Reading Chinese Menus: Dishes: 火鍋 — huǒ guō — hotpot

[kake]

Photo © Ewan-M, used under cc-by-sa.

As with the 水煮 (shuǐ zhǔ) style of cooking, the literal English translation of 火鍋 (huǒ guō) can be somewhat misleading to those unfamiliar with Chinese cuisine. Like 水煮牛肉 (shuǐ zhǔ niú ròu), which is completely different from English boiled beef, 火鍋 bears very little resemblance to Lancashire hotpot.

火鍋 is a sociable, communal-style meal, served as a simmering pot of stock in the middle of the table with raw ingredients (sliced meat and fish, prawns, vegetables, tofu, noodles, etc) supplied on the side. You choose your own ingredients and cook them to your preferred doneness by letting them simmer in the pot before fishing them out with chopsticks or a strainer. Various dipping sauces are also offered.

There are a number of different styles of stock. Helen Yuet Ling Pang describes the Cantonese style, which is a fairly plain one flavoured with carrot, daikon, spring onion, and ginger — you could use pork or chicken stock as a base for this, but since Helen lives with a vegetarian she uses water, and it works out fine. The version pictured at the top of this post is a "split" version known as 鴛鴦 (yuān yāng) [see footnote 0], which has a spicy Sichuan-style stock in one side and a milder, "medicinal" stock in the other — quite handy if the various members of your party have differing chilli tolerances!

I'm having a little trouble finding recipes for the Sichuan-style stock — as far as I can see, a lot of people who make this hotpot style at home simply buy a pre-mixed seasoning packet and use that. I did find a recipe on the BBC website, and an accompanying video [see footnote 1]. (Update, April 2012: I found one on the Yi Reservation blog, though it doesn't give quantities.) I've had no luck at all finding a recipe for the "medicinal" stock, but it usually seems to include things like dried mushrooms and goji berries (wolfberries). (Update, February 2013: Yi Reservation has now posted a recipe for medicinal hotpot stock.)

To serve 火鍋 at home, you'll want some kind of tabletop cooker, a pot to go on it, some small single-serving hotpot strainers, and of course chopsticks. You may want to supply separate sets of chopsticks for eating and for transferring raw ingredients to the pot with, to avoid cross-contamination. Hotpot strainers (photo) should be available in most Chinese supermarkets that have kitchenware sections (regular readers will, I suspect, not be surprised to learn that I got mine from Loon Fung in Silvertown). The cooking can be done in a rice cooker, if you happen to have one of the old types with a completely removable lid, or in a specialist 火鍋 vessel (look for these in any Chinese cash-and-carry/large supermarket). I recently managed to achieve a two-person hotpot in a fondue set, but it was a slow process even on the highest heat setting.

Here are some of my favourite hotpot ingredients (see also my earlier post full of balls):

通菜	tōng cài	water spinach (a leafy green with hollow stems and long narrow leaves)
空心菜	kōng xīn cài	another name for water spinach
金針菇	jīn zhēn gū	enoki mushrooms (literally "golden needle mushrooms")
凍豆腐	dòng dòu du	frozen tofu
大蝦	dà xiā	king prawns
青口	qīng kǒu	green-lip mussels (literally "green mouth")
魚片	yú piàn	sliced fish
特色肥牛	tè sè féi niú	"characteristic fatty beef" — ultra-thinly-sliced raw beef

Finally, here are some hotpot menus from London restaurants:

• Chilli Cool, Bloomsbury (photo with transcription, bilingual)
• Red & Hot, Euston (blurry photo with partial transcription, bilingual, but the English and Chinese versions don't correspond exactly)
• Royal Palace, Surrey Quays (text, translation by me)

Footnote: [0] 鴛 (yuān) and 鴦 (yāng) are the characters for the male and female Mandarin duck, and are often used together to denote a pairing of some kind — CantoDict has a few examples (scroll down).

