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Battle Chef Brigade - Iceberg Turnip Pastry

Battle. Chef. Brigade! One of my most eagerly awaited games from 2017 is finally out and it’s just as awesome as I hoped it would be! You’ll be seeing a lot more recipes from this game next month but I couldn’t help putting these Iceberg Turnip Pastries together after finally finishing the game last week. Vive la Brigade!

Battle Chef Brigade is not a game that can be described in few words. I’ll do my best, but the amount of cool stuff they crammed into this game is seriously unbelievable. It’s not even a mash-up I would have considered possible at first, but the team over at Trinket Studios made it work and truly surpassed all expectations!

In the game you play as a fledgling chef named Mina who is determined to leave her stifling home town to join the illustrious ranks of the titular Battle Chef Brigade. The Brigade is a force of good in this world, made up of top ranked culinarians charged with the safe preparation and practiced cookery of monsters for the hungry people of Victusia. This is no easy task mind you, and annual tournaments are held to determine which up and coming hopefuls have what it takes to be counted among these wonder chefs.

definitely not your average match 3 game

That’s the gist of the story, but where this game really shines is in it’s gameplay, and specifically in its fusion of gameplay styles. Each ingredient added to a dish will be accompanied by a number of connected colored circles known as “taste gems” that stack into a 4×4 puzzle grid. It’s up to the player to rotate these gem arrangements in order to connect three of the same color (green for earth, red for fire, and blue for water,) fusing them together into a single “level 2” gem. These level 2 gems can be similarly upgraded once again meaning that the player must constantly be add more ingredients to a dish to fill in the space left behind by these fusions. The more high level taste gems in your dish before the time is up, the more points your dish will earn!

If you were ever a fan of Iron Chef, you’ll feel right at home in these cooking duels. Similar to famed cooking show, it’s not just about making good food, but the right kind of good food. Before each match, Chairman Kamin will assign the match a main ingredient that must be present in every dish you make. In addition to this, your food will be judged by a panel of one to three separate judges each with their own taste affinities (related to one or more of the three colors/elements listed above.) That’s right, often times you’ll be juggling more than one recipe at a time so you really need to stay on your toes in this kitchen!

why is everyone so dang picky!?

But what about outside the kitchen? I mean the ingredients have to come from somewhere right? This is where the game breaks from its Iron Chef underpinnings and introduces an entirely separate but wholly complimentary element of gameplay: hunting. That’s right, there’s no neatly arranged basket of ingredients in this kitchen colosseum! The chefs must find their recipe components in the monster infested forests, caves, and mountains that surround them. This moves the game from match-3 puzzle game to platform beat-em-up in a fraction of a second and I gotta say, it feels so good to beat up some enemies after struggling with a particularly difficult puzzle.

dragon hearts! Just what I needed!

Now all that might sound like a lot already, but I haven’t even mentioned the compelling plot, super fun art style, incredibly diverse cast of characters, daily jobs, cooking equipment, or special game modes yet! Suffice it to say you really need to play the game to get the full experience. However, there is one experience I can help deliver to you, the taste!

The dishes in Battle Chef Brigade are dependent on two factors, the starting ingredient, and the chef who’s preparing it. In fact, each different chef in the game (there are about 18!) has their own unique style based on real world regional cuisine! How cool is that? A game after my own heart!

The dish I chose this time around is one that can be created by our main character Mina if she begins the recipe using an ingredient called an Iceberg Turnip. Originally, I didn’t know where to start attempting to recreate this Iceberg Turnip Pastry because I’d never heard of such a thing. I mean, I could stuff a pastry with turnips for you and call it a day, but knowing the research and care that the Trinket Studios put into this game, I had a hunch that it was based on something real.

I’m in love with this spiral pastry design

And what do you know!? Turnip pastries (or more accurately daikon radish pastries) are fairly common in China which fits perfectly in line with Mina’s Chinese style of cuisine. The coolest thing about this recipe if you ask me (apart from it being blue if you want it to be) is the pastry dough. As you know, I’m a pastry guy by trade, but making puff pastry in the french style was really all I knew before this. That being said, I absolutely love this method and can’t wait to try it out in more recipes. Also, because it doesn’t contain butter like the French style does, this puff pastry dough is less expensive to make, but more importantly, it requires no resting!

So here’s my first course from Battle Chef Brigade. I don’t know if I’m good enough to be in The Brigade (my monster fighting skills are a little rusty) but I think Mina would be impressed with the recipe all the same. I want to give a big shout out thank you to the members of Trinket Studios for their insight into the game development process they have shared with me! So seriously, go check out Battle Chef Brigade on Steam and Nintendo Switch, you won’t be disappointed!

Want to try some monstrous cooking for yourself? Check out the full recipe on my blog right HERE: Iceberg Turnip Pastry recipe

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