Who gave this heretical practitioner permission to cook?

Chapter 206 Recognizing the Fragrance: The Pink Sky Peering Through the Clouds in the Afternoon. (First Update)
Inside the cave

After Xia Ming cut the mutton into pieces, he took a small piece and put it into the heated seawater in the pot.

Then close your eyes and slowly feel it.

He wasn't actually hungry yet; he was doing all this just to verify a hypothesis.

As the aroma of mutton gradually rose into the cave, Xia Ming began to form his own judgment.

"When it was first put into the pot, it had no freshness at all and you could smell the muttony smell. Because I had drained all the blood, the muttony smell was even more obvious."

"The seawater we used, due to its own salt content, masked some of the raw meat's fishy smell during the heating process. However, because of the heating, the seawater became even saltier, and this flavor was completely transferred to the mutton."

Sensing the information transmitted by the scent, Xia Ming subconsciously licked his palate lightly with his tongue.

Sensing the saltiness and a hint of umami emanating from above, a sudden realization dawned on him.

The magic skill unlocked by the fifth gate elevated his innate sense of smell from simple "sensitive" and "precise" to a level that could be linked with his sense of taste.

In other words, Xia Ming can determine the stage of food and its basic taste by smell.

Take seawater, for example.
Without adding mutton, the smell of seawater made his mouth feel salty. As the seawater boiled, Xia Ming perceived the saltiness to be even stronger.

For example, mutton.
Before it was cooked, when Xia Ming smelled the raw mutton, he felt a faint, slightly sweet taste on his palate, which was different from the strong mutton smell he usually smelled.

Because the former is taste, and the latter is smell.

As described before, the tongue can only taste the five most basic flavors (sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami), while the sense of smell is responsible for the rest.

Together, they make up more than 90% of the "taste" experience.

Before he could open the blood gate in his nose, Xia Ming could only determine the type, composition, and proportions of ingredients before mixing by their aroma.

In other words, when he smells the fish balls made by "Shuai Xiaojian", he can deduce a basic recipe based on the proportion of fish meat and spices in the fish balls, and then see the production method by sight.

But he couldn't smell the salt.

Because the taste of salt is essentially perceived by the sense of "taste," not the sense of "smell."

However, he can use known information to simulate the final texture and taste of the fish balls in his mind, and then find the derivative in reverse.

Ultimately, I calculated the salt ratio based on my own experience.

In this case, he can still obtain the recipe for "Handsome Little Sword", but this recipe may differ from the original recipe for "Handsome Little Sword" in terms of salt content.

If we really look into it...
Sui Wubai's skill "Seeking the Source of Flavor" can essentially be considered a weakened version of God's Tongue.

When he eats food, he uses the taste feedback from his tongue and the odor feedback from his nasal cavity, combined with his experience, to judge the ingredients used in the dish in front of him, and then works backward to deduce the recipe.

At this point, his judgment of the five flavors was absolutely accurate, meaning he could casually say things like "we need to add 2g more salt," "we need to add 5g less sugar," or "the umami flavor is not enough."

However, he is only slightly more sensitive to smells than the average person, on the same level as Maca, so he relies more on experience to judge the specific reasons for the fishy smell.

Xia Ming's situation was the opposite of Sui Wubai's.

He could accurately judge all situations related to smell and taste, except for the "five flavors".

He could smell the faint scent of blood hidden beneath the maca skewers, and whether the vinegar aroma in Sun Xingyao's pot was strong.
However, he cannot smell the taste of the food; he can only guess at its taste. This demonstrates the different functions of the "nose" and the "tongue."

But now, the magic he has acquired has made up for this very well.

After activating this magic skill, you can smell the aroma of the corresponding dish and taste its flavor, essentially skipping the tasting stage.

Xia Mingyuan calls it "smelling the aroma and recognizing the flavor".

This skill can not only be used to predict the taste of the opponent's dish in advance, but more importantly, it can be used to accurately judge the taste of the ingredients.

Suppose Xia Ming wants to pick a wild tomato. If he is blindfolded, he can determine the approximate location of the tomato by smell.

With his blood-red eyes open, he can filter out the tomato-shaped fruit hidden in the distance.

By combining the two, he can quickly find wild tomatoes.

However, he may not have seen this tomato variety before and cannot determine whether the tomato is sour or sweet based on experience.

Therefore, to know its taste, you have to try it.

Moreover, even if it's a taste test, there's no guarantee that all the wild tomatoes in this batch will have the same level of acidity or sweetness.

To be more precise, we might need to taste each one.
But now that he has the ability to "identify flavors by smell," he can quickly determine whether a wild tomato is sour or sweet by lightly licking his palate.

It's like cutting a tomato open and taking a bite.

After confirming this, Xia Ming was also very excited.

"This way, even when faced with ingredients I've never tasted before, I can quickly judge their flavor."

"For example, with 'Kava pepper,' I've only ever drunk the finished 'Kava' liquor; I have no idea what the original plant is."

"After I pick them, I need to taste them first."

"But now, I can tell roughly what the leaves smell like just by smelling them."

In his excitement, he also tasted the mutton in the pot that he had used for the experiment.

After a moment's thought, he discovered that this magical skill had some limitations and flaws.

First, the simpler the scent, the more accurate the taste feedback from the palate.

For example, when boiling only sea salt, he can accurately judge the saltiness.

