kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
[personal profile] kake
A metal pot divided into two halves down the middle with a curved divider.  One side contains 'medicinal' stock, an opaque light-coloured stock with dried mushrooms, shredded spring onions, and dried reddish berries floating in it.  The other side contains a spicier, oilier stock which is almost completely invisible under the layer of dried chillies floating on top.

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 càiwater spinach (a leafy green with hollow stems and long narrow leaves)
空心菜kōng xīn càianother name for water spinach
金針菇jīn zhēn gūenoki mushrooms (literally "golden needle mushrooms")
凍豆腐dòng dòu dufrozen tofu
大蝦dà xiāking prawns
青口qīng kǒugreen-lip mussels (literally "green mouth")
魚片yú piànsliced 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:

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.

Date: 2010-07-08 11:56 pm (UTC)
bob: (Default)
From: [personal profile] bob
what would happen to a unicode snowman in a hot pot?

Date: 2010-07-09 09:41 am (UTC)
bob: (Default)
From: [personal profile] bob
yes it would probably turn to water :)

Date: 2010-07-09 12:17 pm (UTC)
vatine: Generated with some CL code and a hand-designed blackletter font (Default)
From: [personal profile] vatine
Hm, I mostly frequent Ho Hing in Chadwell Heath.

Date: 2010-07-15 03:00 pm (UTC)
vatine: Generated with some CL code and a hand-designed blackletter font (Default)
From: [personal profile] 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.

Date: 2010-07-09 05:31 pm (UTC)
pulchritude: Manuel Neuer comforting Benedikt Höwedes (10)
From: [personal profile] 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

Date: 2010-07-09 09:48 pm (UTC)
pulchritude: (4)
From: [personal profile] 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!

Date: 2010-07-10 09:39 am (UTC)
pulchritude: (5)
From: [personal profile] 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!

Date: 2010-07-10 12:05 pm (UTC)
pulchritude: manuel neuer and benedikt höwedes holding each other (11)
From: [personal profile] 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

Date: 2010-07-10 10:53 pm (UTC)
mrs_leroy_brown: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mrs_leroy_brown
And it was whoa, so tasty indeed. Tick vg would nom again!

Date: 2011-07-11 08:44 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Do you have any idea where on internet we can buy a stainless curved divider hot pot?? Thank you

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