The Hot Pot Manifesto
How (and why) you should Hot Pot at home
Hotpot is awesome. You should be eating more of it, and you should do it at home. See, what hotpot is is a form of communal eating sort of in the mold of something like Korean barbecue, or perhaps a cookout… and it's one of the tastiest ways that you can feed a crowd with a minimum amount of hassle.
Now of course, when I say this word 'hotpot', for a lot of you your mind might immediately jump to that cauldron of bubbling heat that is Sichuan-style hotpot. And while we do absolutely love that stuff too, 'hotpot' is way more than just that. You can find hotpots everywhere from Japan in the form of shabu shabu, to Thailand in the form of Thai Suki or 'steam boats'.
And yet, despite its ubiquity throughout Asia, hotpot is certainly not without its critics: author Fuschia Dunlop has called the continued popularity of hotpot restaurants a negative, and food critic Choy Lan in Hong Kong infamously labelled them a cooking method that "totally lacks cultural significance".
But if you listen to most criticisms in the West, they generally seem to revolve around…
And in some ways, I do kinda get it. If you're new to a cuisine, a Sichuanese fly restaurant or a Japanese Izakaya is gunna offer a lot more in the way of new, interesting foods than a pot of bubbling broth is. But the way I would think about hotpot is more like a cookout – if you're anything like me, some of the most fun I've ever had cooking and eating are with friends or family circled around a grill or a campfire. Hotpot is in that tradition.
But the big benefit for you, the cook? It takes, like… all the pressure off you. For example, if you were cooking a normal Chinese-style meal for, I dunno, your extended family – for eight people or so that'd be something like seven dishes that you'd need to whip up. Sometimes you might be down for the project, but that can get pretty stressful to execute. Much less stressful is making (or even buying) a great hotpot base, slicing some stuff up, and gathering around a pot. A proper feast for a fraction of the effort.
But where we do partially agree with some of the critics is that while it's definitely fun some of the time, you don't have to always pay restaurant premiums for someone else to slice your beef for you.
So in this post, we’ll teach you how to approach making a basic store-bought-base hotpot at home, followed by how you can make your own soup base if you're feeling a bit more ambitious, and finally a cool example from the Guizhou province of how you can turn that basic soup base into something a bit more interesting.
Level I: Hotpot with a store bought base
Step one: Find a Hotpot base.
First things first, you’ll need a hotpot base. It’s highly likely that your local Asian supermarket’ll have, like, and entire aisle of ‘em (Amazon has a solid selection too) - there’s a metric ton of different flavors and brands so definitely do feel free to experiment and explore. If you’re unsure what to buy, the brand Haidilao is readily available and solid enough.
Step two: Dust off (or purchase) a Portable Burner
Second thing you'll need is some kind of portable burner. We just use this one – the little butane camper burner we use in the videos… but electric or induction are also a popular choice.
For the pot itself, nothing fancy – just use whatever pot you have, your dutch oven would totally just work fine.
Step three: Choose what you put into the Pot
Next, choose the stuff that you want to put in your hotpot. Referring to what hotpot restaurants serve would give you a pretty good idea of what's common, so we'll have an example menu in the description box. So for example, thinly sliced beef or lamb rolls are pretty classic … they're frozen meat cut into 1mm thin pieces with a deli slicer.
The easiest way to get that thinness is to just go get the pre-sliced ones. If you can't find it or don't want to buy frozen hotpot meat, you can also just thinly slice up some fresh meat yourself, but don't stress, 'cause not all meat needs to be paper thin. For us, our hotpot must-haves include tofu puffs or skins, frozen meat balls, some root vegetable, and some greens. A few other ideas:
Meats: Sliced beef, lamb, pork, fish. Poultry (cut into chunks).
Organs: duck tongue, intestine, beef tripe, liver, pork brain.
Meat products: Fresh pork/beef balls, spam, frozen meat balls, fish balls, quail eggs.
Tofu, tofu products, etc: firm tofu, frozen tofu, tofu puffs, tofu skins, seitan, konjac.
Seafood: clams, shrimp, squid, octopus.
Leafy veggies: water spinach, spinach, bak choy, napa cabbage, cabbage, lettuce, cauliflower.
Root/hearty veg: sweet potato, potato, yam, Chinese yam, taro, jicama, cassava, corn, water chestnut, gobo, daikon, broccoli carrot.
Mushroom/fungi: king oyster, oyster, porcini, enoki, button, shiitake, wood ear, snow ear.
Kelp: sea lettuce, kombu.
Starch: noodles, rice noodles, rice cake.
Then once all your stuff is prepped? Just mix your base according to the package, bring it to a boil, and move it over to your burner. Start your relaxing and enjoyable meal over the steamy pot, chill with your friends, watch a movie, cook your food bit by bit, slow down and relax.
