AGN -Chapter 360 Relaxation

Qin Huai stood in front of the cooking station lost in thought.

After so long researching the Double Crab Bun, this was the first time he was truly starting to make the filling. It really did sound absurd—spending so much time studying a pastry before finally beginning actual production didn’t seem like something a professional pastry chef would do.

Though, he wasn’t exactly a professional pastry chef to begin with.

The combination of crab roe sauce and sea cucumber was bold, ingenious, and extremely difficult. The previous nine batches had all failed in one way or another—each one an improvement, and each one still a failure. Zheng Siyuan had helped Qin Huai through countless trial-and-error attempts, but they still hadn’t found the correct path.

Zang Liang brought out his most flavorful crab roe sauce. Zheng Siyuan had also kneaded what he and Qin Huai had discussed to be the most suitable dough for the Double Crab Bun. Tan Wei’an had already cleared his stomach, preparing for the upcoming tastings.

The three members of the Double Crab Bun research team had finished everything they could do. Now, it was only up to the team leader to begin his performance.

Qin Huai was thinking about how to begin.

Before this, he had rehearsed the filling process countless times in his mind. He had even mentally simulated how to handle the sea cucumber and how to cook the crab roe sauce. The latter two were still theoretical due to technical limitations, but the filling itself was his responsibility.

He was analyzing why Zheng Siyuan’s previous attempts had failed.

First, there were technical issues.

As a “hexagonal warrior” with well-rounded skills, Zheng Siyuan’s seasoning was still inferior to Qin Huai’s. His current level simply wasn’t enough to fully control the Double Crab Bun filling, which was why every batch had obvious flaws in taste.

Qin Huai’s sharp palate could detect where the problem was—but not how to fix it.

In fact, Zheng Siyuan’s answers might not even be the correct answers to this problem. The Double Crab Bun Zheng Siyuan understood and made was Master Jing’s version, while the one Qin Huai needed to create was actually Master Xu’s version.

So what kind of bun would Xu Nuo make?

It had to be fresh, preserve the natural essence of the Double Crab Bun as much as possible, combine the strengths of both red and white culinary schools—and most importantly, it had to taste good.

This was the kind of bun Xu Nuo loved. Loved enough that he was willing to risk being beaten by his parents and spend a fortune buying the recipe just to give it to Master Jing so he could eat it. Even if he wasn’t at Master Jing’s level, even if he couldn’t replicate that standard, he would still do everything he could to make his own version taste good.

“Taste good” was the top priority.

No matter what method or technique was used—as long as it tasted good, it was fine. There was no need to strictly follow established rules, because Xu Nuo himself wasn’t classically trained either. He was the youngest son of the Xu family, who had once tried but failed to apprentice under Jing Lixiang. In a sense, he was also a self-taught, unorthodox cook.

Qin Huai understood.

If that was the case, he already had an idea.

Crab roe sauce and sea cucumber together were already very dish-like. If used in cooking, he could easily name them: Crab Roe Sea Cucumber, Sea Cucumber Braised in Crab Roe, Crab Roe…

Well, Qin Huai was clearly not good at naming things.

But it sounded delicious anyway.

After making crab roe noodles for so long, and spending a long time last year on crab roe shumai, Qin Huai had developed a liking for crab roe-based dishes. He was very familiar with crab roe—how to season it, how to handle it, and how to cook it to make it more delicious and aligned with people’s expectations.

As for sea cucumber…

To be honest, he still wasn’t very familiar with it. Even though he had made cold sea cucumber before, it still felt foreign.

But it didn’t matter. He could rely on instinct.

Qin Huai moved.

The prepared crab roe sauce had already undergone its first round of seasoning, but that was only the base. Fresh sea cucumber still carried a slight fishy smell, and when combined with crab roe, the flavors didn’t quite harmonize. It needed further balancing through seasoning.

The cold sea cucumber recipe from Cao Guixiang was a valuable reference.

Add a bit of salt, sesame oil, cooking wine, and a little mustard…

Worried that too many seasonings might overpower the original flavor?

It didn’t matter.

Just do it.

Qin Huai followed his intuition, adding ingredients one by one. In his mind, the vague image of the Double Crab Bun gradually took shape.

Zang Liang, who had been steadily cooking his crab roe sauce, gradually noticed that Qin Huai’s approach was becoming increasingly unconventional—almost carefree, even reckless. Eventually, he gave up on his pot altogether and walked over to watch.

Zheng Siyuan had already been watching from the side.

Zang Liang watched for a while and couldn’t help asking, “Is this… right?”

