Kitchen Supper: Hot Pot
Do-able meals, recipes + strategies for inviting people into our lives.
Chinese-style hot pot (or shabu shabu in Japan, or other variations in Cambodia, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, even regional-style hot pots within these) is a Christmas tradition in our house and has been for about a decade.
What is hot pot? Well, picture a simmering pot of stock with aromatic herbs and spices in the center of your table. Folks sit around the table putting meats, seafood, vegetables, tofu, dumplings, and noodles into the steaming broth, letting them cook a bit and then taking them out and swishing them through a bowl of sauce, then into their mouths. Picture people taking each other’s proteins. Picture people laughing together as their chopsticks bump. Picture a warm and communal meal around a bubbling pot cooking. It’s beautiful.
Here’s the theory behind why hot pot is such a great meal for a holiday, as I explained to Max Brearley in his exceptional Aussie-focused food newsletter:
And so I thought hot pot would make a great pared-down meal for our kitchen suppers.
When I do this for Christmas, we have to jigger it around so its kind of a buffet instead of a communal stationary meal because there are too many people, so some of that slowness of the meal gets lost, but for a kitchen supper with 6-8 folks, you can lean into the community aspects of hot pot. And if you all don’t know what you are doing - that’s fine! - you can learn together.
HOW TO MAKE A SIMPLE HOT POT:
Things you’ll need: Butane burner, with butane cans, and a pot. Chopsticks. Small wire strainers, spoons, and bowls.
Stock: This can be anything you like. To water I added pork bones, chicken feet, pork skin, leftover chicken parts, aromatics like leeks, ginger, garlic, kombu. And salt. Bring to a boil and simmer for several hours. Keep pot of stock on low so you can replenish the hot pot as people eat.
Hot pot base: I make the broth from scratch but for a kitchen supper, I’d add a packet of hot pot base to the pot and pour the hot stock over it. So simple. There are great hot pot bases you can get in any Asian grocery store or order online. I like the Lee Kum See brand.
Proteins for Hot Pot
Lamb (sliced thin, look for them in Asian markets)
Beef (sliced thin, look for them in Asian markets)
Salmon (thin slices)
Tofu (cubes)
Shrimp (shells and heads on)
Vegetables for Hot Pot
Bok choy, washed, ends removed
Snow pea leaves, washed
Nappa cabbage, washed and sliced into wedges
All the mushrooms - shiitake, enoki, oyster, shemeji, wood ear, the world is your oyster, washed.
Fun Carby Things to Add in at the End:
Remember we add noodles and dumplings at the end because the soup will have been flavored by the cooking meats and veg. Also these can make the water starchy, so add them towards the end of the eating.
Rice noodles
Frozen dumplings
Sauces:
Sauces define the style of hot pot. There are as many sauce combinations as humans, I suspect. The idea is to cook the meat and veg in the broth and then pop it into a bowl of sauce, swish and eat. My go-to combination is to put Shaca sauce (Bullhead), soy sauce, a hit of black vinegar and sesame paste at the bottom of a small bowl, mix with chopsticks and then swish the foods through it before eating.
Here are some excellent sauces:
Shaca Sauce / Bullhead
Soy sauce
Sambal (or any brand of chili garlic)
Sriracha
To Serve:
Set out hot pot utinsels and bowls. Make sure your stock is simmering on the stove. Have your proteins, veg, noodles and rice ready to go on platters. Put hot pot base into the bottom of pot, and add stock. Turn on your stove/burner. If you have a pot with a divider, you can do a spicy broth on one side and a less spicy on the other side. Or veg on one side, meat on the other, whatever you need. Put out the platters of food and let people choose and cook their own. It will be an effort in glorious imperfection and camaraderie but you’ll do it together and I guarantee it will be fun.
More Hot Pot Tips:
From Thrillist
From Bon App.
From Woks of Life
From The Fung Brothers, who eat hot pot and rap and cut up on Youtube
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END NOTES:
Australian Chef Bill Granger died last week, early 50’s, cancer. The nightmare, the bitch that we worry about at 3am.
I’ve mentioned before that this section of the newsletter is wholly inspired by him. A lot of the style of food we eat now in the US is because of Bill, like avocado toast. His food was weirdly simple and so satisfying. Bills in Bondi was a go-to for me and I wasn’t disappointed.
I don’t know if it’s cool or not to like Bill in Australia (but I do anyway, I can’t help it.) I say this because famous fine dining chef Neil Perry made, what I see as, a passive aggressive comment about Bill in the Sydney Morning Herald:
He was not a chef, but he thought deeply about flavour, he understood what makes things delicious. He was a game changer, he just cooked food that was simple, beautiful and casual and then found the world loved him for it.
The name and the tenents of Kitchen Suppers, which I explain here, are all Bill’s. No surprise. It’s such a cool idea: Loafing around the kitchen island with cool people eating food no one has stressed over. How novel. And this was his vibe, at least for me, an American who owns his cookbooks and saw him in a Sydney mall once and went running after him like some stalker-lunatic. I didn’t catch him. But I tried. I really really tried.
So, he is on my mind heavy this week as I cook. I am grateful to him for giving David and I the idea for kitchen suppers, because these simple meals gave us connections to friends and neighbors when we were losing our adult minds with two babies under two. It was self-care and manageable self care at that. No babysitters or trying to slip away from an anxious baby. It was sane and easy. It felt normal and not upended. And along with Kylie Kwong, Donna Hay, Stephanie Alexander, and every copy of Australian Women’s Weekly and Delicious at the newsstands in Tamarama and South Hurstville. Bill gave me a way to connect to my Aussie husband and tend to our new-ish marriage. The cooking helped the dialogue and the differences. It helped us consider how we wanted to feed our kids, how we would come together with friends and make community.
Cookbooks and recipe really aren’t just cookbooks and recipes, are they?
Thanks as always for cooking with me. Kim
Thanks for the mention and your words in that monster of a roundup last week 😁
On the note of Bill, he still had massive cache in Australia; people here proud of what he took to the world, but also what he did to define a casual culture that happily pervades our food.
I wouldn't take Neil's comment as passive aggressive. I think it's perhaps him saying Bill's power was that he didn't have that rigid chef-trained outlook, and that being a self taught cook allowed him to do his own thing. As far as I'm aware in the early 90s he was telling people in the industry to go to the original bills (note the 90s shunning on capitals and apostrophe). And Neil's outlook these days is less CBD steakhouse (Rockpool) and more neighbourhood (albeit upscale) local (Margaret's in Rose Bay, Baker Bleu).
Happy Freaking Birthday, Foster.