Gongxi Gongxi Happy New Year!
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 flavour them with individual dipping sauces.
Hot pot is a deeply personalized meal! Each individual mixes their own dipping sauce and chooses exactly what they want to eat.
EQUIPMENT NEEDED TO HAVE 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.
NECESSARY EQUIPMENT FOR HOT POT:
Heat Source: We have a specialized electric hot pot burner that comes with a pot. However, any portable heat source will work. You could use an electric burner (coil or induction) or a tabletop gas burner. If you plan on making hot pot a regular event, we do recommend getting a hot pot set with a built-in electric heating element—the pot is removable for easy cleaning.
Pot: Chinese stainless steel hot pots are ideal because of their round shape and depth—wide and deep enough to hold a good amount of food, while not being so deep that the food gets lost at the bottom. The metal is rather thin, which allows the simmering soup to heat up quickly as additional ingredients are added. Some designs even have a “yin-yang” feature, where you can have two soup flavours simmering at the same time. However, any wide, relatively shallow pot will work.
Chopsticks: Chopsticks offer superior dexterity when it comes to retrieving food items. Hot Pot is best eaten with bamboo chopsticks or wooden chopsticks, which are heat resistant and cool off quickly. Plastic and metal chopsticks aren’t ideal. Plastic can melt at high temperatures, and metal conducts heat. Wouldn’t want to burn yourself on them!
ADDITIONAL EQUIPMENT:
Sauce Bowls: You’ll need small bowls (Chinese rice bowls work great) for each person to assemble their own dipping sauce.
Metal hot pot baskets/wire ladles: It’s not completely necessary, but metal hot pot ladles are basically wire sieves with wide holes. You nestle the food in the small wire cup, and the boiling liquid circulates around the food to cook it through. Then you simply lift it up to tip the food tidily into your bowl. It also acts as a sort of “net” to catch other tasty morsels from the pot.
source from thewoksoflife
We wish everyone a prosperous and wonderful Chinese New Year!