AGN -Chapter 337 Time to Come Back

After returning home, Qin Huai secretly practiced thickening sauce for two hours.

Yes—secretly practicing.

Even Qin Huai himself hadn’t expected that one day he would become the kind of overachiever he used to hate in his student days—the type who secretly works harder than everyone else and then surprises them all.

Not only did he practice in secret, he also practiced while attending online lessons.

Since he forgot to bring back the wooden phone stand Zhang Chu had made, Qin Huai used a cheap phone stand he’d grabbed online for 3.9 yuan. He placed it on a high cabinet so that Cao Guixiang could observe the wok from above.

The advantage was a great viewing angle. The downside was that the phone was too far away, making it hard for Qin Huai to communicate with Cao Guixiang in real time. Sometimes, if she spoke softly, he couldn’t hear her clearly.

The first time he tried thickening sauce, Qin Huai attempted to chat with Cao Guixiang while cooking, just like when practicing knife skills. But after a few failed attempts at communication, he gave up and switched to “single-player mode”—he cooked while she simply watched.

Qin Huai felt he really had some talent for thickening.

How to put it? Even though thickening wasn’t difficult, it felt too easy for him.

After all, many dishes can be thickened—not just crab roe sauce.

Since there were some yams in the kitchen that Chen Huihong had stocked earlier and hadn’t taken away, Qin Huai started by making stir-fried yam. Thickening this dish didn’t require advanced skills—just basic technique.

Cao Guixiang sat there nibbling an apple while watching the screen.

At first, she watched casually.

After teaching Qin Huai through online lessons for so long, she had a decent understanding of his impulsive personality—always jumping from one idea to another. When he made pastries, he would quickly lose interest and move on to something new. So seeing the same behavior while practicing cooking techniques didn’t surprise her.

In fact, when she chatted with him during lessons, it wasn’t just to train his focus—it was mainly to make repetitive practice like knife work feel less boring.

Though she had never taken on formal apprentices, she had raised grandchildren. Her way of teaching Qin Huai knife skills was essentially the same as raising kids—coaxing them, encouraging them at the right moments, rewarding them when necessary, and occasionally setting little “traps” to test them. Usually, it worked quite well.

Seeing that Qin Huai was interested in thickening and even confidently claimed he had talent, Cao Guixiang had already prepared some words of praise and encouragement.

But when Qin Huai finished his first plate of stir-fried yam, those words got stuck in her throat.

She even forgot to keep eating her apple, staring straight at the screen without blinking.

If Qin Huai had looked up at the camera, he would have seen something unusual: the always cheerful and joking Master Cao now wore a stunned expression he had never seen before.

Another plate of stir-fried yam came out.

Looking at it, Qin Huai felt that although his stir-frying and heat control were only average, the thickening was excellent—it wasn’t perfect, but it definitely brought the dish to life.

He lifted the plate toward the camera so Cao Guixiang could see clearly.

“Master Cao, I’ll stop cooking yam now—too much would be wasteful,” he said loudly.

“Can you check if there’s any problem with my thickening?”

Hearing his voice, Cao Guixiang instinctively took a bite of her apple. After a few seconds, she replied vaguely, “It’s pretty good.”

“Qin Huai… who taught you this thickening technique?”

“You did,” Qin Huai said. He almost tilted his head up to talk but found the angle awkward, so he simply opened the fridge and took out the crab roe sauce. “Didn’t I watch you cook in the kitchen before? I just learned by copying your movements.”

Cao Guixiang fell silent again.

Seeing her not respond, Qin Huai glanced up at the phone. “Is there a problem?”

“This afternoon when I was thickening, they said my technique and timing were fine,” he continued. “But my fundamentals were a bit lacking. I did well when pouring in the slurry, but my stirring and tossing afterward weren’t great. Is that a fundamentals issue?”

“That’s normal,” Cao Guixiang said. “You’re not practiced yet. Beginners all have similar problems.”

“As for the rest… it’s… quite good.”

“Then I’ll make crab roe sauce now. You can watch the whole process and tell me if there’s anything I should improve.”

“But lately I haven’t been the one making it—Zheng Siyuan has been handling it. And my heat control isn’t great either, so there may be quite a few issues. Just take a general look, especially at the two thickening steps.”

“Alright,” Cao Guixiang nodded, not caring whether Qin Huai could see her. She squinted at the screen, then, finding it unclear, called out: “Old Zhang! Where are my reading glasses?”

Zhang Chu quickly came out from his woodworking room, grabbed her glasses from the TV cabinet, and handed them over. Glancing at the phone, he noticed the new camera angle.

“Why are you doing an online lesson at night today?” he asked casually.

“Shh, keep it down—don’t disturb Qin Huai,” Cao Guixiang whispered, making a silencing gesture.

