Food starts with Mapo Tofu

Chapter 870
Hearing Li Xu's words, Chen Nian was shocked.

"Can you still do this?"

But he changed his mind and thought again, what is the identity of the emperor?Can you call the most powerful chefs in the world to your side in one sentence?
Although they all pay attention to masters, if the emperor orders them to teach themselves how to cook, then they have to come and teach obediently.

Even if you don't want to, the most you can do is say that you are not good enough.

But certainly not everyone does.

"Even if it's a bit unethical."

"But it works."

Old age is crazy.

"Your Majesty, I am willing."

In this case, a fool would refuse.

What's more, Chen Nian's original purpose was to learn more dishes. I thought that I could learn a few more banquets after I came in this time, and it would be enough to learn all about the Tan family cuisine, but I didn't expect to develop At this moment, there is still such an opportunity.

"Well, the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Household..."

"I'd better go to the Ministry of Household Affairs." Chen Nian said, although Meng Tie of the Ministry of Industry has a good relationship with him, but Meng Tie is a servant after all, not the highest officer of this department, and some things are still a bit inconvenient .

But the household department is different.

The boss of the household department is related to him, and he lives in Haifu every time he returns from the palace on vacation, so it must be easier to work with his own people.

What's more, the Ministry of Households has money, if you need a lot of things, you can just talk to Hai Shaowen directly, otherwise, if you go to the Ministry of Industry, if you need funds, you have to apply to the Ministry of Households or the emperor through the Ministry of Industry.

Approved to get money.

In addition to the above-mentioned things, the main reason is that he heard that there is something wrong with the submission of the Ministry of Industry, which means that even if the funds can be applied for at that time, if they are not guaranteed, they will have to be taken by Lord Shangshu. walk a part.

Meng Tie couldn't stop this.

But it would be much better in the household department. Although Hai Shaowen also took it, he would definitely not take his own part, because it was unnecessary.

The person in charge of the money of the entire Great Xia Dynasty would not reach out for a few hundred taels.

Therefore, Chen Nian was finally assigned to the household department.

And at the household department, a courtyard was also vacated for Chen Nian, which was about the same size as Chen Nian's laboratory in the palace.

There is also a kitchen directly set up in the adjacent yard, which is also specially used for aging.

The current old age is the treasure of the Great Xia Dynasty, and all conditions must be met as much as possible, not to mention building a laboratory in the Ministry of Households and adding a kitchen. Even if it is old, it needs a small piece of land now. Li Xu will give it all.

Of course, if Chen Nian makes such a request, Li Xu will take back the land when he has no use value in the future.

In order to allow Chen Nian to do experiments with peace of mind, Li Xu transferred Song Qingzhou directly after letting Chen Nian take office in the household department, and asked him to stay here to teach Chen Nian how to cook. After teaching, return to the palace.

If Song Qingzhou can successfully complete this task, Song Qingzhou will be promoted to a third-rank official of the Imperial Dining Room at that time.

"Apprentice, do you think I have ascended to heaven with you?"

"It's only been a year before and after, and now I can already see Sanpin waving to me."

"Master, how can this be your apprentice, I will take you to heaven. It should be said that you have eyes like pearls, and I am at most a piece of rough jade."

"Then your piece of jade is too precious. It is a third-rank official. Back then, our patriarch was a third-rank official in the imperial court."

"Master, the third rank is the third rank. Maybe you can do higher in the future, but even if we become a first-rank official, after returning to the Tan Mansion, if the master wants to scold us, he can just open his mouth."

"That's right. A master is a master. No matter how high an official is, you must never forget your roots."

"That's right, Master is right."

But Song Qingzhou thought of a new question at this time: "Apprentice, His Majesty wants you to do the experiment now, right? In order to let you do the experiment with peace of mind, I specifically told you who you want to learn cooking from when the time comes. He will arrange for someone to teach you any cuisine..."

Chen Nian heard Song Qingzhou's meaning: "Master, I like being a chef so much. You also know that besides our Tan family's cuisine, I also know many other local cuisines. My dream is to learn the whole world's cuisine one day. All dishes, but no matter what in this world, you are the most important master in my mind."

Song Qingzhou watched with his own eyes that Chen Nian had gained His Majesty's absolute trust from a small helper by his side to now.