Stuff like root vegetable can go in first because it takes a while to cook, and the rest of your food can be added in little by little. If you're worried about raw meat cross-contamination, you can just use a separate pair of chopsticks just for that purpose.
You would dip your food with dipping sauces as you eat. At hotpot restaurants, they have a whole section dedicated to dipping sauces, so there's no way we can be comprehensive. For spicy hotpot, my favorite is adding minced garlic with toasted sesame oil… and for a non-spicy pot, you can't go wrong with some chili soy sauce - fresh heaven facing chili with light soy sauce (and maybe a bit of cilantro).
Level II: Making your own base
Now that we’ve some basic ideas about how to assemble a hotpot meal, let’s move onto the next level: making your own base.
Now, of course, the elephant in the room with this post is… spicy Sichuan hotpot. And forgive us - while we’ve had it on our list for a while as something to cover, it’s been hard to find motivation because it is intense. Chef Wang Gang’s got a pair of videos detailing how to make it, and if you want something a little less intense, we’ve also got a video on an older, simpler style:
In this post however, let’s cover a simple (super versatile) Cantonese style pork bone soup.
Ingredients
Pork bones (猪筒骨), 500g. We used the leg bone. It's best if the bone's got a touch of meat still on it. Ribs would also work fine.
Hot, boiled water, 2.5L
Ginger (姜), 2 inches. Smashed.
Dacong a.k.a. welsh onion (大葱), ~2-3 two inch sections -or- ⅛ of a white onion
Daikon Radish (萝卜), 500g. Peeled and cut into ~2 inch chunks.
Seasoning:
Salt, ½ tbsp;
Chicken bouillon powder (鸡粉), 1 tsp
White pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ⅛ tsp
Process:
Soak the pork in cool water for 30 minutes.
Move to a pot of cool water, cover, and over a high flame bring to a boil. Boil for ~2 minutes, then remove. Give the pork a quick rinse under running water.
Fry the pork bones in ~1/2 tbsp of oil until lightly browned, ~2-3 minutes. Add in the hot, boiled water, the ginger, and the onion. Bring to a boil, then down to a simmer. Cover, simmer on low for at least ~1 hour.
Add in the daikon, then cover it back up. Simmer for one hour more.
Season, then move over to your table.
Level III: Inventive Bases
Pretty much any soup or braise can be hotpot-ified. Want to make an Osso Bucco pot? Go for it.
The following is a hotpotification of the Pickled Greens and Beans, a popular dish (and reasonably popular hotpot) in the Guizhou province. As an aside, you’re curious what the dish itself looks like, we’ve also got a video on the topic.
Ingredients:
Dried lima beans (芸豆) or kidney beans (腰豆), 120g.
Pork belly (五花肉), 200g.
Soy sauce, 1 tsp. To Marinate the pork belly.
Aromatics:
Garlic, 3 cloves. Minced.
Ginger (姜), ~2 inches. Minced.
Suancai, Chinese pickled mustard greens (酸菜), 150g. Minced.
Stock, 4 cups.
Bean cooking liquid, 2 cups.
Corn, 1 ear. Cut into ~four pieces.
Tomato, 1. Cut into slices.
Green garlic (蒜苗) or scallion (葱), 2 sprigs. Cut into one inch sections.
Seasoning [skip if your stock is already seasoned]:
Salt, ½ tbsp.
Chicken bouillon powder (鸡粉), 1 tsp.
Note: If your stock is already seasoned (e.g. if you were using the broth above) do not season twice.
Process:
Rinse 120g of dried beans, and soak in the fridge overnight.
Strain, then add your beans to 2 liters of boiling water. Cover, and cook on medium low for ~2 hours, or until the beans are soft enough to mash.
Remove the beans. Reserve half, then take the other half of the beans and mash them. Reserve two cups of the bean cooking liquid.
Mince 150g of suancai, reserve. Mince three cloves of garlic and two inches of ginger. Cut one tomato into slices, one ear of corn into four sections, and two sprigs of green garlic (or scallion) into one inch sections. Slice 200g of pork belly into about half centimeter pieces, and mix with 1 tsp of soy sauce.
In a wok (or pot) over a medium flame, fry the pork belly for ~5 minutes, or until it's browned and's started to release some lard. Remove, reserve.
Flame still on medium, fry the garlic/ginger in the rendered fat until fragrant, ~30 seconds. Then add the minced suancai pickled greens, and fry for another minute until fragrant. Then add in the minced beans and fry for one minute more. Remove this whole mix, and reserve.
In your final serving pot, add the 2 cups bean liquid and 4 cups stock. Mix in the mashed bean mix from the previous step with the remaining beans. Bring to a boil.
Season, skim, add in the corn, fried pork belly, tomato, and green garlic.