Sunday night, I got together with some dear friends and made my very first Chinese-style hot pot! Hot pot is like Japanese shabu-shabu whereby pre-prepped ingredients are dipped in soup and cooked. You can have different dips for when your items come out of the pot such as sesame oil, finely chopped garlic, chili oil...the list goes on. Each person has their own little bowl where they can make a dip to their taste. I've eaten hot pot in the past when I lived in China (including a memorable meal in Chongqing with two Korean girls I met at my hostel), but never made it myself. My friend Sylvia from choir and her husband hosted me and Chris - another choir friend - at their place. They have done hot pot a few times for company and wanted to try it again.(Her table only fit 6 so we're sorry we couldn't invite more!)
Chris, Sylvia, and I met up earlier in the day to go shopping at T&T Supermarket for all of our ingredients. We went a little bit mad and bought way more than we needed! I include for your perusal our final booty:
- baby bok choy
- king oyster mushrooms
- assorted fish balls
- beef balls
- soy bean sprouts
- watercress
- assorted dumplings
- white radish
- sliced beef rib-eye
- sliced fatty pork
- spring onion
- cinnamon head mushrooms
- chayote
- winter melon
- bean curd cubes
- dried cloud ear mushrooms
- lamb shoulder slices
- pork loin slices
- enoki mushrooms
- fresh ginger root
- lotus root
- Napa cabbage
- shiitake mushrooms
- snow pea greens
- beef tendons (I recommend getting the pre-cooked ones as ours never quite softened)
- calamari
- whole shrimp (which somehow disappeared once we got back to the house, never to be seen again)
- glass noodles (which never got used in the end, we were too full!)
- a cold cucumber and chili salad
- egg custard tarts
Plus, Sylvia had some homemade spring rolls a friend gave her. I also brought some beer from my trip to Niagara the day before (post in the pipeline) from a new brewery called Silversmith Brewing that was just perfect! It was their Bavarian Breakfast Wheat beer. Mmmmm... Then, we proceeded to prep it all.
Sylvia's husband graciously spun tunes and her daughter Karina took the amazing pictures you will see all throughout this post (Thanks hun!). As you can see above, the hot pot itself was essentially a wok on a single gas burner with a few slotted spoons on the side for fishing things out.
A few days earlier, I had sent Sylvia a recipe for the broth. Several members of our party can't have too much in the way of spicy food, so the recipe I sent her is not.
Hot Pot Broth
2 tbsp Shaoxing wine
3 quarts chicken stock (2 quarts initially and then one to keep topping up throughout the meal)
salt to taste
Right before serving, add
1 halved ripe tomato
the whites of two scallions chopped into 2 or 3 sections
Bring the broth to a boil, turn down the heat to a good simmer and start adding ingredients at your leisure. I've found it's best to add in the things that take longest to cook first, plus we added in bits of the slivered ginger to add flavour to the broth.
You can make up your own ingredient list based on what you like, but the above was just what we had. I'd say that between 5 of us, we only ate 1/3 of what we bought in the end. Fun night!!
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