Chapter 114 Butter Crab

In the lobby of Po Wah Building in Mong Kok, a guest watched the show last night and wanted to eat sweet and sour pork and clay pot rice, but saw a blackboard at the door saying: "Today's Special: Chef Zhang Competition Set Meal."

This competition package is divided into meals for two and four people.

The meal for two included all the competition dishes, except that the shrimp balls and sweet and sour pork were in small portions. The soup was prepared according to the usual recipe, with the addition of stir-fried seasonal vegetables.

The special offer states that the conch slices are made from sea snails, the sweet and sour pork is made from pork tenderloin cubes, and the shrimps are prawns.

Foodies all know that conchs are more expensive than shells, shrimps are more expensive than prawns, and pork belly rolls are definitely better, but such a set meal only costs thirty-nine yuan.

The set meal for four people is based on the meal for two people. It comes with large portions of shrimp balls and sweet and sour pork, plus a set of three roast meats, and costs fifty-nine.

This price-performance ratio is unbeatable.

Even if you didn’t watch the show last night, you would order the set meal after seeing the price.

The aroma of clay pot rice filled the hall, which made the new guests decide to order the set meal.

Zhang Junming was busy in the kitchen: "Ningning is so mean, she wanted to transfer Abang to cook beef noodles, so she found this method. This is going to keep me busy to death!"

"Chef Zhang, you've become famous overnight. You're more famous than Ding Shengqiang and Lou Jiafu, and you're already the top chef at Baohualou." Chen Liangwei was serving the dishes and making fun of his junior fellow apprentice.

"Brother, are you laughing at me too?"

"Look at yourself in the mirror. You are smiling like Zhu Bajie seeing Chang'e, and you still say I am making fun of you."

When the customer at the front desk checked out, he found that he had ordered a set meal, but the price of each dish was clearly written, a meal for two people would cost 52 yuan, and a meal for four people would cost 97 yuan. This is a huge discount!

Wait, it seems like a meal for four is more cost-effective. If I can't finish it, can I take the roast meat away? After all, two hot dishes and one soup are twice as much!

The diners in front suggested to the diners behind that, except for those with smaller appetites, they should still order meals for two, while many customers chose meals for four.

Customers who order set meals in the hall have become the mainstream, saving customers the time of looking through menus and ordering dishes. For the kitchen, basically the same dishes are cooked in two or three portions in one pot, which saves time compared to stir-frying a single portion. The kitchen is under pressure but can cope with it.

Baohua Building is doing a booming business, and Ningyan is hosting a reception for the opening ceremony at noon.

At the Ning Banquet today, the poached chicken was the purest poached chicken, without any deliberate jelly. Yue Ning introduced that the chickens used were free-range castrated chickens from Wenchang. The chicken was tender and not pink, with a strong chicken flavor. The only fancy thing was that this poached chicken came with three flavors of dipping sauces: the traditional scallion and ginger flavor of Guangdong Province, the slightly sweet scallion, ginger and soy sauce flavor of Shanghai, and the spicy oil-splashed sauce of the Northwest.

Another amazing dish is the half-crusted blue crab for each person. This blue crab is not an ordinary blue crab. There is no crab meat inside, only full of yellow crab oil, with a dense and delicate taste. When you take a bite of crab roe into your mouth, the freshness and fragrance are unbeatable.

Almost no one has ever eaten such crab roe, and everyone is immersed in the wonderful taste.

An employee of the Baohua Building Management Company said: "I ate this kind of crab once when I was a child. My father caught it in Lau Fau Shan. This kind of crab is sick. Its roe has melted and it can't be sold at a good price in the market."

When those who had already eaten heard the word "sick crab", they suddenly felt very uncomfortable, and those who were eating stopped, wondering whether they should continue eating.

Yue Ning, who was toasting with a guest, heard this and went over to ask the employee, "Did your father catch crabs like this again?"

The clerk shook his head, probably realizing that he had said something wrong, and lowered his head again.

Yue Ning walked over and put his hand on the employee's shoulder: "You are right, this butter crab is indeed a sick crab, and it is a very sick blue crab."

After hearing her words, the originally noisy place suddenly became silent.

Yue Ning looked at everyone and said, "Blue crabs are at their plumpest in July and August of the lunar calendar. Female crabs at this time are the most delicious, full of red crab roe. Don't you have any doubts about this?"

"Yes!" said the president of the restaurant association, "this is the season when blue crabs are in season in large quantities."

"Let me tell you how this crab got sick." Yue Ning said with a smile, "This must be a greedy female crab. She ate a lot during the breeding season, and the crab roe filled the entire crab shell. At this time! She ran into the shallow water. The summer sun was very scorching, and she felt comfortable all over. She didn't realize that the danger had come. As the water temperature rose, the red and hard crab roe decomposed into butter, which soaked her whole body and even into the crab legs. She was indeed sick, and she couldn't complete the next molting and lay eggs. This is the origin of the butter crab. Then I ask everyone, where does French foie gras come from? Where does Japanese Wagyu come from?"

Yue Ning asked the employee with a smile. The employee shrank his head and said, "We are in the catering business, not pet doctors! Sometimes the deliciousness of ingredients comes from their morbidity. Goose liver is made from geese that can only eat one pound of grain a day. Five or six pounds of grain are fed into the geese by machines to fatten them up. The result is a liver full of oil. We eat its richness. The same is true for Wagyu beef, so the beef muscles are full of fat, making it a world-class ingredient. The principle of butter crab is actually the same as these two ingredients."