Zheng Siyuan replied calmly, “Let’s wait for the result.”

Soon, Qin Huai finished mixing the filling, wrapped the buns, and placed them into the steamer.

Standing by the steamer, Zang Liang quietly asked, “Confident?”

Qin Huai answered decisively, “No. It’ll probably taste worse than Zheng Siyuan’s worst batch.”

Zang Liang: “?”

Qin Huai noticed his confusion and quickly added, “It’s normal. It starts like this. It gets better later.”

“But…” Zang Liang, as a professional chef, knew the usual process of developing new dishes. “Zheng Siyuan already made terrible versions, didn’t he?”

Normally, once teammates had already explored the wrong path, the next step would be to move toward the right direction. So why was Qin Huai still sprinting down the wrong one?

“Zheng Siyuan has his approach, I have mine,” Qin Huai said. “Have you ever tried his Four Delicacies Tangyuan? If you have a chance, ask him to make it for you. Though he might not like making it. His version and mine are completely different ideas. You’ll understand once you try it.”

Zheng Siyuan’s pastries… had a very personal style.

Zang Liang: “?”

A few minutes later, the buns came out of the steamer.

Normally, Tan Wei’an would have been the taster for this batch, but Zang Liang, too curious about Qin Huai’s confidence, volunteered.

And then he discovered that whether or not Zheng Siyuan had a personal style, he didn’t know—but Qin Huai definitely had one when it came to failures.

There was a strange beauty to it, like refusing to turn back even after hitting a wall—and taking two more steps forward anyway.

That afternoon, Zang Liang developed a completely new understanding of “self-taught chefs.”

Over the next week, the Double Crab Bun research team fell into a long, repetitive cycle.

Everyone had their own responsibilities, but no one was truly succeeding.

Zang Liang finally got a bit of a feel for thickening techniques—but only a bit.

He had an epiphany, but not completely.

He learned it, but not fully.

It couldn’t really be blamed on him. Cao Guixiang’s thickening technique was inherently difficult. Even Qin Huai hadn’t fully mastered it, so he couldn’t possibly teach it properly to Zang Liang. Even when Cao Guixiang saw Zang Liang’s technique over video call, she felt he was learning quickly and had no major issues—he just simply lacked the skill level to execute it properly.

His imperfect thickening directly resulted in slightly improved crab roe sauce—but only slightly. It was still far from what everyone wanted.

Zheng Siyuan’s progress wasn’t going well either. Whenever Qin Huai and Zheng Siyuan felt the dough should be softer and more fluffy, they would soon realize it shouldn’t be that soft—it needed more chewiness.

But when they adjusted it toward chewiness, they would find it was too firm and should be softer again. Left a little didn’t work, right a little didn’t work either—the perfect balance always seemed impossible to find.

For the first time, Qin Huai and Zheng Siyuan felt so unfamiliar with dough. After so many years as white-dough pastry chefs, they had somehow ended up unable to even properly knead dough.

As for Qin Huai, his situation didn’t even qualify as a normal failure.

He was stuck in a cycle: failure, slight failure, improvement, looking good, close to success… then total failure again. Then slight failure again, improvement again, looking good again, close to success again—then failure once more. An endless loop.

Every time he felt close to success, success would slap him twice in the face and say: “You think you’re getting close? Dream on. Get lost.”

In seven days, Qin Huai had been slapped at least seventy times by “success.” His face was practically swollen, yet he still hadn’t found the balance between red and white culinary techniques.

At this point, he finally understood why Zheng Siyuan had avoided facing the Double Crab Bun for so long after his first failure. Only after actually doing it would one realize how hard it was to face such failure.

This wasn’t ordinary failure—it forced you to confront your true skill level.

As for Tan Weian, he was actually the most miserable.

On the surface, he seemed detached from the group for seven days, spending all his time making mung bean cakes—and even improving at it, making him appear to be the most successful member of the team.

But in reality, his real job was tasting Double Crab Buns. He was the person in the group who understood crab-based pastries the best.

The especially failed batches were given to Ou Yang to taste. But whenever Qin Huai got close to success, Tan Weian had to taste repeatedly, analyzing what exactly made it “right.”

He desperately wanted to find the answer—but couldn’t. After seven days of eating, he even considered asking his great-grandfather in a dream to reveal the secret.

Rumor had it that Tan Weian had already called his father last night, asking him to check their ancestral home to see if there were any notes left by their great-grandfather.

Maybe hidden in some corner of the old house, under the floor tiles or in the cellar, there was a hidden box. And inside that box—was a notebook containing all their ancestral recipes and culinary insights.

