher immediately. I could make it with some wood and iron magic ore. I could also make a millstone with some stone. I could probably find a good stone to use by the river.

After collecting some wheat grains we continued on with our monster hunt. After finishing the hunt we planted wheat immediately after getting back to the base. I knew how to plant them thanks to the cultivation skill.

They’ll take three days. I guess I can relax for the next three days.

〇

We were able to harvest the wheat. Right after harvesting the wheat I was able to rejuvenate the soil by plowing it, so we planted some more.

Alright, now it’s time for the real thing. Next I went to thresh and mill the wheat. The knowledge for how to do that floated into my head thanks to cooking technique. I was able to properly thresh and mill it with the thresher and millstone.

I was a bit lost with how many different types of threshers there were, but the foot thresher turned out the be the best one to use for now. As for the finished flour, I figured I should make some bread with it first.

There were a bunch of other things I could make with it, but I wanted to eat some bread. I made full use of cooking technique to figure out how to make bread. …It seemed I needed something called yeast cells to make bread, so I also prepared some of that before hand. For that I had to put some fruit in some warm water.

I didn’t really know how that worked, but I was able to do it right thanks to cooking technique. I then used some grapen extract to make some bread. After that I let it rest for a bit, and before long it swelled up in size. Now I just need to bake it.

I made a stone oven for baking and then baked the bread inside it. I didn’t really worry about how it looked. Although I’d never baked bread before, thanks to cooking technique I was able to bake the bread like a first class baker.

Once it finished baking I took the bread out of the oven. Ooh, it looks pretty well browned. I took the bread and tore it in half. It was cooked down to the middle.

“Gobu!”

“Woof!”

The goblin and wolf were also looking at it like they wanted to eat it. These guys are really omnivorous.

I broke off a piece for each of them and handed them over. Then I put the bread in my mouth. I could smell the faint fragrance of grapen. I guess that’s from the grapen extract.

It might be good to try combining any other new fruits I find later on. In any case, the bread was really good.

Although I was pretty satisfied with the result, it still had some work to be done on it. Next I made some bread relying entirely on cooking technique. …As expected the flavor was several times worse than before.

It was good. It was good but… It’s not enough! That’s how I felt. Just how much can I skip with cooking technique before the taste starts to noticeably slip? I tried confirming that next.

I started with the wheat. I finished threshing, milling it, and all that sort of thing. Then I kneaded some grapen extract into the bread and tried baking it. The result was, well, pretty much the same as the first batch I guess?

Alright this time I’ll leave getting the grapen extract to cooking technique… Like that I tried various combinations and in the end, well, I figured out that the flavor doesn’t really change that much as long as I do three parts of it. [TLN: yet to confirm if that’s three parts done of omitting three parts]

Personally, I’d like to skip the threshing and milling portion since those take both a lot of time and equipment to do. Other than that I was feeling pretty good about that day. It takes quite a bit of time to culture yeast cells from grapens. The same could be said about other things, but it takes three days.

However since I can preserve the extract to some extent, as long as I’m careful about it every day it’s not unmanageable. So I probably don’t need to leave that to cooking technique either.

So I guess I can just ignore threshing and milling then? That’s the conclusion I reached. …Eh, but it kind of feels like a waste of all the effort I went through making all the equipment for it. But I mean that was the best tasting line to satisfy me.

Since I was now able to make more bread I was pretty happy with everything. …There’s a lot more I’d like to make from now on. For example, in order to make some better bread I’ll need to get some milk. Since I can only really get milk from a cow I’d like to go tame a fang cow.

I’d also like some honey. A bee would know about making honey, so although it’s a bit scary, I’d also like to try taming a poison bee. As I tame more types of monsters I’ll also have a wider variety of materials I can collect. Perhaps if I tame something like a sahuagin I’ll be able to explore the ocean.

I guess I’ll try taming more monsters tomorrow. …I think it’ll be nice to leave training the new monsters to those two.

…I guess it’s about time I give them names. I let out a breath as I watched the two happily eating their bread.