The clerk nodded repeatedly: "So that's how it is."

"Your father never caught this kind of crab again because it takes many coincidences for this kind of crab to form in nature. When it's hot, the fat crab runs to shallow water and is exposed to the high temperature. The crab paste melts and is caught by fishermen by chance. So it is very, very rare."

Yue Ning walked up to the leader of the import and export company and said, "Blue crab farming can be traced back to the Guangxu period, when rice farmers in Pengcheng and Taishan opened ditches in the fields and put blue crab seedlings in to let the blue crabs grow naturally in the fields. Blue crabs are also called He crabs, which is the "He" in "He seedlings". In order to enrich the dining tables of the people in the port city in recent years, and of course the main purpose is to make money, we in the mainland! We started large-scale blue crab farming. They accidentally discovered that this kind of crab is super delicious. So they specially collected this kind of crab and sent it to the port city, hoping to make it more delicious with my help. When I got it, I saw that good things only need to be simply cooked to present the original flavor. So today's steamed butter crab is here."

The head of the import and export company stood up and said, "Dear guests, I want to thank Ningning for her hard work in recommending our mainland ingredients. The more than 100 butter crabs we used today were collected from six crab farms in Guangdong Province after a week of hard work. Ningning said that more than half of them did not meet the standards."

Yue Ning pointed at the half crab in Yang Zhijie's hand and said, "This is just the butter that hasn't been completely melted. There's cream and oil in it."

"Eat it while it's hot. If it gets cold, it loses half its flavor. Goose liver can be stuffed with feed, but butter crabs are hard to come by. Ning Yan is celebrating its opening today and entertaining guests. The leaders from the mainland helped me collect so many crabs. If you want to eat crabs in the future, you need to make reservations in advance. People can only wait for the crabs, not the crabs waiting for them. When they deliver them to me, Ning Yan will notify the guests to come and eat."

After hearing Yue Ning's words, everyone lowered their heads and ate. The leaders of the import and export company were full of gratitude.

This season is when blue crabs are at their fattest. Hong Kong is also a blue crab producing area. Guangdong Province, which is adjacent to Hong Kong, is the main source of blue crabs for the Hong Kong market.

Yue Ning thought of the butter crabs that cost four or five thousand yuan per pound in his previous life.

In the past, butter crabs were a delicacy for Hong Kong gourmets. After tasting such delicious food in the mainland, they became popular in Hong Kong. From sick crabs that no one cared about, their prices rose rapidly and became the most expensive crabs in the world, bar none.

Yue Ning told the people at the import and export company that he wanted to look for such crabs. The people at the import and export company specially sent someone to talk to the crab farmers and found out that such crabs no longer had crab roe and would be regarded as unqualified sick crabs and would be picked out.

The import and export company asked the crab farmer to keep six or seven crabs and sent them to Yue Ning, saying that if she wanted them in the future, they would give her a discount.

How could Yue Ning dare to take advantage of this?

Yue Ning invited Mr. Zhou and the leaders of the import and export company to cook and steam the crabs himself.

Mr. Zhou is an expert, and he will not let go of even a drop of crab oil in the joints of the crab legs. He told the people at the import and export company that the crabs must be top-quality when the crab roe has turned into oil, and even the crab legs have oil mixed with the meat.

He commented on these crabs one by one, and the quality of the crabs classified by Mr. Zhou was almost the same. Yue Ning added a few words and decided to classify the butter crabs into several grades, purchasing them at five to twenty times the price of blue crabs, which scared the people of the import and export company.

Yue Ning insisted on purchasing at a high price, because even though the blue crab breeding technology was very mature in the previous life, the proportion of butter crabs was less than 1%.

Yue Ning explained to them: "This stuff is rare, you can't have it just because you want it. Scarcity makes things valuable, right? If the price is not high enough, how can the crab farmers carefully select and sell them to us? How can the crab farmers be motivated to fatten the crabs? From the perspective of Hong Kong's diners, Ningyan is a high-end restaurant, and diners are not short of money. If the price of the ingredients is not expensive enough, how can we live up to the status of these diners and make them willingly pay for it?"

Now the people of the import and export company believe that after tonight's banquet, their butter crabs will definitely become famous in the port city. Ningning has been working hard to sell their agricultural products at a good price.

After eating the butter crab, the next dish that came was fried macadamia nuts with celery and lily. The crispy macadamia nuts, refreshing celery and sweet and crispy lily were fried together, giving it a unique flavor.

The next dish is the highlight, the traditional pheasant roll with white truffle.

It is said that the pheasant roll was created by the family chef of Huang Jian, a scholar of the Hanlin Academy in the Ming Dynasty. In the 1920s, a Cantonese chef looked through the recipe and used pork instead of pheasant meat to make the pheasant roll in Cantonese cuisine.

This time, Yue Ning restored the ancient method and used chicken and pork fat to make the pheasant roll. After it was out of the pot, a thin slice of white truffle was shaved on it, and the residual heat of the pheasant roll was used to stimulate the charming aroma of the white truffle.

White truffles have a strong aroma similar to garlic, but different from garlic. They are compounded with fruity and floral scents. Paired with the crispy and delicate pheasant roll, it really tastes great.

But the president of the catering association shouldn't be so cautious, right? The president also told her: "It's still a little early for white truffles at this time. If you wait another month, the rich aroma..."

Yue Ning couldn't help but sigh that some people are still superstitious about the top-quality European ingredients!