Chinese Hot Pot at Home
We worked with Lee Kum Kee to develop this Hot Pot at Home post. Enjoy!
When fall and winter roll around, one big treat tends to pop into our minds—Chinese hot pot. It’s a warm, comforting, and social meal to have with a close-knit group of family or friends. Plus, because all the food gets cooked at the table, it’s an easy meal to boot.
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With all of us staying indoors and sharing each meal with those in our own households, it’s also a great at-home dining “event.” It’s a welcome break from routine, and a delicious one! In this post, we’ll talk about how to make hot pot at home.
There are many types of hot pot across China, but at its most basic, Chinese Hot Pot is an interactive meal in which diners sit around a simmering pot of soup at the center of the table with various raw ingredients—meat, seafood, vegetables, tofu, and starches—in thin slices or small pieces for quick cooking.
Diners can add whatever they like to the boiling liquid. They can then retrieve cooked food items from the pot with wire ladles, and flavor them with individual dipping sauces.
Hot pot can be a deeply personalized meal! Each individual can mix their own dipping sauce, and choose exactly what they want to eat.
If that sounds right up your alley (how could it not be?!), keep reading!
In China, hot pot is a cold weather staple. Hot pot restaurants range from casual to upscale. Some offer individual small pots with rotating conveyor belts of ingredients, similar to conveyor belt sushi restaurants. Others focus on the more traditional communal dining experience.
Many offer specialized regional hot pot experiences. There are restaurants specializing in Yunnan hot pot, Sichuan hot pot, Mongolian lamb hot pot, and even Japanese shabu-shabu.
Some have special pre-mixed dipping sauces you can order off the menu, while others offer a buffet-style sauce bar.
One of our favorite hot pot chains in China is called Haidilao Hot Pot Restaurant (海底捞火锅), known for their superior service and dancing noodle pullers. Haidilao roughly translates to “scooping the bottom of the ocean,” which is a pretty good metaphor for scooping your ladle through the pot for a fish ball or tofu puff!
We have hot pot restaurants here in the U.S. as well, but we find them to be relatively pricey, and the quality varies widely. That’s why we prefer to make our hot pot at home.
You do need some special equipment to have a hot pot meal at home. Let’s start with the essential gear.
When it comes to broth, there’s a lot of variation out there! For a super simple version, we’ll take out some chicken soup and throw in a handful of goji berries, ginger, and sliced scallions.
However, sometimes you’re looking for a particular flavor profile. Most hot pot restaurants offer different broth flavors, which really elevates the experience.
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Some people like very clean-tasting plain broths that are either meat or mushroom-based. Others like a thick tomato soup base, while others like fiery, oily Sichuan hot pot.
The process has become even easier with the advent of packaged hot pot soup bases.
We really enjoyed Lee Kum Kee’s Soup Base for Satay Hot Pot, which had a light seafood flavor and gave everything a rich umami boost.
If seafood isn’t your thing, they also make a Japanese-style pork soup base, a tomato soup base, and a spicy Sichuan one as well.
These soup bases can also be used to make other dishes. For instance, hot pot soup base is a key ingredient in our Ma La Xiang Guo (Spicy Numbing Stir-fry Pot) recipe.
These pre-packaged options definitely make the meal much easier to throw together anytime you feel like surrounding yourself with plates of raw veggies, noodles, tofu, and proteins to settle in for a nice long feast.
There are a few categories of hot pot dippables to keep in mind. Make sure you have a good balance of 3-5 items from each category to have a varied hot pot meal.
Here are some of your options:
A good mix of vegetables (including Chinese leafy greens as well as harder root vegetables) and fungi is important to a balanced hot pot experience. Here are some options:
Leafy Greens: To prepare leafy greens, simply wash them thoroughly and cut them into manageable pieces. Baby leafy greens (suck as baby bok choy) can be left whole, while larger leaves (like napa cabbage) should be cut into smaller (1-2 inch) pieces.
Other Vegetables: Most of these vegetables should be peeled and sliced into 1/4-1/8 inch slices. You can also cut them into small 1-inch chunks, but the thicker they are, the longer they’ll take to cook through.
Mushrooms:
Asian grocery stores sell thinly sliced meat (usually beef, lamb, and pork) intended specifically for hot pot.
If you can’t find pre-sliced meats, you can thinly slice cuts like flank steak, sirloin, lamb shoulder, pork belly, and pork shoulder. They’ll be easer to slice if partially frozen. You can even bring them to the table while partially frozen, as long as they are sliced thinly enough to cook quickly once added to the simmering pot.
Seafood items are also popular—whole shrimp, thinly sliced fish fillets, shrimp balls, squid, and scallops.
See more : 4 Surprising Health Benefits of Chestnuts
Other meat & seafood items include pre-cooked beef balls, pork balls, fish balls, squid balls, and mixed seafood balls. These are pre-cooked, and just need to be heated through in the hot pot.
You could do a completely vegetarian hot pot, but adding meats requires additional attention to food safety. Always make sure your broth is boiling, and don’t add too many ingredients to the pot at once. This could lower your broth temperature and result in undercooked food.
Make sure your meats are completely cooked through. After adding raw meat, allow the broth to boil for at least 30 seconds to 1 minute before removing any other items from the pot.
Every meal needs a few carbs!
We like to have our hot pot with a side of white rice, but eating rice with hot pot isn’t the norm. Many prefer to cook their starches right in the pot along with everything else.
Look for thin/small items (like thin noodles, small dumplings) that cook quickly and won’t add too much additional starch to your soup base. Here are some options:
Soy products are a must-have in our family for any hot-pot meal. You’d be surprised at just how much variety there is! Most of these products are already cooked; they just need to be fully reheated in the pot.
Ok, on to our last hot pot element—the dipping sauce. Your dipping sauce is a very personal thing.
I like a sesame paste-based sauce, while my sister and dad prefer Sha Cha (Chinese BBQ sauce) to be the primary flavor. My mom’s dipping sauce is more soy sauce-based.
To make your dipping sauce, start out with what you’d like your base to be (sesame sauce, peanut butter, soy sauce, Sha Cha) and add additional flavorings from there, tasting as you go.
Here are some sauce elements:
We enjoyed Lee Kum Kee’s Sesame Sauce, which was a bit thinner than traditional Chinese sesame paste.
Sesame paste can be very thick and difficult to stir smoothly, while the Sesame Sauce poured easily out of a squeeze packet.
We also tried their seafood flavored soy sauce, which has oyster extracts in it to give it a bit of extra umami.
Hot pot dipping sauces are so tasty, I’ve also done a recipe where I made a batch without hot pot, just to mix into noodles. Check out my hot pot sauce noodles recipe.
Ok, I think that’s everything. We’ve included the ingredients, equipment, and instructions in the recipe card below so you can embark on your own adventure of making hot pot at home!
Source: https://en.congthucvatly.com
Category: Cook
This post was last modified on Tháng Mười Một 15, 2023 12:17 sáng
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