"Jinlin is not a thing in the pond. It is impossible to keep Chen Nian around all the time. Although there are a lot of Tan family dishes, they are not that many, and they don't have the ability to include all other cuisines.

Chen Nian is very gentle most of the time, and is very polite to everyone. Song Qingzhou has more contact with Chen Nian than everyone else, so he can feel that sometimes Chen Nian's ambitions are really too big.

Every dish that passes through the hands must be learned.

Except for those dishes that are easy to understand at a glance, as long as they are a little complicated and you don’t understand them when you look at them, they will be directly used to ask questions later.

So now all he wants is an old attitude.

No matter what dishes you learn in the future, as long as you go out to age, you will be the successor of the Tan family cuisine.

"Well, Chen Nian...let's work hard and learn more." Finally Song Qingzhou said so.

"Thank you Master, I will definitely do well."

After that, Chen Nian will stay here to do research.

Now, the subject in his hand has three directions.

The first direction is to continue to cultivate potatoes and sweet potatoes, because he knows that if these two are developed maturely, the yield of several thousand catties per mu will not be a problem at all.

The second direction is the food seasoning.

The existing salt and sugar are still a bit rough, and there are many impurities in them, so the current stage of aging is to further purify these seasonings.

Anyway, if you need any materials, you can ask the Ministry of Industry.

The third direction is to develop new crops.

Chen Nian roughly drew several crops based on his own understanding, and these can be used as the main food for future generations.

If they are collected, Aging will start to study how to increase the yield per mu of these crops.

Because only by continuously producing research results, can one's own laboratory be preserved.

Another year later, after years of cultivation and research, the production of potatoes and sweet potatoes increased again.

This time, the entire imperial field was filled with these two crops, but even so, there were still quite a few left in the warehouse.

But if these potatoes and sweet potatoes are sold, it won't cost much at all, but it will be different if they are planted.

So Li Xu called Hai Shaowen, Chen Nian, and the main officials in charge of these parts of the palace to chat for a while.

The final conclusion was to distribute these potato tubers to the common people for free.

And not only is planting free, as long as they grow potatoes or sweet potatoes in their own land according to the requirements of the court, not only will they be exempted from taxes in the coming year, they can even get some grain as compensation.

Even the potatoes that grow in the end, the court will send people to collect money.

But this kind of activity will only last for three years, and there will be no such rewards after three years.

But under such a policy, there are still many people who don't know what it is, and choose to plant the previous crops, but some people still want to try their luck, follow the direction planned by the imperial court, and grow potatoes in their own fields Or sweet potatoes.

Every piece of land planted with potatoes and sweet potatoes is inspected to see if the planting distance meets the standard.

In the follow-up process, the imperial court will also send people to conduct random inspections to see whether these potato and sweet potato seedlings will be attacked by insects.

These strategies were agreed upon by Chen Nian, Hai Shaowen, and Li Xu.

Because the growth of potatoes is indeed developing in a good direction as the old man said.

Now the imperial court does not need to pay more at all, let the common people grow potatoes and exempt them from taxes, it is not much at all.

Because there are only so many potatoes left.

As for finally rewarding those farmers with some food and spending money to recycle potatoes from them, this is just equivalent to the imperial court paying some money for them to grow potatoes.

According to the number of tubers planted now, it is more than enough to recycle hundreds of thousands of catties of potatoes in the coming year.

At that time, part of it will be sold, and then part of it will be taken out for interested farmers to plant. As for the remaining part, it will continue to be taken to the towns around the capital to continue this model.

At that time, the money for collecting potatoes and giving out food can be fully earned by selling potatoes.

Because potatoes are a rare item at this time, it is normal to sell them more expensive.

When potatoes flooded the market on a large scale, and the price dropped and remained at a certain level, the imperial court would no longer need to spend money to promote planting.

At that time, people who have tasted the sweetness or want to join the group will naturally find their own way.

Even at that time, when new potatoes with higher yields are cultivated here in the old age, they can in turn generate income for the court.

Looking at the laboratory animals in the laboratory who are happy for this year's bumper potato harvest and promoting potatoes to be planted, Chen Nian's heart has already thought of other places.

"Now the Great Xia Dynasty mainly uses silver and copper coins for transactions. These two metals are quite stable, but their mining is limited."

