4th round

After the announcement of the remaining contestants, Eira allowed them to distribute the remaining food with each other and taste the food of their opponents. That would give them the chance to see what they could make better in the future. Also, they had a chance to talk to each other and make some connections. Eira also stayed with them to get to know the contestants better.

"Miss Morgan! Miss Morgan, wait!" The female cook from earlier came running to her. Eira turned around to wait for her to catch up.

"Yeah what is it?" She asked.

"Miss Morgan. I am Fabiola Beaufort. Thank you for letting us enter the 4th round. It means a lot to me... us." Fabiola bowed lightly to her.

"Don´t thank me. You have to thank your teammates for that. You all had achieved that together." She smiled at the girl.

"Yeah, you are right. Still, I wanted to thank you for this great opportunity. You are truly an amiable person I look up to." Fabiola Beaufort smiled at Eira happily. She then bid her goodbye and went back to her group and tapped a guy on the shoulder. He turned around and looked at her. She started to talk cheerfully to him. Eira didn´t bother about that and continued to talk to some of the board members that came to watch the competition. They were very satisfied with her latest achievements and became excited to see the winner of this cooking competition. Another good thing was that in the last few days their stock rates had risen a significant amount.

Also was also satisfied with the results. She could imagine how much better everything will get when she had her final winner in a few days.

The next morning was the 4th round of the competition.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Only fifty contestants remained. Today we will select our top ten. Today's task is... reproduce this dish that I am going to reveal in a few seconds. I think I don´t have to explain more to that. We have all sorts of ingredients for you to work with even those you probably don´t need... but who knows? You could give us a surprise. Remember to play fair and stay respectful to each other. Now then let´s show you which dish you should reproduce."

Eira went to the silver tray that Helen held for her and then put off the lid of it.

The crowd gasped in surprise.

There were two noodle dishes on it.

One was called su filendeu. An Italian style noodle. It was very thin and laid on a round wooden board to dry and then broken into pieces to put it into soups. It´s so thin that there is only one person in the world who could make 256 threads out of the dough. Even the biggest chef struggle to make them.

The second dish was soba noodles. Also very simple to use but very hard to make the noodles themselves. 100% buckwheat flour is used for the soba noodles. The difficulty is that buckwheat flour doesn´t have gluten so it won´t come together that easily and it breaks very fast if you are not careful. There are only a few masters who can handle 100% buckwheat flour. The soba noodles you usually buy in the grocery store are often buckwheat flour mixed with regular flour so that they could be handled easier.

These two noodles the contestants have to recreate. Each one of the contestants gets a small sample of the two dishes to taste them so that they get a rough idea of how they are supposed to be.

Not an easy task.

Eira gave the starting signal and everyone scattered to the ingredient table to look for the right ones to recreate one of those two noodles. Meanwhile, Eira sat down in between the Italian and Chinese cook. The Italian cook looked especially excited today.

"Miss Morgan the su filendeu is a very hard task. It needs a lot of experience to handle them. How can you expect them to recreate it? But actually, I am very excited to see if there is someone who could make them here." The cook smiled to himself and started to observe the contestants. The Chinese cook also had started to observe the contestants and smiled to himself.

"I think we will lose a lot of them. There is no way they can manage that but we should never underestimate them. Don´t you think Miss Morgan?"

Eira nodded in agreement.

"Actually there is someone who had to make those two types of noodles... well he almost perfected both of them. ALMOST" Eira grinned.

The two chefs looked at her in disbelieve.

"Who?" They said simultaneously.

"Well I don´t want to brag but that was my father. Like I said he had trained many years at many places to achieve so many things."

The two chefs looked at her dumbfounded.

"So your father was a true genius. A master of noodles?"

"Yes."

"Did he hand down his skills to anyone? To you maybe?" They curiously asked.

Eira just smiled at them silently and shrugged her shoulders. The two chefs could interpret her gesture how they like but she won´t tell them any more than that.

For this round, the contestants were given two hours. The preparation didn´t take that long but Eira was sure that they would need the extra time to experiment a little. She continued to chat with the two chefs and observe the contestants that were bustling before them.

On some faces, there was already despair visible. They were ruffling their head and grumbling to themselves. Someone who didn´t seem to be bothered at all was the one guy who was wearing a face mask. He calmly worked on his dough and was jotting down some notes. What was so amazing was that he really was meticulously measuring every little gram of flour he added. Everything was noted and then he started to knead his dough until it formed a ball. After that, he laid it on his work surface and rolled it out. Eira could see that he was trying to make the soba noodles. Out of the two noodle types, the soba noodles would be the easier one to make because you could "cheat" by adding normal flour to it so it would be easier to handle. But this guy didn´t do that. He only used buckwheat flour. He quickly rolled out the dough in a rectangular shape by using his rolling pin. It didn´t get into a perfect rectangular shape but that didn´t matter to him. He started to fold it in and then started to cut the noodles. He rhythmically cut the soba noodles and then put them into the hot cooking water. After they were cooked through he placed the noodles immediately into ice water to stop the noodles from cooking further. Then he tried them. He shook his head and set the noodles aside and started to make a new batch of noodles.