Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man fights a never-ending war against food, in an attempt to eat it all. I’m your Gluttonous Gladiator, Jon O’Guin, and today’s dish is thankfully, much simpler than our recent attempts. Indeed, I don’t even know if I feel comfortable calling it a “recipe”, but it’s something I wanted to share with you all, so we’ll make do with what we have. For everyone who wants to skip straight to the “details”, click this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Getting Hot Hot Hot

So, Hot Pot. What is it? Besides my failed rap name, hot pot is a classic Asian style of cooking, which is best explained “what if Fondue were a stew?”

And apparently consisted entirely of earth tones.

Since I’ve never had to explain Fondue on the site before, though, maybe I should be more specific. While Fondue uses a central cooking vessel of hot oil, or molten cheese/chocolate, in which people dip small pieces of meat, bread, fruits, pretzels…a lot of stuff, hot pot typically uses some kind of broth. And while that may sound very vague…yeah, it HAS to be. Look, saying I’m making “hot pot” is like saying you’re making “pasta” or “soup”: there’s so much potential variation in ingredients that it really only tells you a basic level of information. For example, I bought 3 pre-made Hot Pot stocks:

I’d say it was hardest to buy the one without English, but that would be a lie. a better picture of it wold make it VERY obvious it was Kimchi flavored. Another clue: that’s what the display I bought it from said.

EACH of these is, technically, from a different country. They are also, technically, from the same country, as they are all made by the same Japanese company, just made to MIMIC different dishes: the far left Is a Kimchi-flavored stock, made so that you can mimic Kimchi jjigae or Budae-jjigae recipes with your hot pot. (“jjigae” is basically Korean for ‘stew’. The dishes became popular in Japan over the last 20 or so years, as Korean dramas were broadcast to the region. Put a pin in that thought.) The far right one is closer to a Chongqing or, as it says “Xiang la” style of Hot Pot*, a Chinese variant that relies on Szechuan pepper and spices. The MIDDLE one is a shoyu-based one (Shoyu being a Japanese word for/variant of “soy sauce”). And it’s the one we went with, because historically, my mother and brother aren’t super big fans of spicy food, and we didn’t want to go full Budae-jiigae on the first go.

The history of hot pot is…fractured, and hard to parse. Like, let’s take that asterisk from the last paragraph: Xiang la…doesn’t mean anything. Xiang is a dialect of Chinese, a last name, a word with like, 50 possible interpretations…but I THINK what happened is Japan is trying to cite málà xiāngguō, a word I will definitely butcher when I try to say it, which is a variant of Chinese Hot Pot…that is a stir-fry. It’s a hot pot with no broth. So it’s kind of funny that I have been sold a bag of broth that promises me an authentic no-broth experience. Anyway, basically everyone agrees the dish originates in China, though, weirdly, most of them do it by claiming it’s an adapted Mongol tradition: that Mongol warcamps would have a single pot into which they threw ingredients. Others claim the dish arose from a tradition akin to Cioppino: fisherman cooking in pots on their boats, just tossing in whatever they had. And it could be multiple things: another Korean stew style, Jeongul, supposedly arose from Korean soldiers cooking stews in their helmets, but otherwise sounds a lot like the stories about the Mongols.

3 - A new meaning to boiling in this armor.png

Hats: when made of metal, basically bowls. News at never.

But the modern version is widely understood to have been popularized/formulated in China. Indeed, one Chinese Emperor, who reigned during the American Revolution, was famous for his love of Hot Pot. His son, on ascension to the throne, celebrated his own coronation with a feast including over 1500 hot pots. So it was big in China first, before being exported worldwide. You know, like gunpowder.

Let’s see…anything else to mention? There’s a pretty big ARRAY of hot pot varieties, but I think I’ll hold off on that for a little bit, maybe cover it more in-depth on Thursday. Um…You know what, let’s do a quick talk about the prep work on this, and then we’ll get into it.

Bringing it Home

I was going to try and tackle a topic about the complicated interplay of history and immigration, and how too often, in America at least, there’s a sort of cultural blind spot to forget that other nations exist relative to other nations: like, Americans often find it surprising that Norway LOVES Tacos, because they forget that Norway and Mexico exist independent of their relationship to America.

They’re a little confused, but they’ve got the spirit.
This is actually a kind of higher-end hipster-y taco. A “Korean pork-check taco”, which…man, Norway is doing Korean-Mexican fusion, too?

