Kochugunshikan Boukensha ni Naru

After draining the water, I put the cooked pasta on a large plate, poured the meat sauce on top, took some of the hard cheese we bought earlier, and then shaved some portions on top of the pasta and meat sauce mix. It definitely made for some nice powdered cheese. With this, the meat sauce tagliatelle is finally complete.

“Alright! It’s done!”

“Oh! What’s with this dish!? I swear I haven’t encountered anything like this in my life, and I guarantee no one else in this country has either.” Verse exclaimed.

“It looks really delicious!” Sara-chan excitedly quipped.

 

“Go ahead and try some.”

I mixed the meat sauce and pasta thoroughly and placed portions on three plates. We then dug in.

Mm, that good! I was winging it a bit earlier, but I did manage to make some great meat sauce in the end. The harmony between the Big Boar meat, the tomato sauce, and the sautéed garlic, onions, and carrots were superb. The powdered cheese also suited the meat sauce quite well.

“What’s this!? It’s so chewy and delicious!” Sara-chan praised.

“Oh, it’s so good. So there was a dish like this in this world.” Verse exclaimed softly with a touched tone.
“There are actually quite a variety of sauces that can be used to pair with pasta. I’ll give you a number of sauce recipes later.”

“I’ll be troubling you, Alan!”

“I’ll be making a dish called pizza next. Can I take some of your bread dough, Verse?”

“Go ahead. It’s right over here.”

Verse opened up a shelf and presented to me five prepared bread doughs wrapped in a moist cloth.

“Hee, so these are your bread doughs huh… Do you have the stuff that would make the bread expand when baked?”

“You mean the leavening agent?”

Verse passed me a container wrapped in cloth along with one portion of the prepared bread doughs.

“Oh, so this is the leavening agent huh.”

I kneaded the bread dough with my finger for a bit. I see. I can’t really tell the difference between this and genuine pizza dough since I’m no expert. I also mixed around the leavening agent with my finger for a bit as well.

Now then, what should I do? There’s a definite difference between the process of making bread dough and pizza dough. Of course, the baking process is different as well. I can at least reproduce the usual shape if I just used the dough as is, but I really want Verse to be able to taste a properly made pizza.

Oh, right!

(Hey, Iris.)

『Yes, Captain.』

(How can I make this dough become a proper pizza dough? Oh, and I want the dough to be in the standard napoli-style as well.)

I actually prefer the thick napoli-style crust with puffed-up sides to the thin roma-style crust.

『……I believe I am the only military ship AI that was asked a question like this in the entire history of the empire.』

(Cut me some slack here, okay. Pretty please.)

『Using that particular bread dough as a base, proceed to add in fifty-two grams of wheat flour plus thirty milligrams of water, and then proceed to re-knead it. The end product will turn out fairly similar to the item you want.』

(Thanks a bunch, Iris. Oh, and please draw up a recipe for pizza dough using this leavening agent as the key ingredient as well.)
『…Understood.』

I followed Iris’s instructions and re-kneaded the dough. Great. I think this much will do.

I divided the newly created pizza dough into two portions. I was thinking of making two pizzas using two different groups of toppings.

Using the tomato sauce as a base, I will make one with bacon as the main ingredient, while the other will be using the river prawns.

I and Verse started processing the river prawns. There were newly bought bacon, onions, bell peppers, and mushrooms available as well. I’ll go ahead and chop these up too. Oh, and I also have to grate the cheese I bought in the market as well.

I’m going to use the tomato sauce we made earlier to make the pizza sauce.

I flattened the pizza dough with the chef’s rod. I was, of course, making a napoli-style crust with puffed up edges. When that was done, I spread the pizza sauce over the surface of the dough. Then, I started to put on the various toppings. The first is plenty of cheese. Let’s put some mayonnaise on top as well. And just like that, two different kinds of pizza were completed.

Alright. Now all that’s left is baking them in an oven.

“Um, I need to bake these in an oven now.”

“Oh, so you were actually gonna bake them inside an oven? You should have said so earlier so I would’ve fired it up.”

Oh yeah. It totally slipped my mind. Even if we started putting in some firewood now, getting this oven ready for baking will still take quite a bit of time.

“Hey, um, can I use magic to heat this oven up?”

“Hm? You can actually do something like that?”

“I’ll give it a whirl. Sara-chan, this is gonna be a bit dangerous, so step back please.”

Um, the oven would probably break if I used more power than necessary. Let’s raise the output gradually then.

Then, a stream of flame akin to that produced by a flame thrower spewed in front of me. It then flowed toward the oven. In order to heat the entire inside surface of the oven evenly, I carefully adjusted the output of the flames.

“So this is magic!? It’s so amazing!” Sara-chan excitedly exclaimed.

I continued producing magic flames like that for about a minute or so and then stopped.

(Nanom, is the temperature inside of the oven ready for baking now?)

『It is a little lower than the usual temperature used for baking, but it will do.』

“How about it, Verse?”

“…Hm. I guess it’ll do. But you sure are amazing, Alan.”

“Yeah, I guess. Even if I don’t really look like it, I’m still an A rank member of the Magic Guild after all. Magic’s quite convenient, isn’t it?”

“So you’re already A rank huh…”

I asked Verse to put the two pizzas inside the oven. The temperature was a little lower than what’s ideal, so I guess it’ll take longer than usual to bake them.

After about ten minutes, the pizzas were finally done baking. When we took them out of the oven, the edges were puffed up nicely, and it visually looked pretty much perfect. Oh, let’s tear up some of those basil-like herbs and put it on top of the pizzas as well.

“Okay, all done. Go ahead and have a taste.”

I cut up the pizzas into slices and served one slice of each kind to the three of us.

Let’s try the one with bacon toppings. Mm, that’s good. This was baked to perfection. The crisp texture of the bacon and veggies and the hot, stretchy cheese fitted each other perfectly. The pizza inside my heart has finally appeared in front of me…

The one using the prawns as toppings was also pretty good. The juicy and tender prawns were to die for. The pairing between the tomato sauce and the mayonnaise was also nice.

“Uwaah! This is also really good! Actually, I think I like this the most out of all the dishes you taught us!” Sara-chan exclaimed in glee once more.

“Oh! This is great. To think simply putting ingredients on top of bread dough and then baking them together could produce something like this. The appearance is also really nice! I’m sure this will knock the heck out of our customers.”

“With this dish, simply changing the toppings used will allow you to make a great variety of pizzas. You can go ahead and try different kinds yourself and see how it goes.”

“Oh! Leave it to me. I’m gonna do it for sure!”

There’s still some time until dinner. Okay. I’ll go ahead and make some risotto as well. There are still some prawns left, and I properly set aside the prawn heads and shells earlier as well. I can probably make some great dashi with them.

“Okay. The next dish is called risotto. Let’s make dashi using the prawns first. Gotta bring out plenty of umami.”

I put water to a boil, put in the prawn heads and the shells, and created some prawn-based dashi. I gave it a taste and confirmed that the rich flavor of the prawns have been soaked up by the water, creating perfect dashi. The prawn heads and shells gave the dashi a deep and complex seafood flavor.

I’ll sauté some of the shelled prawns next. If I boiled them directly with the rice, the prawn pieces would turn hard and shrink after all. I set aside the prawns on a plate, sautéed some garlic next, then some onions, red bell peppers, and finally, some unwashed rice.