Adding mutton made his judgment more comprehensive, but it slightly reduced his overall accuracy.

In other words, the stronger the complex flavor, the more likely his judgment is to be inaccurate. "However, there is no need to worry about this. Although it is impossible to reproduce it 100%, with the combination of smell and experience, it can be basically accurate."

In other words, with the ability to "recognize flavors by smell," Xia Ming has essentially evolved into a recipe replicator.

Just smell the ingredients before they go into the pot, and then smell the dish after it's cooked.

He can replicate a recipe based on his intuition, and this recipe may be more accurate than the conclusions drawn by Sui Wubai after tasting the dish.

Of course, some ingredients will undergo significant changes in taste and properties after being cooked.

In this respect, if Xia Ming has no knowledge of the original ingredients and only smells them without tasting them, he will definitely make mistakes.

Xia Ming is only at the fifth level now, which, according to the cultivation logic of the Blood Blade Sect in the Nine Provinces Continent, is not even considered a starting point.

As his blood soul increases and he breaks through more blood gates, he will naturally continue to strengthen it.

Feeling the occasional sea breeze seeping in from outside, and analyzing the various flavors of the surrounding ingredients, Xia Ming smiled slightly.

"Putting aside cooking techniques, I should now be on par with those people on Douyin who specialize in deciphering spice recipes."

However, most of those who cracked the code on Douyin (TikTok) did so in a laboratory setting, which not only requires specialized equipment but also makes it difficult to achieve more than 95% accuracy in the reproduction.

Because laboratory analysis of spices or compound seasonings generally involves multiple aspects such as "top notes", "base notes" and "base flavors".

Depending on the proportions of the chicken bouillon and seasonings, the maximum percentage is approximately 90%.

As for the later parts, they can only be made up for by the talents of exceptional individuals.

Therefore, to make up for the remaining 10%, the difficulty increases exponentially with each 1% improvement.

Now, Xia Ming only needs to have a basic understanding of the raw materials and take a few sniffs to achieve a minimum of 90% or more of the original content.

In other words, he alone is equivalent to an entire laboratory.
Of course, this ability cannot be used indefinitely.

It's not a matter of consumption, but rather that the flavors in the mouth can mix and blend together.

Of course, compared to this ability, these are minor issues.

After numerous experiments, Xia Ming basically determined the scope and limitations of his "scent recognition" ability.

So he found a place to dump the mutton and seawater used for the experiment.

Seeing such a wasteful scene, netizens fell silent.

[IP Eagle: Our country's chefs can't even fill their stomachs, and the meat of Chinese chefs is simply dumped! This is too much!]

[IP Hua: What's so excessive? It's reasonable for you to deal with the prey you hunted!]

[“IP Kangaroo”: Seawater is inedible, it’s too salty. I don’t know what he’s doing, is he just wasting meat?]

[IP Bear: I've heard that people in China have a tradition of seasoning their pots. Could it be that they're seasoning the pots with mutton broth?]

[IP Hua: That's not necessarily true. Seasoning is for cast iron pans, not Teflon non-stick pans!]

[IP Hua: Xibei! You need to keep several Teflon non-stick pans in one kitchen! (doge)]

Just as Xia Ming finished preparing the mutton pieces he needed and found the bread leaves to wrap them in.

On the other side of the island, Miao Zeyang was hugging a tree trunk, waiting for the wild boar below to leave.

He's not like Xia Ming, who can get a triple kill with just a broadsword. So the best way to deal with wild boars is to find a tree.

Although the danger has passed, the wild boars below just won't leave.

Looking at the sun in the sky, Miao Zeyang felt his head was about to explode.

"Don't be so patient, let's go already."

Just as he was agonizing over this, Mori took off her coat on the coastline.

As large swaths of skin were revealed under the sunlight, her live stream instantly reached a small climax.

Taking a deep breath, holding the harpoon she had redeemed, Mori took a few alluring poses before smiling and entering the sea.

Catching sea fish is much easier for her than catching land creatures, and she can also take the opportunity to give away some freebies—why not?
On the other hand, Maka discovered a pool of goat blood in the jungle.

Judging from the thickness of the infiltration, she believes that someone slaughtered a sheep here.

In an instant, Xia Ming's face appeared in her mind.

With a slight frown, she looked around and quickly determined the direction Xia Ming had left by the bloodstains.
After glancing in that direction twice, Maka ultimately decided not to follow, but instead headed in the completely opposite direction.

Just as Maka left, Xia Ming had already set up the "coconut leaf crab trap" he had made in the shallow water area of ​​the mangrove forest.

Due to the terrain features, the best time to catch sea crabs in Feiji is after the tide.

Xia Ming didn't have that much time to wait for the tide, so setting more traps became his best option.

But just as he finished setting the trap and was about to search for wild eggplants in the vicinity, he noticed a change in the wind direction.

Seeing this, he frowned slightly, then quickly found an open space to observe the celestial phenomena.

Suddenly, the afternoon sky became murky, and the clouds began to turn a faint pink, with their edges becoming somewhat blurred.

Seeing this, Xia Ming hurriedly headed towards the small cave.

"Judging from this weather pattern, a downpour is definitely coming within 40 minutes!"

"Whether we can get the other ingredients or not, we can see tomorrow, but if they get wet here, that would be a serious problem!"

(End of this chapter)