But honestly, my attempt to talk about it in relation to Japan, China, and Korea went a little too dark for my tastes, so instead, I just want to point out that it’s perfectly normal for Japan to be making their understanding of Chinese food, just as America does. Japanese people can be as interested in K-Pop or K-dramas Americans can. And SPEAKING of dramas, that’s how this dish came to be the star of this week’s show: My mother’s insane rate of consumption of Asian dramas (said without irony by a man who read…800,000 words of fiction this weekend, utterly destroying his sleep schedule) has infused with with a moderate desire to try new Asian foods, and thus she requested that, at one of our highest-tier Patrons, that I make hot pot before the Winter is out.

Which required some more extensive preparation than usual. Not in terms of, say, ingredients, but in terms of equipment: See, obviously, if you want to have a cooking pot that everyone can access, it needs to be in the middle of the group. But most Western houses have the oven built into a counter along the wall. If you’re fancy enough to have an island with a built-in range, that’d work, but for most people, you need to pick up a burner.

Take it. It’s quite cool.

Now, you can actually do this a couple ways, I went with a Butane burner…honestly, because it was the burner they had on the island in Uwajimaya when I learned I might have to make Hot Pot. If you’re not comfortable with a butane burner on your table, you can also look for general hot plates/induction cookers. The issue with them is you’ll need to run a power cord, but that’s probably less nerve-wracking for most people. My family, given our history with camp stoves, has no issue with the butane, and it’s cheaper for more energy output: a $60 electric induction plate is about 1800W, which is roughly 6,000 BTU per hour. A BTU is a British Thermal Unit, and it’s the heat required to heat up 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit. So bringing 5 pounds of water to a boil from, say 70 degrees would take (212-70 =142x5…710 BTU. So a 1800W burner can boil…40 gallons of liquid at a time. For comparison, a $50 butane burner has TWICE the BTU output at $10 cheaper…at the disadvantage of needing Butane refills, and, you know, producing carbon monoxide.

Oh, that is a minor concern, if you’re doing this inside: a butane stove will output a mild amount of carbon monoxide, so don’t do this in, like, a small room with the doors and windows all closed or you’ll make yourself sick. Do it in, like, a dining room or living room, with a fan on and a window cracked, and you’ll be fine.

We also took a lot of steps to ensure that our burner didn’t melt the plastic table we had it on top of…which I think may have been overkill. We had our burned in a baking sheet, on a towel (to prevent sliding), on a cooling rack…and I don’t know that, at any point, even the baking sheet got anything above, say, 70 degrees. If you’re really worried, that’s another point for an induction burner, which heats the POT, not the burner, and/or you could try a heat-resistant/reflective mat.

I’m just saying…you can do better than me. A statement often true in culinary talents, but rarely true in relationships.

At which point, it’s time to cut to the chase, and get things ready. Which is actually pretty easy, especially because this time I had people helping me out! My mother and brother took over chopping meat and vegetables. We specifically went with Beef, for which I bought two products: the first was some boneless flanken-cut short ribs. We thought they MIGHT be thin enough to cook easily in the broth, and my family just likes short ribs. We also bought a compressed brick of beef shavings.

BEHOLD, THE MEAT BRICK.

This was because technically, the meat normally used in these kind of situations is VERY thin. Like, if you’ve ever been to a Mongolian barbecue place, where they have those flash-frozen thin cuts of meat? Those are ALSO used in hot pot restaurants all the time. So I got the closest I could to that level of thin cuts without driving over to Seattle and spending like, $12-30 a pound for the really good stuff.

For vegetables, we went with what the bag of broth recommends: some carrots, mushroom, daikon radish, strips of cabbage… all cut to “whatever we think feels right.” The mushrooms were cubed, the carrots were chunked, the daikon was in disks…

It turns out I didn’t take a picture of the vegetable tray before cooking.

We also had frozen udon noodles, to add to the pot, and some soft tofu. (we could have gone with firm tofu, but the soft one was going to go bad sooner.)

From there, it was a matter of bringing the broth to a boil, and just eye-balling ingredients. Personally, I found that our boneless short-rib chunks were WAY too big: like, maybe 1/3rd their current thickness, or cutting them into smaller chunks would fix it. There was a real element of pure FUN just working out how to pick up certain things: my mom, from watching her shows, knew there was a specific kind of hand motion you’d need to twirl-up the udon noodles, while the first time I plopped in a couple cubes of soft tofu and realized there was no way I was going to pull them out with chopsticks once they were heated up.

Practically invisible in the pot!
Also known as “I forgot what I took pictures of”.