Footnote: [1] I'm not sure whether or how much the BBC recipe is "dumbed down", given that the chef (Ching-He Huang) is using Lee Kum Kee chilli bean paste — with the brand name blanked out on the jar, since this is the BBC, but the jar is pretty distinctive. See Fuchsia Dunlop on this subject, and also note this forum thread disparaging Lee Kum Kee's pre-prepared Sichuan hotpot base.

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See here for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[bob]

what would happen to a unicode snowman in a hot pot?

[kake]

水!

[bob]

yes it would probably turn to water :)

[vatine]

Hm, I mostly frequent Ho Hing in Chadwell Heath.

[kake]

Bit more out-of-the-way for me, that one. I checked out their other branches, and none of them are all that convenient either. bob did discover a branch of See Woo in North Greenwich, but the walk to the Jubilee Line station is over a mile, which makes it less convenient than Loon Fung. I suppose these places aren't really situated with public transport in mind...

[vatine]

Ho Hing in Chadwell Heath certainly isn't, there's no close bus stop (nor any close train station, I think the train station is a mere 50 metres further than the closest bus stop) and plenty of car parking spaces.

However, it's well within cycling distance for me, so not too bad, all things considered.

[pulchritude]

And I thought the common name for 通菜 is 空心菜 (and, in fact, the former does not come up as a compound in my IME but the latter does!). (It's completely different in my topolect, and I always have to remember to not use vocabulary from my topolect when speaking Standard Mandarin, which I fail to do at times...)

I have never attended a hotpot in which people used strainers! :O My mother has a few and I always wondered what they were used for! :O

Any places you'd recommend for it in London? :D

[kake]

Oh, yes, good point, thank you! I knew of the name 空心菜, but didn't think to note it down in the post (partly since I was using the hotpot menu from the place I had my birthday dinner at last night as a memory aid, since there are so many tasty things that go in hotpot — and they use 通菜). I've added it to the post now.

Strainers are really useful for when you've lost something in the bottom of the pot and want to rescue it before it overcooks :) The ones in my photo have bendable handles so you can hook them over the side of the pot and let things sit in them in the stock, if you want to keep track of them.

The only place I've actually had 火鍋 in London is Royal Palace in Surrey Quays, but I am keen to go and try it out in other places... Royal Palace is so convenient to my house, though, so I keep just going back there! I would like to give Chilli Cool and Red & Hot a go, since I've had very good non-hotpot food from both places.

[pulchritude]

I have never had 空心菜 in hotpot, actually. The thought of it makes me O_O. I've also never lost anything in the bottom of the pot!

[kake]

Does that apply to all leafy greens, or just 空心菜? (Or am I misinterpreting your smiley... I'm reading it as "boggle", but I am far from fluent in smilies!)

[pulchritude]

Not all leafy greens! I usually have what is called Chinese leaf in my hotpot. (I'd use the Chinese...but considering that there is great regional difference in names for stuff...:|)

And yes, that is a boggle smiley! Thanks for giving me a term to use!

[kake]

Ah, yes, I like Chinese leaf too! Though not quite as much... I find I prefer the less robust greens like 空心菜 and spinach. They do tend to cook quite quickly though, so you have to be a bit careful with them or they end up as depressing grey slime.

[pulchritude]

...I have never had spinach in my hotpot, either. The idea makes me DDDDDD:. I imagine it's because I've had established hotpot foods in my mind for decades now, so the idea of other stuff just seems very weird.

And haha, I totally stalk the hotpot when I'm eating it, so I've never had to worry about anything overcooking! XD

[mrs_leroy_brown]

And it was whoa, so tasty indeed. Tick vg would nom again!

[kake]

Very glad you liked it! I thought it would be good for veggies, seeing as they have so many different vegetables and tofu products and things on the menu, but it's good to hear confirmation from an actual vegetarian :)

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have any idea where on internet we can buy a stainless curved divider hot pot?? Thank you

[kake]

I don't know, I'm afraid, particularly since you don't say which country you're in. For the UK, there's Wai Yee Hong and Wing Yip, but they don't seem to have any listed.