Hot pot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the East Asian dish. For the British dish, see Lancashire Hotpot.
Hot pot, also known as Steamboat, is a communal dish which originates from Mongolia, but now eaten in a variety of forms throughout East Asia. It consists of a simmering pot of stock at the center of the dining table. While the hot pot is kept simmering, ingredients are placed into the pot and are cooked at the table.
Typical hot pot dishes include thinly sliced meat, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, wontons, egg dumplings, and seafood. The cooked food is usually eaten with a dipping sauce. In many areas, hot pot meals are often eaten in the winter.
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[edit] China / Mongolia
Huo Guo (Traditional Chinese: 火鍋, Simplified Chinese: 火锅, pinyin: huǒguō) is the Chinese name for "hot pot", where huǒ means "fire", while guō refers to "pot'.
Chinese Fondue is an English term used more commonly in Western countries.
Da Been Lo is the common Cantonese terminology for Hot pot which roughly translates into "hitting the side of the pot".
The Chinese style of cooking has origins in Mongolia[citation needed] and northern China, emerging in primitive forms over a thousand years ago. Mongolian nomads would cook meat and vegetables in a pot over the embers of a camp fire. It is these nomads who is said to have started the tradition of slicing meats thinly, allowing them to be cooked with minimal use of precious fuel.
It spread to the south during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906). Later, the northern nomads who settled in China enhanced the hot pot with such meat as beef and mutton, and southerners did the same with seafood. By the Qing Dynasty, the hot pot became popular throughout most of China.
Today, in many modern homes particularly in the big cities, the traditional coal heated steamboat or hot pot has been replaced with electric or gas versions.
Because steamboat and hot pot styles change so much from region to region, many different ingredients are used. While not strictly traditional, it is fun to experiment with ingredients and sauces according to one's own tastes. A Cantonese variation includes mixing a raw egg with the condiments to reduce the amount of 'heat' absorbed by the food and thereby reducing the likelihood of a sore throat after the steamboat meal, according to Chinese herbalist theories.
Frozen meat is sliced deli-thin. Slicing frozen meat in such a way causes it to roll up and is often presented as such. Meats used include lamb, beef, chicken, and others. The cooking pot is often sunken into the table and fueled by propane, or alternatively is above the table and fueled by hot coals. Meat or vegetables are loaded individually into the hot cooking broth by chopsticks, and cooking time is brief. Meat often only takes 15 to 30 seconds to cook.
There are often disagreements between different types of hot pot enthusiasts.
1) This hot pot enthusiast likes to enjoy the process of cooking, by leisurely placing items into the hotpot at a relaxed pace. 2) This hot pot enthusiast likes the speed and quickness of throwing everything in at one time, rendering the hotpot useless for a certain amount of time during the wait for it to return to a boil.
[edit] Common ingredients
- Meat
- Vegetables
- Condiments
- Hoisin sauce
- Soy sauce
- Satay Sauce
- Chili
- Sesame butter
[edit] Regional variations
In Beijing (Peking), hot pot is eaten year-round. Typical Beijing hot pot is eaten inside during the winter. Different kinds of hot pot can be found in Beijing - typically, more modern eateries offer the sectioned bowl with differently flavored broths in each section. More traditional or older establishments serve a fragrant, but mild, broth in the Mongolian firepot, which is a large brass vessel, which is heated by burning coals in a central chimney. Broth is boiled in a deep, donut-shaped bowl surrounding the chimney.
The Manchurian hot pot (Traditional Chinese: 東北酸菜火鍋) uses plenty of Chinese sauerkraut (Traditional Chinese: 酸菜) to make the pot's stew sour.
A Sichuan-style hot pot is markedly different from the style eaten in Taiwan, for example. Quite often the differences lie in the meats used, the type of soup base, and the sauces and condiments used to flavor the meat, to name a few.
In Xishuangbanna, near Myanmar, the broth is often divided into a yin and yang shape - a bubbling, fiery red chilli broth on one side, and a cooler white chicken broth on the other.
One of the most famous variations is the Sichuan "má là" (Traditional Chinese: 麻辣 — "numb and spicy") hot pot: a special spice known as "huā jiāo" (Traditional Chinese: 花椒 — "flower pepper" or Sichuan Pepper) is added to dull the sense of taste, hence "má là". It was usually used to eat variety meats as well as sliced mutton filet.
Hot pot is famous in Sichuan province, where it has evolved into a distinctive style. The cities of Chengdu and Chongqing are also famous for their different kinds of huǒ guō. "Sì Chuān huǒ guō" could be used to distinguish from simply "huǒ guō" in cases when people refer to the "Northern Style Hot Pot" in China. "Cuān yáng ròu", Chinese: 氽羊肉(instant-boiled lamb) could be viewed as representative of this kind of food, which does not focus on the soup base.
