PATRIARCH FOWL
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Casual Heroing, Chapter 87
🕑 Added 2023-04-06 19:34:21 +0000 UTCRead-y Link (Mobile Optimized Reader)
WORKING ENCHANTMENTS OUT! 🤖🤖🤖
4/4 chapters this week!
Next chapter comes out on Tuesday! Sorry, but my mom is visiting Sunday/Monday/Tuesday.
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Chapter 87 – Pastry Bagging
“Bronze is not actually the best element to work food with,” I tell Tiberius and Quintus as we walk toward Happy Bakery.
I slept for quite a bit after I came home.
I had wanted to practice more magic because I suddenly had the inspiration to use the spinning principle of the Second Cantrip to figure out a better way to move the pot of the bread mixer, but then, I just collapsed on the bed for ten hours.
“So, you can’t use lead?” Tiberius and Quintus were surprised by the revelation.
“Nope. Lead is extremely toxic. Food in contact with lead for a long time will eat into your brain slowly but inexorably. Gold, titanium—which is this blueish metal—and a few other elements are suitable for food. Steel is pretty good. Bronze is also not toxic for what we are going to do, but it’s not optimal either. Actually, bronze was used for a very long time where my parents come from to make pasta. If some [Blacksmith] here can figure out stainless steel, then that would be the best option. Until someone does, bronze it is!”
“So, a bread mixer is a…” Tiberius looks confused.
“A thing that mixes bread. It has a spiral and a rotating bowl. The spiral reaches to the bottom of the bowl and mixes up the bread.”
“What use is that?” Quintus scoffs. “And who’s going to crank the lever all night? Isn’t it better to just do it by hand?”
“HA! That’s what you would think, wouldn’t you? But guess who figured out how to do that withoutmanually operating the whole thing?” I give Quintus my custom wink while Tiberius is still trying to wrap his head around the bread mixer.
“But how does a spiral fold the bread like you taught us?” My wooden-legged friend asks.
“Don’t worry, Tib; I’ll show you. Oh, and by the way, can you two come with me to the camp in the morning? I wanted to check on Truffles. I’ve been postponing that for a few days.”
…
There’s something about baking that is incredibly hard to describe to people. I don’t know if it’s about feeding others or seeing their expressions when they’re about to be fed. At this very moment in the bakery, everyone is looking at the huge machine Raul is putting together. I gave him instructions just to assemble the base for the moment so that I could put down the first of the two enchantments.
“Joey,” Clodia comes to me with a big wooden spoon in her hand. “I just got the invoice for that. You have three minutes to make your case before I take one of those lumps of metal and smash it into your head.”
“You know,” I tell the big woman, “I would almost take offense if you didn’t make it sound thatsexy. But anyway, the big lump of metal is a bread mixer—or a kneader. Whatever you want to call it. It’s pretty much going to make every single kneading skill useless. The big spiral that you see and the massive pot of copper can make all the Altamura bread we need. Also, I was thinking about a gold coating for the spiral and the bowl thing if you think that the bakery is safe enough. Copper is good, but not great. Well, I’ll leave you to work out the math anyway.”
“You are saying that that thing will knead all the bread?”
“I mean, it could pretty much knead anything. Since it’s so big, we would need huge batches of stuff to knead to have the thing work to its highest potential. But yeah. I can also have someone build it on a smaller scale for cakes and pastries.”
“And how does it work?” Clodia frowned. “Didn’t you bring Claudius here two days ago? I remember Flaminia telling me that. Claudius told you this cannot be done.”
“Well, it cannot be done by him,” I correct her. “I am pretty sure I can make it work. I just need to make sure my Enchanting is up to par. Honestly? On paper, it looked fantastic, and I could effortlessly power the whole thing since it’d be just some simple Light Magic.”
I see Clodia starting to tremble.
“Joey. For all the rot on the World’s Tree. What do you mean, on paper?!”
…
Well, that got heated.
Apparently, raw metals and speedy commissions do cost a pretty penny. If this thing doesn’t actually work, I might need to reimburse it completely. Clodia told me I am actually missing several dozens of golds to reimburse it. This begs the question: how much does making a machine like this even cost?!
But alas, the question is useless because if this enchantment doesn’t work, I swear on all the pink aprons in this bakery and all my gold buttons that I will burn the stupid book—
ZAP!
Damn it!
Again?
HOW?!
I take a few deep breaths to calm myself down and see that Raul has now assembled the base of the rotating pot. I approach him, and he gives me a nod.
“You can start the Enchanting you need to do.”
“Alright, alright. Lemme have some space.”
Everyone who’s been snooping around takes a few steps back from the humongous bread mixer, and I take a pastry bag out of my bag of holding before filling it up with powdered Mana Stone.
“Is he using a fucking pastry bag to enchant?!”
I hear Clodia’s cries from behind and swallow.
