After entrusting the important task of making Three Meat Buns and Fermented Rice with Steamed Buns to Zheng Siyuan, Qin Huai began slicing radishes.
He hadn’t cut radishes seriously for two days, and although Qin Huai didn’t feel like his knife skills had obviously stalled or declined like last time, there was still some effect.
In the first 20 minutes, his touch wasn’t right.
As someone who couldn’t describe the exact operation but could only say, "You know the feeling, right?" Qin Huai highly valued intuition.
He felt that intuition was a magical thing.
When you have the right feeling, everything seems divinely aided; when the feeling is off, even though the procedure is flawless and all the details are controlled, the desired effect is still not achieved.
Qin Huai was slicing radishes in front of a phone camera, trying to regain the feeling while cutting.
"What’s up, Xiao Qin? Your mind seems elsewhere. Just back from a business trip to City A and too tired to chop radishes? If you’re really tired, just cut fewer, half an hour should suffice," Cao Guixiang said cheerfully.
Cao Guixiang was kneading dough.
It’s not dumpling dough; it’s bun dough. Cao Guixiang planned to improve the family’s breakfast with some Northern style large meat buns that she should theoretically be good at making.
In fact, Cao Guixiang had some pastry skills, and they were quite good. She wasn’t like Zang Mu and Tong De Yan, who were purely meat chefs. Perhaps due to the times, when Cao Guixiang apprenticed in her youth, she learned a bit of everything.
In her words, back then in the Beiping chef circle, because of a particularly hardworking predecessor, being versatile was a necessity. This predecessor was proficient in both meat and pastry, Shandong cuisine and Cantonese cuisine, eventually encompassing all strengths.
Under the influence of this predecessor, chefs like Master Cao needed to be adept in various skills to maintain their reputation in the circle, so Cao Guixiang learned a bit of everything from her master during her training.
Stuff like buns, steamed buns, and fried sauce noodles, which were common snacks for sale, were things Cao Guixiang could manage.
It’s just that over the years Cao Guixiang rarely made snacks, and her pastry skills became a bit rusty. She had long retired from being a chef, usually just cooking some home dishes for her family. Instead of spending time making buns and steamed buns to freeze and steam every morning, it was better to grab a rice noodle roll from the breakfast shop at the community gate.
It might be due to her frequent interactions with Qin Huai recently. Every time Qin Huai practiced his knife skills on video, Cao Guixiang would chat away to distract him. Qin Huai’s life is very simple; outside of snacks, it’s just customers, his sister, and friends. Talking about snacks so much made Cao Guixiang a bit itchy to pick up and practice her long-lost pastry skills again.
At this time, Qin Huai had to say something very ruthless.
Even if Cao Guixiang wasn’t a pastry chef and hadn’t made snacks for many years, her kneaded dough was still very beautiful, more so than Pei Xing’s.
Pei Xing, don’t listen, this is a negative comment.
"Not tired, Master Cao; I just couldn’t find the feeling earlier," Qin Huai explained, "Holding the knife felt off, cutting felt wrong, applying force like that felt wrong, and I adjusted several times before it felt comfortable."
"You haven’t practiced enough to form muscle memory, which is why you feel uncomfortable here, awkward there," Cao Guixiang laughed, "Many beginners have this issue, always wanting to get things right in one go, unaware that some things rely on comprehension, some on practice, and some on both comprehension and practice."
"Xiao Qin, the last time you told me that often you can’t teach people clearly, you think it’s about the feeling, the strength, doesn’t this relate to why you can’t articulate specific adjectives?"
"Things that rely on comprehension can’t be taught."
"Take knife skills as an example. Last time you asked me how long you needed to keep slicing radishes, and I didn’t know. You asked what state the radishes needed to be cut into to be considered good, and I couldn’t say."
"Slicing radish thin like a cicada’s wing and translucent counts as good, right? Of course."
"Achieving uniform thickness and length in radish strips, spreading them out and piecing them back into a whole radish counts too, I think."
"Cutting them into tiny square pieces, stackable like building blocks counts, doesn’t it? That doesn’t seem to be an issue."
"But is practicing knife skills really just about achieving those? Do meat chefs practice knife skills just to cut beautiful radish slices, neat radish strips, or nice radish cubes? Can machines not accomplish these tasks? If machines can easily do this, why would a chef spend years or even decades, exhausting themselves early and late, day in and day out practicing knife skills?"
"Because machines are inflexible, but food is alive."
"When you truly make a dish, when your skills are honed and your intuition sharp, you’ll know what ingredients you need. You’ll know the precise thickness of radish slices, the length of radish strips, and the size of radish cubes needed."
"Once you’ve reached a sufficient level, you’ll genuinely realize the importance of basic knife skills for both meat and pastry chefs. Though you’re just starting to practice knife skills, you already understand their importance, which is why you specifically choose assistants with good knife skills."
"Sometimes not being able to articulate something and just saying ’it’s about the feeling’ isn’t a bad thing. Being able to express the word ’feeling’ means you’ve felt it. For someone who doesn’t understand it, it just means they haven’t grasped the feeling they need to. There are many master chefs who don’t know how to teach apprentices, and even more who lack the words to do so. When I was learning, some could only keep pushing apprentices to practice without explanation, but they were all undoubtedly great masters."