Chapter 320

Listening to An Youyou's exaggerated praise, Qin Huai also picked one up and took a bite after the baozi had cooled down a little.

Hmm, a very normal vegetable baozi.

I'll send two to Zheng Siyuan later.

Zheng Siyuan's plane had just landed this morning; he rested at noon and came to Yunzhong Cafeteria to work in the afternoon. After helping Qin Huai finish the San Ding Bao and fermented rice baozi, he went back to rest without working any extra overtime.

He wasn't interested in Qin Huai making ordinary vegetable baozi.

If Qin Huai were making double-crab baozi, Zheng Siyuan might be willing to stay and study them together. Zheng Siyuan was already very accustomed to Qin Huai having one idea here and another idea there, being all over the place.

Let alone Qin Huai deciding to make vegetable baozi after coming back from the bathroom, even if Qin Huai came back from the bathroom and announced that he wasn't going to be a dim sum chef anymore and wanted to practice stir-frying, specifically stir-frying cabbage and meat, Zheng Siyuan would only assume that the system Qin Huai hallucinated had issued him an inexplicable side quest.

Master Xiao Zheng was just that tolerant.

Qin Huai took a big bite, and the first thing his teeth touched was the baozi skin.

With his current advanced dough-leavening skills, making the skin for such a very daily baozi was simply a piece of cake, a dimensional strike. He only needed to make a move casually to make the breakfast shops within a ten-mile radius collapse, causing the owners to raise white flags in surrender while cursing in their hearts, all while not forgetting to sneak into Yunzhong Cafeteria to buy baozi.

It was very delicious—chewy yet soft—and one could chew out the wheat aroma and the faint, steamed carbohydrate fragrance unique to baozi.

The first chew was the skin, and the second chew tasted the filling.

A very ordinary and simple cabbage filling.

Cabbage absorbs oil and tastes bland; the legendary Yin-Yang Cabbage Soup is a weight-loss tool. Without oil or salt, just boiling cabbage in water with ginger and Sichuan peppercorns, the first bite makes one review the first half of their life, and after the second bite, one can't help but start thinking about the second half of their life. By the third bite, one feels their life is hopeless, and by the fourth bite, one starts thinking about the meaning of life. If one can finish the whole pot and insist on eating only this for several consecutive days, then that person will succeed in anything they do.

The above was a post from a friend's Moments that Qin Huai saw while "reviewing memorials" in his Moments—a friend who ran a hand-smashed lemon tea shop and who, having become wildly fat from drinking their own shop's products, had made a painful decision to lose weight.

From this post, one could see that if cabbage lacked oil and seasonings during the cooking process, it would be as unpalatable as it could possibly be.

And the vegetable baozi Qin Huai made this time only managed to ensure the cabbage had oil and the most basic seasonings.

If this dim sum didn't have a buff, it would just be an ordinary vegetable baozi that tasted better than a normal one; no matter how good it was, it was still an ordinary vegetable baozi because its level was only C+.

Yes, C+.

Qin Huai felt that when he went back tonight, he still needed to watch the video tutorial. The baozi Jiang Weiguo made were only C-level because his pastry-making skills weren't very good. His pastry-making skills were so much higher than Jiang Weiguo's, yet the baozi he made were only C+, so besides the knife skills that didn't affect the baozi itself much, there should be other places he hadn't noticed.

Of course, it was also possible that because Qin Huai didn't usually make vegetable baozi and wasn't skilled at it, if he made them a few more times, the vegetable baozi should be able to reach B-level.

A C+-level baozi, plus a buff, could become a dim sum with an eating experience comparable to B-level.

If this were B-level, even if it were a B--level vegetable baozi plus a buff...

He didn't dare to think about it; he absolutely didn't dare to think about it.

Not to mention that this vegetable baozi only sold for three yuan each.

Before the San Ding Bao reached A-level, the vegetable baozi would become the most competitive baozi in the entire Yunzhong Cafeteria.

Qin Huai narrowed his eyes slightly, chewing the baozi very enjoyably.

He felt that the buff for this vegetable baozi was really good—double the happiness and satisfaction. When people eat carbohydrates, the body's instinct makes one feel happy and satisfied, and this vegetable baozi's buff was double that; it was truly a wonderful feeling.

A wonderful feeling of eating a delicious vegetable baozi when one is starving and hungry from dieting to the point of almost dying.

The guests who bought the vegetable baozi also felt it was wonderful.

Liu Ayi, who was the first to buy the vegetable baozi, originally intended to take all 10 baozi home to share with her family as the main course for the evening.

However, Liu Ayi was a bit hungry, and her greed got the better of her; she couldn't help herself, and while receiving the baozi, she picked one up and bit into it.

With just one bite, Liu Ayi's "evil intentions" grew; she wanted to make a decision that violated the Yunzhong Residential Area residents' convention, risking the danger of being "justly executed" to line up again and buy 20 more baozi.

