The Phantom French Bread
「Whoa!」
I scooped up the snow with a square shovel and tossed it onto the curb where it wouldn't be in the way.
At the moment, I was in the midst of some light snow shoveling.
Here in Regor, snow doesn't pile up as much as it does in Japan's snow country, so I don't have to be overly meticulous. Still, I wanted to clean up the area around the inn where I lived.
The inn was short-handed, so I thought it would be difficult for them. Besides, I wouldn't deny that it was a way to earn some goodwill.
「Oh, thank you as always, Mongrel-san,」 the innkeeper said.
「That much will do just fine.」
「No, no, don't mention it,」
I replied.
「I'm a guild member, and I have strength to spare. Let's call it a day for now. If it snows again, there's no end to it.」
The innkeeper, who ran the inn where I was staying, had been managing almost all of the work by herself since she lost her husband to illness six years ago.
She had a daughter about 15 years old, a second daughter around 10, and a six-year-old son who was bawling the other day when his crab got cooked. The eldest daughter was quite earnest in helping her mother, but she mostly spent her time looking after her younger siblings.
After her husband passed away, the range of work she could do narrowed.
With the jack-of-all-trades husband gone, some of the cooking recipes were lost, and heavy labor became difficult, causing the inn's original services to decline.
As a result, the inn's reputation had fallen a bit, but that desolate atmosphere was convenient for me when I was looking for a place to stay in Regor.
I had been renting a room for the past six years. Before I came to this inn, I had been staying at various inns, but it had been difficult because I could never secure a long-term place.
The situation suited both my desire to stay long-term at an inn and the innkeeper, who couldn't offer many services but desperately wanted customers. This mutual benefit led to our present arrangement.
... Come to think of it, I'd been in Regor for quite some time now.
Six years at 『Skoll's Inn』, and I wandered from one inn to another in Regor for about two years before that... Eight years in Regor already? Time flies.
I almost forgot, but when I was 21, I decided to make this my base of operations. Now I'm 29? Damn, soon my stomach might start rejecting greasy food. I'll transform into a creature that prefers lean meat and fish dishes...
「Mongrel-san, you should find a good woman soon. You look youthful for your age.」
「Haha...」
Aunties are hard on the unmarried everywhere.
「How about our Julia? She's a bit noisy, but...」
「Mom! Stop saying irresponsible things, would you!?」
Julia's voice rang out from inside the inn as she tried to put a stop to her mother's limitless auntie energy.
Indeed, these sorts of conversations are usually more of a nuisance for the subjects involved than anything else.
By the way, julia's reaction wasn't some kind of tsundere act.
Recently, she had been getting along well with a boy around her age, so she was genuinely bothered and thus yelled in protest.
An old-timer must never misinterpret this, especially with the young ones.
「Well, I'll head back to my room then...」
「Oh, Mongrel-san, wait a moment! Take this before you go! Let me see, where was it...」
The innkeeper hurried into the kitchen.
I could hear shouting with her eldest daughter back and forth about something. They didn't have a bad relationship, just a loud one. It was their usual thing.
After a while, the innkeeper returned, carrying a ceramic jar.
「There you go, remember I talked about this before? White flour! My relatives gave it to us especially, but we don't really bake bread here, so I don't know what to do with it.」
「Seriously?」
White flour? This was honestly thrilling.
If it had been some random pickled vegetables, I would have put on a brave face to thank them without really meaning it.
「It's just a bit, but please use it! You're working on another one of your crazy inventions, right? Feel free to use it for that!」
「Haha... ah, thank you.」
「Not like the hard one from before but make something a bit more delicious this time!」
The innkeeper patted my back repeatedly before heading back into the inn.
... Alright then. Well, that's nice.
At any rate, I managed to get my hands on some pure white flour.
「Now. Has the time come at last?」
In my room at the inn, I laid out the ingredients, crossing my arms.
Bread. It's a staple food in this country as well.
However, the bread here doesn't use pure white wheat, and it has a strange smell, is hard, makes you thirsty... It doesn't really suit a modern person's taste in many ways.
Honestly, I personally didn't mind. Even if I didn't like the taste, the nutritional value was good. It has more healthy components than the pure white stuff. If I think of it as health food, I can normally...
But acting all stoic and pretending not to care was tiring, so today, I decided to bake some bread myself.
The bread I planned to make today was French bread.
It's an ultra-simple (not simple at all) bread that can be made with flour, water, salt, and yeast.
What makes it great is that you don't need pricey ingredients from this world, like eggs or sugar. That's definitely a plus.
Due to needing to heat it by the fireplace, the traditional long baguette shape would be difficult. So, I thought I'd go with a batard, around 40-50 cm long, this time.
Although the ingredients for this French bread were simple, the process involved quite a bit of waiting.
Blending the flour well with water and allowing it to ferment takes time. However, putting in the effort and care would result in a highly delicious French bread. It was mostly for personal enjoyment; not something you do on your own.
During this time, fermenting near a fireplace and storing the dough to refrigerate it in the snow were flexible methods that worked in my favor. It's the best season for expressing adventurous culinary spirit.
However, baking in other worlds comes with several challenges.
The main one being sealing. When fermenting the dough, you cover the bowl with plastic wrap, something that obviously doesn't exist in this world. You could cover it with a skin, place a board on top, and add weights, but there's a more elegant solution.
「Hehehe... Everything's perfect with this beeswax wrap...」
Beeswax wrap. Simply put, it's a piece of cloth soaked with beeswax, harvested from honeycombs.
Under normal conditions, it remains solid, but it softens with body heat and gradually becomes pliable.
When you cover a bowl with a softened beeswax wrap, fold the edges along the container, and behold! The container is neatly wrapped.
I could have marketed this as an invention as Lord of Chaos, but since the price of beeswax doesn't seem to drop even with an increase in honey production, I've been holding back on revealing this idea product.
I wish beeswax would become more common... The wealthy are quick to turn it into candles, and that's a hassle. Just go to bed early at night.
「Now, it's finally time for this one to do its job.」
The beeswax wrap had another task.
That would be this wrapped ceramic container.
It contained fruit mixed with sugar or flour to create one of the essential items for raising bread... yeast.
Of course, there was no such thing as dry yeast in this world. It was commonplace to create natural yeast from scratch using fruit.
And natural yeast wasn't something you could sell to others. So you couldn't find it anywhere; you had to make it yourself.
Yeah, it was a hassle to periodically add flour and shake it up. Yet, thanks to the beeswax wrap, the task felt relatively easier. The container wasn't made of glass, so I had to frequently open it to check inside. At those times, having the wrap was handy.
Yep. That's about all I needed to prepare.
I just had to start the bread-making process now.
... Whether it's putting butter on French bread or soaking it in ajillo, it's all good.
The possibilities were endless...
「Now then, let's check on the natural yeast...」
Excitedly, I peeled the wrap off the container filled with natural yeast.
「... Ah.」
Inside, where the natural yeast should have been, a flourishing world of mold greeted me.
Creating natural yeast had ended in a complete failure.
「... Alrighty, no more French bread! Time to make focaccia! Let's switch gears!」
That day, I resorted to making focaccia, a kind of unleavened bread that I wasn't particularly fond of, munched on it listlessly, and went to bed grumpily.
The next day, when I shared some focaccia with the innkeeper, her response was a mere, 「Hmmm, I guess it's alright.」
I couldn't help but agree. It's not that I dislike focaccia or anything...