Hot Pot Essentials: A Guide To Creating The Ultimate Homemade Feast

Hot pot is a fun and social meal to enjoy with family and friends. It's an interactive dining experience where everyone can cook and eat exactly what they like.

To make hot pot at home, you'll need a pot and a portable stove. For the pot, you can use a regular pot or invest in a split pot if you want to have multiple flavours of broth. For the portable stove, you can use a gas stove, an induction cooker, or an electric burner.

You'll also need a variety of ingredients, including broth, protein, carbs, and veggies. For the broth, you can make it from scratch, use a store-bought soup base, or purchase broth from your favourite restaurant. For protein, thinly sliced meats such as beef, pork, and chicken are popular choices. For carbs, noodles or rice can be cooked in the pot or served on the side. And for veggies, leafy greens, mushrooms, and crunchy vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower are all great options.

Don't forget the dipping sauces! Soy sauce, sesame sauce, and chilli garlic sauce are just a few options to elevate your hot pot experience.

Broth

Making Broth from Scratch

If you want to make your own broth, you can make a spicy or mild version.

Spicy Broth

A spicy broth is typically made with a soup base and water or stock. The soup base is made with beef tallow or a neutral cooking oil, dried chillies, Sichuan pepper, aromatics like scallions, onion, coriander, garlic and ginger, and spices like star anise, cassia cinnamon, bay leaves, and Chinese black cardamom. This is heated and then mixed with a soup base made from chilli bean paste, fermented black beans, and Shaoxing rice wine.

Mild Broth

A mild broth is typically made with a stock, aromatics, herbs, and sometimes vegetables. You can make a stock by boiling a whole chicken or chicken pieces in water with sliced ginger. You can then add rehydrated shiitake mushrooms, scallions, Chinese dates, and Goji berries.

Using a Store-Bought Base

If you don't want to make your own broth, you can buy a hot pot soup base in a Chinese shop or online. You can also buy pre-packaged hot pot soup mixes. To make the broth, simply mix the packet with water.

Using a Pre-Made Hot Pot Soup Mix

You can also buy a pre-made hot pot soup mix, which typically includes a packet of seasoning that you mix with water.

Customising Your Broth

You can customise your broth by adding extra ingredients. For example, you might add corn on the cob slices, green onions, jujube, goji berries, or ginger slices. You can also add beef meatballs or a splash of soy sauce or fish sauce for extra flavour.

Meat

The type of meat you use for your homemade hot pot is entirely up to you. It's your choice! Hot pot is all about customisation, so you can go with whatever you're in the mood for.

If you're going to include meat, it's best to use thinly sliced fatty meat. This is because the meat cooks quickly in the hot pot, so a fatty cut will stop it from overcooking. Fatty cuts of meat are usually the cheaper options, such as brisket, rib eye or beef belly.

• Beef short ribs
• Presliced fatty beef (usually brisket or chuck)
• Leg of lamb
• Presliced pork belly
• Chicken wings
• Tripe
• Rib eye
• Pork belly
• Pork jowl
• Lamb shoulder
• Pork shoulder

If you want to add meatballs to your hot pot, you can either buy some or make your own. All you need to do is pick pieces of meat that are heavily marbled, pop them in the freezer for about 30 minutes, and then slice them as thinly as you can.

Seafood

Types of Seafood

The most popular seafood choices for hot pot include shrimp, scallops, squid, fish, crab, mussels, clams, oysters, and lobster. You can also add in seafood balls, such as fish balls, shrimp balls, or mixed seafood balls, which are usually pre-cooked and just need to be heated through. If you're feeling adventurous, you can even try abalone or geoduck, thinly sliced and cooked for just a few seconds.

Preparing Seafood for Hot Pot

For most seafood, simply clean and prepare the items as you normally would, cutting them into bite-sized pieces or slices. For items like shrimp, scallops, and squid, you can cook them whole or remove the shells and heads beforehand. Oysters should be shucked, and clams should be scrubbed clean of any grit and sand. For mussels, remove their beards and ensure they are well-cleaned. Lobster and crab can be a bit tricky as you'll need to chop them into large pieces while they are still alive.

If you're using frozen seafood, such as shrimp or fish, you can add them to the hot pot straight from frozen. For items like fish balls, there's no need to defrost them first; simply drop them into the broth and cook until they float to the surface.

Cooking Seafood in the Hot Pot

When it comes to broth, a seafood-based broth or a simple chicken broth flavoured with chunks of daikon, carrots, or corn can work well. You can also find packaged seafood-flavoured hot pot broths, such as Lee Kum Kee's Seafood Hot Pot Base. For dipping sauces, a simple combination of soy sauce, sesame oil, and chilli oil or chilli flakes is always a good option. You can also try an egg yolk dipping sauce (if you're not concerned about salmonella) or a ginger-scallion sauce, which goes well with seafood.

Vegetables

The sky is the limit when it comes to choosing vegetables for your hot pot. The only rule is to select veggies that go with Asian flavours. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Leafy Greens

• Spinach
• Baby bok choy
• Morning glory
• Kale
• Watercress
• Tatsoi
• Napa cabbage
• Chrysanthemum leaves
• Choy sum
• Pea tips
• Watercress
• AA Choy/Cai

Other Vegetables

• Lotus root
• Potato
• Sweet potato
• Pumpkin/Kabocha squash
• Daikon radish
• Tomatoes
• Corn
• Winter melon
• Bamboo shoots

Mushrooms

• Enoki
• Wood ears
• King mushrooms
• Shiitake
• Oyster
• Shimeji
• Beech
• King oyster

Starchy Vegetables

• Taro root
• Potato slices
• Sweet potatoes
• Japanese yam
• Corn

Noodles

There are many different types of noodles that can be used for hot pot. Here are some options:

• Mung bean vermicelli: Soak these noodles in warm water for about 10 minutes before adding them to the hot pot.
• Rice noodles: Boil these noodles according to the package instructions, then rinse them in cold water and drain before adding to the pot.
• Thin fresh white noodles
• Fresh spinach noodles
• Shirataki noodles: These can be added directly to the boiling broth and cook in seconds.
• Rice cakes: The thin oval-shaped rice cakes are best; the thick Korean-style rice cake logs take too long to cook.
• Frozen dumplings: Smaller dumplings are better and will cook faster. Cook these according to the package instructions.

When preparing noodles for hot pot, it is best to soak them in hot water for 30 seconds and drain them first. This helps to remove any excess starch that could thicken the broth.

Frequently asked questions