Hot Pot! 火锅 Aka Huǒguō

Hot Pot!  火锅Aka Huǒguō, aka to “Dah Beeno”

This is one of my favourite ways to spend a winter evening with friends and I’m going to go on for a few pages about this in the hope you’ll decide to try it out. We have started to do it a lot and it has been popular with all the people who’ve tried it as it is interactive and people get to cook their own dinner.

  

dried chillies

Hot pot is basically a communal pot of boiling stock where people cook their own ingredients and then dip them in a variety of different sauces of their choice. In Sichuan they are spicy to the point of tears, literally three inches of chilli oil plus half a dozen dried chillies floating like naval mines, and copious amounts of Szechuan peppercorns in case you can still feel your tongue. My home version is much more understated. And your guests will enjoy cooking their own food to their own tastes. 

You can use a wok on a portable hotplate or even a large rice cooker with a lift off lid, or I use a slow cooker/crock pot.

 Stock:

Use a large stock pot or a wok to make your basic stock. This doesn’t have to be authentic, go for flavours you enjoy. Make vegetable stock with some leeks, carrots, celery  and vegetable scraps from preparing your vegetables for the main event (I even throw potato peelings, carrot peelings etc.), cooked for at least an hour, then strain the vegetables out. Make enough to fill your stock pot – it doesn’t matter if this is more than your hotpot can contain as you will need to top the hotpot up during the evening anyway. Add a stock cube or some spoonfuls of bouillon so that the stock is tasty but not too salty.

You can add dried Chinese mushrooms to the stock for a rich flavour; when you fish out spent vegetables from your base broth these can be kept in as they are great to eat later.

You can also add miso to your stock for an extra “umami” flavour.

Once you have a basic stock you can add different flavours.

One I’ve used before is a curry laksa type stock base. 5 tbsp of red curry paste (more if the paste isn’t that concentrated), fried in 1 tsp oil, with 20 cm ginger, sliced. Then add a tin of coconut milk, and 2 – 3  strips of lemon/lime zest and then topped up with stock. Add 1/3 cup of nutritional yeast and some soya sauce to taste.

Spicy Sichuan style: Fry about 8/9 whole chillies, 2 tsp Sichuan peppercorns, with 1 tbsp chilli bean sauce  in 1 tbsp oil until toasted, then add the stock. You can top this up with chilli oil if this isn’t fiery enough for you!

sichuan peppercorns

Don’t stress about your stock too much, if it tastes nice to you, great. During the course of the evening your guests are going to add loads of vegetables, tofu, noodles, dumplings etc to the pot, and the stock gets more and more flavoursome as the evening goes on. Plus, they are going add lots of different sauces to their own food, which adds even more flavour.

Dipping sauces:

Have a range of different sauces available. Sauces that have proved popular:

Satay Sauce,

Sriracha, Soy Sauce – both light and dark,

Sesame paste/tahini with a layer of sesame oil 

Sesame oil with ½ tsp of minced garlic

Chilli oil with black vinegar

Sweet chilli sauce/Chilli bean paste

Vegetarian oyster sauce/vegetarian XO sauce

Garnishes:  a dish of chopped scallions, a dish of chopped coriander

Things to go in the hotpot:

Buy as much as you think you and your guests will eat and choose whatever suits you.  

Chinese vegetables: e.g.  bak choi, Chinese (napa) cabbage, (can use choi sum, etc. instead)

carrots cut into 1cm slices, ½ a rutabaga/swede cut into 1cm slices in various shapes or some pumpkin/squash.

a daikon radish/mooli peeled and sliced into 1.5 cm slices.

3 or 4 medium potatoes, sliced into 0.5 cm slices

Mange tout, sugar snap peas, baby corn

Large bunch of coriander/cilantro works well as a cooked vegetable

Fresh (and dried if you have them) shitake mushrooms

Enogi mushrooms

Tofu, cubed and deep fried. Can be bought ready fried in Chinese supermarket.

Vegetarian Chinese dumplings (jiao zi), in the freezer section of Chinese supermarket. I have a recipe that I’ll put on the blog soon.

Hot dog sausages are strangely popular in Chinese hotpot in China (mind you, so is pig’s intestine). Cut your (vegan) hotdogs up – last time we had them whole, one slid out of my bowl like a seal off a rock and jumped right back into the hotpot.

Noodles:

Starch Noodles - you can buy noodles in the Chinese supermarket that are made of various types of starch, e.g. potato starch, corn starch, wheat starch etc. of various thicknesses. These are great for hot pot as they tolerate long cooking without breaking up and they are lovely and chewy. Buy one or two packets to feed 4 – it will keep to your next hotpot if you don’t use them up.

Udon – thick wheat noodles, really “meaty” and chewy. They come dried or come in small vacuum packs.

Tools

Chopsticks and small individual bowls for all.

Tongs, pasta spoon (the ones to dish up spaghetti), slotted spoons are things that are necessary to get things out once they are cooked.

Long wooden chopsticks are good as well but not essential. These are communal, so that people aren’t double dipping with their own chopsticks into the stockpot, if you are worried about these things.

The ritual

Hot pot takes time so is best done on a day off as you’ll need the day to prepare, or pre-prepare the stock, and vegetables the night before.

Cut grooves lengthwise into your carrots, daikon radishes, then slice.

Pre-prepare your vegetables in advance. I cut my daikon radish, carrots, potatoes, swede/rutabaga into cutesy little shapes as it adds a little decorative element, see pictures. You can also use cookie cutters in various shapes – any leftover trimmings can be added to your stock, so no waste here. I keep the vegetables sealed in plastic boxes and bring them to the table. This is pretty informal fare so boxes are fine at the dinner table.

Set up your table with your sauces, vegetables, and the stock pot in the middle. You will need an extension cord. Once your guests are ready get the stock boiling. You might want to play mum and put in stuff to get things started, e.g. potatoes and carrots and other vegetables that take a long time to cook. Then people can put their own things in.

Everyone cooks, makes up their own sauce in their bowls, then pulls cooked food out dips it in their sauce, adds garnish if wanted and eats.