Zhang Chu chuckled and lowered his voice. “Don’t you usually chat while teaching to distract him? Why worry about disturbing him now?”

“Today is different,” she said softly.

Then she put on her glasses and stared at the phone without blinking.

Meanwhile, Qin Huai was attempting to make crab roe sauce from start to finish for the first time.

Perhaps it was the confidence he gained from thickening. Or maybe it was because Ou Yang lived downstairs—so even if it didn’t turn out well, he could just give the sauce away instead of wasting it.

Normally, Qin Huai would never attempt crab roe sauce at home knowing his skill wasn’t as good as Zheng Siyuan’s.

But today was different.

Today, he just felt in the zone.

How to describe it?

To put it bluntly—during his first attempt at thickening that afternoon, he felt like a chosen one, as if guided by divine help. By the second attempt, he realized the first just felt unusually good.

But tonight, when he lowered the difficulty by thickening stir-fried yam, that same “chosen one” feeling returned.

It just felt right.

Qin Huai often found this kind of flow when making pastries, but this was the first time he experienced it in hot dishes.

Previously, whether practicing heat control or knife skills, everyone told him the same thing: these are fundamentals—you can’t cut corners. No matter how talented you are, you must invest time and effort. There are no shortcuts.

And that was indeed true. The difference between practicing more or less was clearly reflected in both heat control and knife skills.

That effortless, almost instinctive mastery he sometimes felt in pastry-making—where things just clicked—had never appeared in his work with hot dishes.

In that regard, Qin Huai’s experience was exactly the same as Tan Wei’an’s.

Where is this “feeling”? What even is it? Does it exist in hot cooking at all?

Previously, Qin Huai believed it didn’t. He thought hot cooking was 99% effort and 1% talent—you had to fill up that 99% progress bar before talent could make a difference.

Now, he felt that even in hot cooking, there is a sense of flow—you just have to find it.

And he had found it in thickening.

For something as simple as thickening, it felt ridiculously easy.

Sure, his stir-fried yam wasn’t great—but the thickening was excellent.

Too bad the system didn’t treat thickening as a separate skill. Otherwise, Qin Huai felt he’d at least be at an advanced level.

He now focused intently on simmering the crab roe sauce.

His heat control was quite average—everyone knew that. It was only slightly better than his knife skills, and that was mostly because his knife skills had been particularly poor.

Though now his knife skills had improved somewhat, both fundamentals were still equally weak overall.

Still, considering that his heat control was close to advancing to a higher level (just 1,000 proficiency points short, though progress was slow), and his knife skills were nearing intermediate level (only 100 points away, also progressing slowly), Qin Huai felt justified in claiming his heat control was better.

There were many problems with his sauce-making—some he could even spot himself—but he couldn’t fix them.

Cooking crab roe sauce is quite a complex task. Using fresh crab roe is easier, but reprocessing finished crab roe sauce significantly increases the difficulty.

That’s why making crab roe sauce had always been Zheng Siyuan’s responsibility—

Tan Wei’an simply wasn’t skilled enough yet.

Zhang Chu sat beside Cao Guixiang, watching Qin Huai cook crab roe sauce.

The phone angle Qin Huai had set up was excellent—the situation inside the wok was crystal clear. As for Qin Huai himself, only the back of his head was visible. It was basically a standard surveillance-camera view.

As a carpenter who didn’t know much about cooking but had eaten plenty of good food, Zhang Chu offered an outsider’s critique: “Qin Huai’s sauce doesn’t look great.”

“Is the heat too high? I remember when you made sauce at home before, it didn’t look like this. Or are different sauces cooked differently? Like zhajiang, sweet bean paste, and crab roe sauce aren’t done the same way?”

Cao Guixiang wasn’t very interested in responding to her husband. She replied perfunctorily, “His heat control isn’t good. That’s not urgent—it can be corrected slowly.”

“Stop talking. If you’re watching, then watch quietly with your mouth shut.”

Zhang Chu: ?

Did he offend his wife today? Did he forget to wash a bowl? Miss a bag of trash? Or maybe he failed to catch fish the other day and secretly bought some from the market to pass off as his own, and now she’d found out?

His mind raced.

Just as he was wondering whether embezzling grocery money last week had been exposed, Qin Huai was about to begin his first thickening step.

He was mixing the starch slurry.

Mixing starch slurry was actually a technical skill in itself.

What kind of starch to use, the ratio of starch to water, whether to mix different types—all of these required careful consideration.

Simply following a recipe ratio made it hard to cook well.

Cooking is flexible—many things rely on the chef’s experience and intuition. When Qin Huai thickened the stir-fried yam earlier, he kept it simple since the ratio didn’t matter much. But crab roe sauce was different.

It required mung bean starch and a light thickening, so the consistency of the slurry was very important.