If they could just open it, the first page might be the Double Crab Bun recipe, and they could graduate instantly from this nightmare of tasting duties.

As for everyone else, they weren’t doing much better.

Ou Yang, Qin Huai’s chief taster, to support his friend’s culinary ambitions, had stopped eating breakfast entirely. Every day, he started by shaking milk tea at Xiao Ou’s hand-shaken lemon tea shop, then went to Yunzhong Cafeteria for tastings, went home stuffed, returned to shaking milk tea, then went to the gym to work out and digest.

Even his expensive personal trainer praised his rapid progress—he could eat and train, but warned that his carbohydrate intake was absurd. Improvement was good, but this kind of improvement was bad for his health.

Even Wang Gensheng, the elder who had originally only tasted Xu Nuo’s version of the Double Crab Bun and served as the task’s initiator, was starting to develop mild PTSD from it.

At first, when Qin Huai invited him to the cafeteria for private tastings of crab roe sauce and crab roe noodles, Wang the elder would even wonder whether he was worthy of such treatment.

Now, he had stopped wondering altogether. In fact, he felt like quitting himself.

He no longer envied Ou Yang. Instead, he sympathized—this young man had it tough. Being a taster was exhausting work.

Eat, think, critique, and comfort others—all at once.

Unlike his days in Suzhou tasting Four Delicacies Tangyuan, where he only had one bowl per night and plenty of time to write reviews, now he had to eat at least six batches of buns every afternoon. And that was already his stomach’s limit—not Qin Huai’s production limit.

He had to write six reviews a day, all honest, all carefully recalled from fading memories. His hair was thinning, and he looked increasingly exhausted.

Even Xu Tuqiang, who had always been jealous of Wang the elder, no longer felt envy. Instead, he sighed when mentioning him and said the private tasting clearly wasn’t so good after all. Then he would add that Wang the elder was just not skilled enough—if it were him, he could easily write sixteen reviews a day instead of six.

In short, everyone was suffering from the Double Crab Bun.

As Qin Huai put it, he knew this was a tough bone to chew, and he had prepared mentally for it. But when the real battle began, he realized it wasn’t just hard—it was absurdly hard. Not only had it broken his teeth, it had nearly broken everyone’s teeth, and yet the bone still hadn’t been bitten through.

After another day of failure and repetition, Qin Huai realized this couldn’t continue.

Unlike the Four Delicacies Tangyuan, where the problem was not knowing the direction, the Double Crab Bun had a direction—but they still kept failing. At this rate, it wouldn’t just be a technical issue anymore—it would become a mental one.

Zang Liang had once said something important: when you feel stuck and keep forcing yourself down a dead end, you’re already on the wrong path.

Change direction, and you might find the answer.

“Let’s take a day off tomorrow,” Qin Huai said.

He didn’t know which direction to try next—but he could at least pause for a day.

“What do you mean, take a break?” Zheng Siyuan thought Qin Huai meant changing locations to find inspiration, like going back to the orphanage he was familiar with.

“Just a normal break,” Qin Huai said. “Everyone’s tired. Ou Yang and Uncle Wang are exhausted too. They need a day off, or Ou Yang is really going to turn into a bodybuilder.”

“By the way, Ou Yang got some amusement park annual passes. How about we go tomorrow? Relax a bit. It’s Sunday, and Luo Luo doesn’t have class—we can take her along too.”

“An amusement park?” Zheng Siyuan was stunned.

“An amusement park!” Zang Liang immediately got excited. “That’s great! I only went once during a school trip in elementary school. Haven’t been since.”

“I originally thought I’d go with a girlfriend someday, but I’ve been stuck in the kitchen all these years. Forget a girlfriend—I’ve barely even seen women!”

“There are really too few female chefs in red-cooking kitchens!”

Qin Huai: “……”

Your master’s disciples are a bit too dedicated.

“Tan Weian, have you ever been to an amusement park?”

“I’ve been in a relationship,” Tan Weian said.

Zang Liang: “……”

Qin Huai made the final decision: “Alright, it’s settled. We take tomorrow off and go to the amusement park. But we might not leave too early—I still need to finish knife practice, and Luo Luo has homework.”

Zheng Siyuan nodded. “I need to make a batch of pastries first too.”

Zang Liang said happily, “Then I’ll make some cold dishes to practice seasoning. We can bring them along—can you bring food into amusement parks?”

“Yes.”

Tan Weian: “……Then I’ll… make mung bean cake?”

Wasn’t tomorrow supposed to be a day off? Why were they still working before relaxing?

Did these people even understand what “relaxation” meant?