BOTW 4: Prime Meat and Rice Bowl

Okay, so two weeks ago I created an affront to God and man, and last week I didn’t so much enjoy my efforts. It’s time to fix that, and it’s time to get back in the winners’ circle. So we’re keeping it basic. Meat. Rice. What could be any better?

The Dish: Prime Meat and Rice Bowl

This bowl is loaded with high-quality meat. Your hunt for a serious meal ends here. Ingredients are Raw Prime Meat, Hylian Rice, and Rock Salt.

The Research: Since this is Breath of the Wild, all of the research was predicated on looking at the dish and seeing what extras Link tacked on. And this one is wacky. In addition to some sesame seeds and some haphazardly-strewn-about full rosemary leaves (indicating Link doesn’t really get the idea of herbs for flavor), there’s a flower in there for…plating, I guess.

Imagine for a moment that you’re Princess Zelda. As far as you know, Calamity Ganon is about to break contain any second now. The world may be literal minutes from destruction. Meanwhile, this dingus is taking his sweet time plating up his dishes like he’s a dang Iron Chef. He’s not trying to unseal any of the heroic spirits or rushing to save you, he’s just playing with his food. It’s the sort of stuff like this that cracks me up. Anyway, with our research done, it’s time to get cracking.

The Method: This dish starts, like so many others, by generously rubbing the meat with salt and pepper (weirdly, despite the fact that Hyrule clearly has salt, they don’t have a version of black pepper) and letting it chill in the fridge. While it’s there, we’ll dice up some carrots, celery and onion for a nice mirepoix. Also, we’ll pour some high-quality beef broth in a cup and mix in some tomato paste and red wine, setting it aside for now.

With that done, we’ll pour some olive oil into a stainless steel pan and get it ripping hot, then cook our beef strips in batches, setting them aside once done. If you’re using a rice cooker, now is about when you’d wanna start the rice. But we’re not done with that pan yet – Link’s rice clearly has some sort of sauce – so we’ll kill the heat, throw in a pat of butter and our mirepoix, and scrape up all of the brown goodness that ChefPK calls “good-good” and everyone else calls “fond”. Once completely loosened, we drop in our broth-paste-wine mixture, turn the heat back on, and reduce it down, adding cornstarch and seasonings as necessary.

Once the sauce is good and reduced, we’ll pour it into a heatproof bowl and employ our immersion blender to blend everything into a nice smooth consistency. Afterwards we pour the sauce back into the pan, then put the beef back in and let it hang out in there for a few minutes before plating and serving over rice.

The Result: This was delightful. The beef was perfectly cooked, and the sauce wonderfully enhanced the dish. The sesame seed flavor disappeared into the meat and the rosemary didn’t do much of anything, but all in all, this is a dish I’d gladly make again. Mission accomplished!

BOTW 3: Tough Meat-Stuffed “Pumpkin”

My track record recently has been pretty lousy, so it’s time to fix that with an easy one that’s mainly full of stuff I enjoy – stuffed squash!

The Dish: Tough Meat-Stuffed Pumpkin

Grants a defense boost. This hollow, meat-filled fortified pumpkin is a local specialty of Kakariko Village. Ingredients are Fortified Pumpkin and Raw Meat.

The Research: This one was pretty easy, all told. No exotic or clearly-fictional ingredients. I wasn’t able to find a non-blurry picture of the dish, so I just made it in-game to get a decent visual. Looks like Link somehow magics in some peas, carrots, and…either corn or pine nuts into his end result, and garnishes it with some basil…that, or he really likes to have no basil flavor followed by all of the basil flavor at once? Anyway, this one’s simple.

The Method: Again, simplicity is the watchword here. I cut my carnival squash (standing in for the pumpkin) in half, scooped out the innards, and roasted the halves for about 30 minutes.

During that time, I made the beef mixture. I achieved this by browning some ground beef, then throwing in some carrots, peas, and pine nuts. Thrilling! It didn’t really look game-accurate…

…but I would be somewhat disturbed if I came across ground beef that smooth, y’know? Anyway, the mixture was eventually ready, the squash was eventually roasted, and all there was left to do was fill and eat.

I also topped it with some chopped basil, but that woulda made for a boring photo.

The Result: Meh. I’m not a huge fan of carnival squash, as it turns out (my wife loved it, though). The beef mixture was really good, though – I saved some and made fried rice with it the next day. All in all, a passable and relatively easy meal.

BOTW 2: Monster Cake

After two straight stews, it’s time to finally get back to dessert. And this one…was really something.

There’s more to it than this, but I didn’t wanna crowd the shot.

The Dish: Monster Cake

It’s said once you have a taste of this cake, you’ll never forget its sweetness. Ingredients are Tabantha Wheat, Goat Butter, Cane Sugar and Monster Extract.

The Method: To make monster cake, we must first answer the question: what is monster extract? And I have a theory: it’s simple food dye. Now, I know that in the past I’ve been incredibly open about my laziness, so you may be wondering if this is more of the same, and…no, I’m fairly convinced it’s just food dye. My reasoning is threefold!

FIRST, I don’t see how else it fits in otherwise. If you look at the five monster recipes, you’ll notice a wide variety of flavors, from spicy (Monster Curry) to savory (Monster Stew), to sweet (this one). It’s highly unlikely that one ingredient would be the linchpin of all five of them. Plus, they all appear to include everything they need without the monster extract. For example, this cake! If I was gonna bake a cake, I’d say sugar, butter and flour were pretty necessary. Our cake was ready to go without the extract, so what does it add?

SECOND, we already make food dye in a similar way. Certain red dyes are made by grinding up cochineal beetles, so it’s feasible that monster extract – whose creation process aside from grinding up monsters is unclear – likely only just dyes your food.

And THIRD, it’s totally possible to fool people with a little food dye. Here’s a study where wine connoisseurs were fooled with some red food dye. It’s entirely possible that some enterprising Hylian chef used food dye to trick unsuspecting diners. “You eat with your eyes”, they say. If you handed someone purple cake and told them you had some sort of super-special awesome secret ingredient in there, they’d probably assume you were telling them the truth and rate it accordingly!

So with that settled, it’s time to make some cake! The Monster Cake itself looks like chocolate cake with purple frosting, so that’s what we’ll make. I don’t feel like making a full cake, so I’m gonna just whip up this cupcake recipe. I figure for each Monster Cake I’ll do a layering of two cupcakes with frosting. Gonna go ahead and slip you a spoiler warning: don’t do this.

Once the ingredients are combined and the cupcakes are in the oven, it’s frosting time! Now I am not much of a baker and I’ve never dealt with food dye before, and I’ve just gotta say: there’s probably some sort of method or device designed to easily work with food dye, and you should probably use it if so. That said, with judicious combination of red and blue food dye, I was eventually able to work up a decent-looking purple frosting:

The cupcakes finished in time, and we had some cake to ruin!

The Result: I’m gonna be straight here – I failed. The cupcakes tasted good, but they weren’t amenable to being layered at all. My Monster Cake looked like all Monster and no Cake. I didn’t even bother taking a picture because, let’s face it, the Internet has enough cake disasters by this point.

All that to say this: if you do make it, just whiz up a standard layer cake like the good lord intended. Use biscuit cutters from there to form your smaller pieces. My cake failed. But, if nothing else, I at least solved the mystery of Monster Extract.