That afternoon, the slurry had been prepared by Zang Liang.

Qin Huai hadn’t paid much attention at the time—he was too focused on listening to Zang Liang’s instructions. As a result, when it came time to do it himself, he didn’t know how to mix it.

He froze for a moment.

After thinking for a bit, he decided to go with his instincts.

Wait… where were his instincts?

Forget it—no time to find them now. Just go step by step.

Cao Guixiang watched his confusion, hesitation, and sudden resolve unfold.

Under normal circumstances, as an instructor conducting an online lesson, she should have guided him loudly on what to do next.

But she didn’t.

She simply put on her reading glasses and watched quietly.

Qin Huai finished mixing a bowl of starch slurry—one that, in Cao Guixiang’s eyes, had plenty of issues.

Holding the bowl, Qin Huai stared at the wok.

The crab roe sauce inside was beginning to boil—small bubbles forming and bursting one after another. Even Zhang Chu could tell it was time to thicken.

But Qin Huai didn’t move.

“What’s Qin Huai doing? The sauce is about to boil over,” Zhang Chu muttered.

“Quiet.” Cao Guixiang didn’t even spare him a glance. She set down her apple and stared intently at the phone.

Finally, at the moment when a small bubble near the edge rose and burst—

Qin Huai felt it.

Now.

He understood.

With a large, sweeping motion—just like Cao Guixiang’s—he twisted his arm and wrist and poured the starch slurry into the wok in a wide circular motion.

The slurry flowed smoothly and evenly, sliding off the rim of the bowl in a perfect, silky stream.

Yes!

The little Qin Huai in his heart was cheering.

Another successful thickening guided by instinct.

He realized that thickening during the simmering stage felt even better than during stir-frying.

Remembering how he had previously failed by getting too excited and forgetting to stir, Qin Huai didn’t repeat that mistake. He grabbed the spatula and stirred frantically, then excitedly looked up at the phone:

“Master Cao, how was that just now?”

Cao Guixiang already wore a standard warm and satisfied smile.

“Very good.”

“Better than I expected.”

Qin Huai continued working on the crab roe sauce. After the successful thickening came slightly panicked reduction and clumsy tossing.

Seeing the sharp contrast, Zhang Chu couldn’t help commenting again: “Making sauce like this… wasn’t that thickening just fine? Why is he so flustered now?”

Cao Guixiang shot him an annoyed look. “You talk too much. For him to do this well is already very good. Don’t expect too much. He’s a pastry chef, not a hot-dish cook.”

Zhang Chu felt his wife’s attitude was strange today.

In just these short minutes, she had glared at him several times—each time because he spoke.

He made a bold guess: “You taught him thickening, didn’t you?”

“Isn’t thickening something you need to teach face-to-face? Online lessons are a bit too much to ask. Back when I learned woodworking, my master had to stand right beside me.”

“I didn’t teach him,” Cao Guixiang said. Having seen what she wanted, she finally shifted her gaze away from the phone and took off her reading glasses. “He learned it himself.”

“By himself?” Zhang Chu didn’t understand. “But his technique looked just like yours. Isn’t your thickening method a specialty of your Tan family cuisine?”

“Yes. He learned it just by watching.” Cao Guixiang’s eyes were filled with amazement. “If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t believe someone could learn it just by observing.”

“It looks like we’re out of shark fin, sea cucumber, and bird’s nest at home. Go contact Old Wang and have him find some good quality ones.”

“Qin Huai likes mangoes—buy some next week.”

“Oh, and good pork belly. Go early to the market next week and pick some nice cuts. The chef at Qin Huai’s canteen doesn’t make good braised pork with preserved vegetables—Qin Huai has complained to me several times. We should let him taste a proper one.”

“Has Qin Huai finished practicing knife skills?” Zhang Chu asked.

Cao Guixiang didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she opened WeChat and searched through her chat history with Qin Huai, trying to recall which recipes she had already given him.

“Looks like I’ll have to take some time to organize these recipes. I can’t remember them all right now,” she muttered, before finally replying: “Even if he hasn’t finished, it’s time for him to come back. With his level of thickening, I need to teach him properly. He won’t grasp the essence just by self-learning.”

Seeing the serious look on his wife’s face, a bold thought crossed Zhang Chu’s mind.

“Guixiang… are you thinking of taking Qin Huai as your apprentice?”

Cao Guixiang shook her head. “I’ve already said I don’t take apprentices. And Qin Huai may not even want to become my disciple. What pastry chef goes to apprentice under a hot-dish chef?”

“But… it would be a pity not to pass on my skills to someone as talented as him.”

“Isn’t that basically the same as taking a disciple?” Zhang Chu laughed.

Cao Guixiang rolled her eyes at him. “None of your business.”

“I’ll do as I please.”