In the Taiwanese hot pot, people eat the food with a dipping sauce consisting of sacha sauce and raw egg yolk. The use of thinly sliced red meat in hot pot probably originated from the nomadic Mongolians.
[edit] Cultural significance
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Eating with family or friends is supposed to emphasise unity and togetherness[citation needed], because it is done from a single shared pot. "Weilu" — to 'circle' a hot pot — has a deep and profound meaning[citation needed] to the Chinese people, many of whom traditionally adhere to Confucian ideas, which strongly emphasize unity with family. The hot pot style of dining is often taken nice and slow; the diners often chat while they are eating together. Traditionally, it was not uncommon for this type of meal to span nearly a full day[citation needed]. Beer is the beverage of choice at a hot pot meal in China[citation needed]. Hot pot is sometimes eaten as part of the Chinese New Year feast[citation needed]. The roundness of the pot is a symbol of family unity[citation needed].
[edit] Food Poisoning
A few things should be kept in mind to prevent E. coli or Salmonella poisoning. After handling raw meat with chopsticks, dip the chopsticks in the boiling broth to kill any microbes. If a raw egg is used, use only the freshest possible. Another alternative is to use separate chopsticks for the hotpot.
[edit] Korea
[edit] Chigae / Jigae
Korean steamboats are very hot and spicy, perfect for warmth in harsh Korean winters. The ingredients are stewed in a spicy soup flavoured with chilli bean paste or salted shrimp paste. Typical varieties include:
- Dubu Jigae - with tofu.
- Kimchi Jigae - with kimchi.
- Budae jigae ("military base jigae") - invented back in the poor old days by people collecting leftover food from US military bases such as instant ramen and Spam and stewing it with kimchi and other ingredients.
[edit] Thailand
[edit] Thai sukiyaki
Steamboats in Thailand were Chinese-style hot pots at first, catering mainly to Thailand's sizable ethnic Chinese community. However in the 1960s a restaurant chain called Coca opened its first branch in Siam Square, Bangkok, offering a modified version of the Chinese hot pot under the Japanese name of Sukiyaki. (Although it only vaguely resembled Japanese sukiyaki, it was a catchy name for it because of a Japanese pop song called "The Sukiyaki Song" which was a big worldwide hit at the time.) In this modified Thai version, diners had more options of ingredients to choose from, each portion being considerably smaller in order to enable diners to order many more varieties. The spicy dipping sauce was catered for Thai tastes too, with a lot of chilli, lime and coriander leaves added. This proved to be a massive hit, and it wasn't long before other chains started opening "suki" restaurants across Bangkok and other cities, each with its own special dipping sauce as the selling point. Today the MK chain is the most popular in Thailand with 122 restaurants across the country and 8 in Japan. Coca is making a rapid spread abroad too, already serving Thai suki in 24 outlets across Asia and Australia and further outlets planned in the US and Europe.
[edit] Japan
Japan has a wide range of steamboat dishes, collectively known as nabemono. They can be divided into styles where the ingredients are simmered in a light flavoured stock and then dipped in a sauce before eating (like chinese hot pots), and where ingredients are stewed in a soy sauce based or a miso-based broth.
[edit] Common varieties
- Mizutaki - chicken pieces simmered with other ingredients in stock and served with a dipping sauce such as ponzu. A traditional speciality of Fukuoka, but eaten throughout Japan for hundreds of years.
- Yosenabe - various meats, seafood, tofu, mushrooms and vegetables stewed in a soy or a miso flavoured broth.
- Sukiyaki - thinly sliced beef, negi, tofu, ito konnyaku (jelly-noodes), shungiku, various types of mushrooms and other ingredients, simmered in a shallow cast-iron pot in soy sauce, sugar and mirin and dipped into a small bowl of beaten raw egg by the diner before eating. Did not become popular until the end of the 19th century when western influence meant eating red meat no longer was a taboo.
- Shabu-shabu - similar to Chinese hot pot. Thinly sliced beef simmered in a potful of stock along with tofu, mushrooms and various vegetables, and served with a variety of dipping sauces such as ponzu. Ingredients such as pork, chicken or seafood are occasionally used instead of beef. Chinese hot pot was introduced to the Japanese during their colonial rule of Manchuria, and upon their return to Japan following the end of the war, they recreated the dish replacing lamb with beef which the Japanese were more familiar with .
[edit] See also
- Lancashire Hotpot - a dish referred to as "hot pot" (or "hotpot") in Britain
- Shabu shabu
- Szechuan hotpot