Then Liu Ayi hesitated and chose to call her husband to come downstairs quickly to buy baozi, while she hurried home.

When the time came, if others asked, she would say she didn't know her husband had also come to buy them; both of them happened to get the news and were in such a hurry to buy baozi that they forgot to notify the other. As the saying goes, "the ignorant are not guilty"; although their family violated the community convention, there were extenuating circumstances, and they wouldn't be "justly executed."

20 baozi, well, her family of five could finish them; it wouldn't be a waste.

Thinking this, Liu Ayi happily stuffed another baozi into her mouth, full of happiness.

Oh, the vegetable baozi Master Xiao Qin made this time was truly too delicious!

In Yunzhong Cafeteria, because Chen Huihong was a "super-connected" person, she didn't need to follow the community convention and bought 20 baozi in one go. 18 for her, 2 for Luo Jun; 5 to eat in, 15 to take away.

"You bought so many baozi?" Luo Jun couldn't help but look at the baozi Chen Huihong bought a few more times, speaking sarcastically, "What, haven't you eaten enough vegetable baozi in your past few lifetimes?"

Chen Huihong stuffed a baozi into her mouth: "I really have eaten few vegetable baozi. When I was bumming around in Beiping, the major restaurants never made ordinary vegetable baozi. It was either beef baozi, lamb baozi, or some mountain delicacy baozi, seafood baozi, or eight-treasure baozi—all sorts of messy things stuffed into the baozi. Chamois meat, venison, bear meat—they'd stuff whatever they had, and the taste was all over the place. It was even hard to eat ordinary pork baozi."

"However, although the taste was all over the place, the baozi at Taifeng Tower were always the most delicious. Have you ever been to Taifeng Tower to eat?"

Luo Jun silently took a bite of a baozi and spat out one word: "Scram."

"Did you all learn your speaking style from Chen Gong?"

Chen Huihong chuckled: "Not really, we just have a little bit of communication in private."

"Assistant Chen's way of speaking is still quite interesting; she has some unique insights."

Luo Jun took another bite of the baozi and didn't say anything, considering that the baozi tasted pretty good and eating two bites could make his mood slightly better.

After finishing a whole baozi, Luo Jun slowly said: "Can you finish 18 baozi? Spare me three; I'm going to eat them as a midnight snack tonight."

Chen Huihong:???

After finishing dinner, Qin Huai carried a bag of dim sum consisting of vegetable and meat baozi, mung bean cakes, and pan-fried radish cakes to Zheng Siyuan's house.

Because the intermediary Zheng Da found at the time wasn't good, Zheng Siyuan didn't rent a house in Yunzhong Residential Area, but only rented a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in the neighboring residential area. Later, when Qin Huai learned of this and indicated that he could help Zheng Siyuan introduce housing in Yunzhong Residential Area, he was refused by Zheng Siyuan. Zheng Siyuan didn't have high requirements for living and didn't want to move; he felt it was close enough anyway, just a difference of walking two steps more or two steps less.

When Qin Huai delivered the dim sum to Zheng Siyuan's door, Zheng Siyuan was making crab roe sauce.

Seeing Qin Huai arrive, Zheng Siyuan said directly: "You came just in time; I was planning to talk to you about this tomorrow."

"The crab roe sauce version of the double-crab baozi should ideally be made with fresh crab roe for the crab roe sauce, but it's not the season for crabs now. If there were fresh crab roe, there would be no need to make the crab roe sauce version; we could just make the normal version."

"These are all new crab roe sauces I processed and boiled with crab roe sauce; I just feel something isn't quite right. You came just in time to help me taste them."

The method for making crab roe sauce is actually very simple: boil fresh crab roe in lard, then add other seasonings like green onion, ginger, and garlic according to personal needs. If you want the crab roe sauce to be more delicious and the color more enticing, you can boil oil with shrimp heads and add shrimp head oil; the finished product will be better.

If there are no extra requirements, the seasonings only need simple light soy sauce, cooking wine, and salt.

Zheng Siyuan must have been boiling the crab roe sauce as soon as he got off work; the rich aroma of crab roe permeated the whole room. Because it was crab roe sauce made from crab roe sauce, the fishy smell was relatively smaller, but it was also mixed with some other flavors that didn't belong to crab roe.

"Is that so?" Qin Huai didn't expect Zheng Siyuan to be more attentive to the double-crab baozi than he was. He hadn't even planned to start practicing the double-crab baozi yet, and Zheng Siyuan had already prepared the crab roe sauce.

Qin Huai put the dim sum he brought directly on the entryway, changed his shoes, and went straight to the kitchen to taste.

Zheng Siyuan had already boiled three types of crab roe sauce.

The fourth one was simmering on low heat in the pot, needing to render out the crab roe oil again.