All in all, from start to clean-up, the meal was about 45 minutes, and we had to CHEAT. See, we’d gone through cooking meat and veggies and udon, and Nate and I decided we wanted another batch of the noodles, which we felt were the stand-out portion of the dish, for reasons I’ll get into in a second. So we added another brick of udon noodles…before realizing that we had, by that point, already boiled out most of the broth. We had to add a cup of water to de-reduce the mixture, and allow the noodles to boil.

While it was a somewhat chaotic process, which I couldn’t use my phone during a lot of it, I did grab this last shot: this is what was left in the pot after we’d decided we were full, less than halfway through our meat and veggies.

In retrospect, “look at all this brown broth and beige noodle” wasn’t my best use of natural lighting.

It’s a really cool time. I would suggest, if you’re going for the pre-made soup base bags like we did, maybe grab 2, as they’re honestly less than a quart of liquid, meaning they’ll cook out pretty quickly if you leave the heat up. Also, more boiling broth is just going to have more thermal capacity to cook food in. Yes, reading the nutritional information, the “80% of your daily sodium” per serving number will be worrying…I don’t have a comeback to that. Just like, make sure you drink water, don’t eat it every weekend, and it shouldn’t be too big a problem?

As I noted, we did a pretty chaotic version, versus a more poised experience, where you might only briefly ‘wash’ thin slices of meat in the broth to cook them, before dipping in sauces and eating. But that’s part of the fun. There’s TONS of traditions and variations. A lot of Chinese hot pot restaurants are leaning into section hot-pots where the pan is physically split into two or more parts, with each part holding a different soup, so you can split, say, a hot-and-spicy side and a creamy bone broth side. A lot of hot pot places in Korea take a “three tiered” approached, where first, you have your hot pot as a brothy soup, then they add noodles to coat in the thickened broth, and once THAT cooks down, they used the extra-reduced broth with all the remaining fragments of meat and vegetables as a base to toss in cooked rice, and make fried-rice out of the whole mix. And if you can’t find broths, you can make your own! Something as normal as like, store-bought beef or vegetable broth would work, you can do a Miso Soup hot pot. From what I’ve read, the broth/sauce we made for the tteokbokki is essentially the same as some of the Korean-style broth bases. And one recipe I saw was “equal parts water, mirin, and soy sauce, with a touch of sugar”, another was “chicken broth with some sake and soy sauce”, and a third was straight up just “make some dashi”. The possibilities are functionally endless, ESPECIALLY once we start bastardizing this noble tradition into something weird. Does French Onion Hot Pot sound remotely reasonable? Absolutely not. Does it sound delicious? Absolutely yes. And if that feels weird to you, I will remind you that, as far as I can tell, Japan’s “hot and spicy Chinese hot pot” is based on a stir-fry… Oh no.

Can I make “Mongolian Beef” hot pot? Ginger, garlic, water, Soy sauce, brown sugar…it’s a lot of the same elements… obviously we’d need to re-arrange the ratios a little, get it “brothier”…Maybe just straight up add beef broth…This requires more (terrible) research. But not for a while. As noted, we are NECK DEEP on sodium intake, and will need a bit of time to burn it off. Say…a month? That sounds about right.

THURSDAY: I AM IN THE MIDST OF MADNESS. MAYBE WE TALK HOT POT STYLES, MAYBE WE TALK ABOUT BURNERS, WHO KNOWS?

MONDAY: WE’RE DEFINITELY DOING SOME VEGGIES TO COOL DOWN FROM THIS. MAYBE SOME ASPARAGUS? OR CARROTS? I DON’T KNOW, WE’LL FIGURE SOMETHING OUT.

Here is the

Recipe

SIMPLE FIRST-TIME BEEF HOT POT

Serves 3-5

Ingredients

Proteins

½ pound beef, thinly sliced or cut into bite-sized chunks

½ pound tofu, cut into 1” cubes

Vegetables

3 large carrots, peeled and cut into 1” long chunks

½ daikon, peeled and cut into ½” thick disks

8 ounces mushrooms, quartered

1/3 head of napa cabbage, cut into 1” wide strips

Noodles

1-2 packets of frozen udon noodles

Broth and dipping sauces

3-5 cups of cooking broth of your choice

1 tbsp coarse sea salt

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp sesame oil

Other sauces as desired

Preparation

Over your burner, bring the broth to a boil. while heating, arrange meat on parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet, and vegetables on similar. Pour each “sauce” into its own ramekin.
For mixed company/proper sanitation, each diner should have their own bowl/plate, along with chopsticks and or spoons, and there should be communal “serving” chopsticks, with which to take food from the pot to your plate.
Once broth has reached a boil, reduce heat to medium, and add other ingredients at your leisure/desire, cooking to your preferred doneness. Move to your plate/bowl,and eat.