"Up to now, the gold standard or the oil standard is generally used, and such resources are generally controlled by those powerful countries.

Now that there are so many potatoes in the Great Xia Dynasty, I wonder if it can be made into a potato standard?Then take these things to trade with foreign countries...

When they come to buy things, they take their silver, and if they come to sell things, they take potatoes as a transaction. "

But after Chen Nian thought about it for a while, he felt that it was too difficult. Potatoes will only grow more and more in the end, and this is not a non-renewable resource. Others can also plant it after taking it back.

If the potatoes are really bound to the currency, it will not be as good as it is now in the end.

But... the potato standard?
"Hahaha, I'm such a genius, I can think of such a thing, but unfortunately it's not very practical."

In this way, Chen Nian continued to stay here. Although he had already left the imperial dining room, his workload only increased.

Every day in the laboratory, he studies all kinds of seasonings that did not exist in ancient times. In addition, he also plans to study additives in food. If additives can be invented, the shelf life of food can be greatly increased .

In the laboratory on the other side, Chen Nian also has to study the new generation of potatoes and improved varieties of sweet potatoes every day, and strive to achieve an early yield of [-] catties per mu of sweet potatoes and [-] catties per mu of potatoes.

That is to say, Chen Nian had carefully looked at this aspect at the beginning, and with the support of the court, he also had the capital and room for trial and error, otherwise it would be difficult to make these improvements based on aging alone.

On the other side, after Song Qingzhou lost his job as an imperial cook, what he thought about every day was how to hand over all the dishes he knew to Chen Nian. Now this has become his main job.

Apart from this matter, he only needs to help the officials of the household department to cook every day.

But he was supposed to teach Chen Nian how to cook every day, and he learned several dishes every day, and the dishes he made happened to be shared by everyone in the household department.

Anyway, now Li Xu has given Chen Nian great authority, as long as the ingredients proposed by Chen Nian and Song Qingzhou in learning dishes, they will be delivered that morning.

It's just that Chen Nian is busy here, and Lu Ke has not given up on her dim sum shop.

Although she is already married to the son of Hubu Shangshu, it will be inconvenient for her to show her face in the future, but she can still control her as the boss behind the scenes.

Before she left, she handed over all the skills in her hands to the few masters in the shop who were not bad at the craft.

And within two years, opened three more branches in the capital, and recruited a lot of associates.

The master chefs of these three branches are also the ones who got the dim sum recipe from Lu Ke.

They were originally from the Fu Xin faction, but now they have completely become members of the Hai family, and no one dares to betray. After all, it is not a joke to offend the Minister of the Household Department.

Even if people don't show up, if they say a word casually, there will always be people who will punish themselves.

In addition, Lu Ke also recruited a lot of people under Jiang Bai's suggestion, and initially set up forty breakfast stalls in Chang'an. One makes hamburgers, another ten sells pancakes, and the last ten sell traditional breakfasts such as fritters and pancakes.

In addition to selling their own special breakfasts, the top [-] breakfast stalls also provide soy milk, but it is too time-consuming for them to cook soy milk, so Chen Nian came up with a central kitchen model and opened a soy milk The workshop does nothing here. The daily task is to make soy milk for the forty breakfast stalls.

And this is just Chen Nian's preliminary idea, and he wants to come up with more types of breakfast in the future.

Then gradually turn these stalls into one store after another.

The current stores are their own directly-operated stores. In the future, people from other cities need to join if they want to come to learn technology, or move this model completely.

At the same time, when this business system is mature, it can develop into other industries, and these are also the powers in the hands of my sister. Although my sister is now from the Hai family, but I have money and can only spend it from the Hai family. The money is different.

Even if Hai Mingxian loves his sister very much now, it is hard to guarantee that other members of the Hai family will say something else about her in the future.

In the end, these business systems were not only run by my sister, Chen Nian also planned to let Fu Xin do it in the future. If a person is only an official, he can only bet that children can also become talents in the end.

But as long as the family has enough property, even if the child is not suitable to be an official in the future, he can turn his head to do business and live a good life. Women can marry the court, but boys only need to wait until there is a man who is also suitable for an official in the future. Man can rise again.

It started with a small family and gradually developed into a big family.

(End of this chapter)