Well, listen, I haven’t actually tried enchanting with a pastry bag. You would usually take a few brushes and a scalpel to make sure that the lines are the way you want them. But there’s no other tool in the whole world I’m more precise with than a pastry bag. You could pitch me against a DaVinci surgery robot, and I’d still be able to perform anything that involves squeezing stuff out of a tube more precisely with my own two hands and a lil’ pastry bag.
But yeah, it is fair that Clodia and the others would doubt it.
Let them.
They didn’t call my decoration technique 4D sculpting without reason.
One deep breath.
And then.
[Advanced Mana Sense]
Abruptly, I move my sharpened eyes to the long bar of metal and its circular, flat core. As I do, I feel people backing off even more without me having said anything this time. The same way it happened during the bake-off, time slows down to a crawl as I remove my finger from the beak of the pastry bag and start squeezing out powdered Mana Stone mixed with some alchemical thingy that makes its consistency similar to a glaze.
Even though my memory usually works terribly, all the years of decorating cakes and baking have made it bulletproof when it comes down to recipes and compositions. I can actually recall all the decorations I have made throughout my life if they bear any significance. In the same way, I remember the blueprints I made for this rune’s conduits of power.
When the first line of powdered, glazed Mana Stone hits the circular plate at the center of the bar, my hands have already moved in three different directions. The lines take shape even before they touch the steel. Thanks to [Advanced Mana Sense], I can see the conduits of power and even slightly adjust them when one of them seems to have created a slight ripple; the adjustment is instinctual, something I didn’t even need to think about. It’s like pieces perfectly falling into their places inside a jigsaw.
Unlike a cake, where the decoration process is quite long, I find myself being done with this after barely ten seconds. Most of the Mana Stone’s conduits of power have evaporated, and the rest coalesced to form the actual rune that will power the machine.
Suddenly, a deep thought hits me as I see the Rune glowing, resembling exactly the one I had sketched on paper.
If I ever get a baking class and a [Flirt] class that someone mentioned to me, could I combine them to form [Sugar Daddy]?
…
The Runes work. Both do. The one that makes the bowl spin and the one that makes the spiral… spiral.
There’s not one bit of a jagging movement. The spiral and the pot spin as they are supposed to. I called Clodia to be the muscle and carry all the semolina flour we need, together with some water chilled atop runes, the semolina-based mother yeast, a little pinch of sugar, and salt.
“Mix the salt in a bowl of cold water. You can put the flour and mother yeast at once, let them combine a little, and then, we slowly add the cold water little by little.”
The machine whirls pretty silently for being a humongous being of metal. It’s roughly five feetfootsix. While taking into consideration the little volume occupied by the spiral and the straight bar of metal that goes down the pot to force the bread into the spiral, the whole thing can go up to 500 pounds.
Usually, with dough mixers, you have to be careful what the transmission is made of. Belts, unlike chains, pick up much more heat and are definitely not what you want to go for. Chains, being metal, retain much less heat, for example.
“So, yeah. Just keep pouring the water in and let it combine. I am the only person who can turn off the enchantment for the moment. I haven’t designed a button-like thingy yet. I can do that later, though.”
Clodia looks at the spiral working the dough and the mother yeast in awe as Quintus slowly puts in more water every minute.
“I can top up the Mana with no further expenses too. Again, this is not super elegant. This is more like a prototype. We can get more done to scale up the production. One will not be enough to make all the bread at once. Six of these? Four cycles and, if my math is correct, we have enough bread for twenty thousand families on our hands. At that point, it’s more a matter of getting it all worked and cooked. But we have enough employees that will now have way more free time on their hands. Once you scale a delivery system, the mother yeast production, and—”
Before I can continue, Clodia comes up to me and gives me a soul-crushing hug.
“Rotten roots, Luciani! You are a fucking marvel!”
“Ouch! Ouch!” I emit some strangled sounds. “You are kinda crushing me!”
Not that I don’t like it, though.
Post chapter:
I recommend checking this video out if you are curious about professional mixers. Joey's technically making an industrial grade one which would have three spirals in most cases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD0q0xj5gwk
Comments
Fortunis
Seriously though, I want to see a giant Stay Puffed style Bread Golem 😆 🤣 he could make self delivering Golem Cakes 😆 🤣
Fortunis
Yes, yes it would. And his Ginger Bread Warriors will destroy all opposition.
Paratus
If Joey takes over the world, would it be a pastriarchy?
Fowl
I mostly eat bronze-cut pasta at home. It's just that Joey thinks that bronze is slightly reactive and it might not be healthy on the long term for the Elves. It's a conjecture of his.
Fowl
Forgot to accept the change in the document and it showed both versions. Yes, five foot six.
Paratus
Was this supposed to be five foot six? - It’s roughly five feetfootsix.
Paratus
Lot of people are going back to Bronze for Pasta making because it gives it more texture: https://marcelliformaggi.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-italian-bronze-cut-pasta/