Qin Huai looked at the bottles and jars on the kitchen counter, and the various brands of crab roe sauce in the jars that one could tell at a glance weren't very pure and must have had some extra things added to make up the numbers, and picked up a spoon.

First, he tasted Zheng Siyuan's boiled crab roe sauces one by one. Then, because he had never made double-crab baozi, had never eaten them, and didn't know what the requirements for the crab roe sauce for double-crab baozi were or what it should taste like, he couldn't say anything for a moment and could only comment purely on the taste.

Qin Huai pointed to the first one: "This one tastes the most normal."

"It feels like the taste of normal crab roe sauce, just that a little too much cooking wine was added. The last two have too many extra things; for the third one, I feel the starch content is higher than the crab roe content. I know that thickening the sauce slightly at the end of making crab roe sauce can improve the texture, but it shouldn't be thickened like this, right?"

"It's the sauce's problem," Zheng Siyuan explained. "The first sauce is one I got from a supplier; it's the most expensive and the best quality, but perhaps because it was already made into crab roe sauce, I feel it's not very suitable for double-crab baozi after secondary processing."

"If you want to use crab roe sauce to make double-crab baozi, you actually can't use such authentic ingredients."

Qin Huai:?

There's such a saying?

Qin Huai was truly hearing for the first time that making a dim sum couldn't be "too authentic."

Zheng Siyuan knew what Qin Huai was shocked by and explained: "The original intention of my grandmaster in researching the recipe for making double-crab baozi with crab roe sauce was to allow diners to eat double-crab baozi that tasted similar even in seasons when crabs weren't on the market."

"The pursuit of taste was actually secondary; the point was whether the crab roe sauce could be stored for a long time. In order to store crab roe sauce for a long time, it was necessary to add a large amount of aromatic seasonings. The conditions back then were different from today, and it was impossible to achieve maximum flavor retention."

"So actually, before I came, I thought: is the recipe left by my grandmaster really still applicable today?"

"Now there are more and better crab roe sauces that, even if they aren't that authentic, don't differ much in taste. In my opinion, these crab roe sauces are actually more suitable for making double-crab baozi; my grandmaster's recipe is actually a bit outdated."

Qin Huai was a bit surprised to hear Zheng Siyuan say this.

It wasn't that Zheng Siyuan was a stubborn old antique who stuck to conventions, but that Zheng Siyuan had actually always respected and even worshipped his grandmaster. This was the first time he had heard the words "grandmaster's recipe might be outdated" from Zheng Siyuan's mouth.

"Zheng... have you discussed this with Master Zheng?" Qin Huai asked.

"I talked to my dad on the phone. At first, I thought my dad would scold me, but he didn't. On the contrary, he was quite happy and laughed out loud for at least three minutes; I was afraid he would choke on his laughter."

"My dad said that before, I was always learning how to make dim sum, but now I've finally learned how to be a chef."

"The beginning of a good apprentice surpassing their master is questioning whether what the master did was really all correct. My dad questioned it since he was a child and was often punished by my grandmaster, but my grandmaster liked my dad's personality very much, feeling that my dad would definitely be an outstanding pastry chef in the future."

"Actually, my dad is good at everything, except he's too lazy."

"After making money, he doesn't want to work hard anymore."

Qin Huai:...

Look at what you're saying; who wants to work hard after making money?

If you don't believe me, go ask An Youyou; after she makes money, she probably just wants to lie on the beach and sunbathe every day.

"So..." Qin Huai seemed to know what the first problem he needed to overcome was if he wanted to start making double-crab baozi. "Before we start researching double-crab baozi, what we actually need to research is how to make a crab roe sauce that is more suitable for today's double-crab baozi."

After Qin Huai finished speaking, he tasted the three crab roe sauces one by one again, still unable to make heads or tails of it.

His tongue wasn't bad, but he didn't have a reference model; he hadn't eaten double-crab baozi and didn't know what kind of crab roe sauce was more suitable for them.

Zheng Siyuan shook his head: "No, this is what I need to do."

"Before you research double-crab baozi, the most important thing is to first taste what double-crab baozi taste like."

After finishing, Zheng Siyuan took out a jar of crab roe sauce from the refrigerator that looked like it was homemade: "This is the crab roe sauce my dad made last year, made using my grandmaster's recipe, but it wasn't used to make double-crab baozi; it was used to mix with noodles."

"Tomorrow I'll make you a portion of double-crab baozi; you can roughly taste what it tastes like, and then we can start researching the crab roe sauce."

"Considering that when making crab roe sauce, you will definitely make a large amount of unusable crab roe sauce, I think that starting tomorrow, Yunzhong Cafeteria can launch crab roe mixed noodles."

"The handmade noodles you make are actually quite delicious."

Qin Huai nodded, understanding Zheng Siyuan's hint.

"Understood, the soup you hung this afternoon is still simmering on the stove."

"I'll definitely let you eat chicken soup noodles tomorrow morning."

(End of chapter)