Now that the weather has cooled down, it’s finally the time of the year again for hot pot!
One thing I love about winter is reuniting with friends and family. Regardless in Taiwan or in US, winter is the season of reunion. Taiwanese hot pot is something that you can enjoy with the whole family. In Taiwan, during the Chinese new year, relatives from all over the world will come back to Taiwan just to sit by this big hot pot and enjoy the family time together. In my opinion, hot pots that you have in restaurants can never taste like the hot pot you have in home – it lacks the flavor of the “warmth” that only a home can give. Usually, hot pot involves the whole family. It takes the whole family to prepare and the whole family to enjoy. I still remember when I was little, my mom will ask me to put the utensils on the table while my brother will help mix the sauce and my dad will be washing all vegetables while my mom is preparing the hot pot. Right now I’m here in the US, my mom and dad always ask me if I have enough break to go back to Taiwan, to sit by our big hot pot table once again!
This time, I want to present you our second recipe in this hot pot series, the Taiwanese hot pot.
Ingredients
- 4 cups of chicken broth
- 4 cups of water
- 2 pounds of beef slices or your choice of meat
- 1 bundle of crown daisy / garland chrysanthemum (茼蒿)
- 1 cup of rice vermicelli
- 3 cups of hot pot ingredients (火鍋料)
- 1 box of firm tofu
- 1 cup of fried taro
Dipping Sauce ingredients
- ½ cup of Taiwanese barbeque sauce / Sha Cha Sauce / Taiwanese Satay Sauce(沙茶醬)
- ½ cup of soy sauce
- 3 green onions
- 7 cloves of garlic
Different than regular dishes, Taiwanese hot pot really don’t have a set recipe, nor does it have a set ratio of ingredients. Honestly, it is just one pot of broth soup that you cook whatever ingredients you want in it, and then you enjoy them with various dipping sauces. The key to Taiwanese hotpot is that you cook and eat and cook and eat around the table with friends and family. Never cook a Taiwanese hot pot on stove top.
First, boil a pot of soup. Usually we use 1:1 chicken broth and water. The reason that we don’t use full chicken broth is that the soup becomes more and more savory as you cook more ingredient in it. Even though it might be a bit high in cholesterol, it’s super tasty! Let me introduce each one of the hot pot family to you.
Crown Daisy
crown daisy, also known as garland chrysanthemum, is a kind of vegetable that we eat mostly with many different kinds of hot pots including Sukiyaki. The flavor is very unique. The nickname of crown daisy in Taiwanese is “wife-beater veggie”. They said this vegetable is very delicious but shrinks a lot when it’s cooked which makes the husband think that the wife ate it already without saving him any so he beats his wife. Honestly, I don’t like the story at all, but it does bring a point that crown daisy is tasty and it shrinks a lot when cooked. Don’t worry if one bundle seems too much for a family!
Rice vermicelli
The beauty of rice vermicelli is that it will soak up all the flavor of the soup. Therefore, you never want to add rice vermicelli in the beginning. Like what we did for spring roll, you want to soak this in cold water first until it’s soften before cooking. The longer you cook it, the more flavor it soaks up, therefore we usually add them after the first batch of meat and then eat it at the end of the meal.
Hot pot ingredients (火鍋料)
These items play such an important role in Taiwanese hot pot but yet it’s hard to find an accurate word to describe them. There is a word called “火鍋料” which means ingredients that you add to hot pot. Usually they are processed food like meat balls, special dumplings, fish cake, spam, so on and so forth. This is one thing that makes Taiwanese hot pot uniquely different from other kinds of hot pot. Although it’s the heart and soul of a Taiwanese hot pot, it’s so expensive to buy them in Chinese supermarket! Therefore, knowing how to make them, is really really important 🙂 Check out our Taiwanese meatball (貢丸) recipe! You can pre-make them and freeze for later use.
Fried Taro
One very important ingredient is fried taro. We fry it first so it won’t become mushy when you cook it.
Dipping sauce
One important component to Taiwanese hot pot that we want to talk about here is the Taiwanese Barbeque sauce also known as Sha Cha sauce. It is very very very different from the regular barbeque sauce you would have in US. In fact, growing up in Taiwan, never a time I saw anyone apply this sauce to a BBQ pork or beef. Taiwanese Barbeque sauce is derived from Satay sauce. They are similar in look but intrinsically different in taste. Taiwanese barbeque sauce is used at hot pot and stir fry dishes. After I moved to US, I sometimes have hot pot with Chinese friends from different regions. To my surprise, I found that only Taiwanese people use Taiwanese barbeque sauce for hot pot. I guess that makes this sauce very unique!
The sauce we are making today is what I usually have: take the same amount of soy sauce and Taiwanese barbeque sauce and mix evenly. Add the chopped green onions and garlic. This is my all time favorite. Some other variation you can try is to add a drizzle of sesame oil, or a raw egg yolk. Some people even use some peanut butter! There is only one rule here: whatever you add, unless you are super confident about the outcome, don’t add more than 4 ingredients or else the flavor might be too complicated for your taste bud to appreciate!
It’s very simple to eat Taiwanese hot pot. First, add ingredient when the pot is boiling, and then close the lid. Second, once it’s boiling again, open the lid and eat what you like. Third, once all ingredients are eaten, add more and close the lid until it starts boiling again.
- 4 cups of chicken broth
- 4 cups of water
- 2 pounds of beef slices or your choice of meat
- 1 bundle of crown daisy / garland chrysanthemum (茼蒿)
- 1 cup of rice vermicelli
- 3 cups of hot pot ingredients (火鍋料)
- 1 box of firm tofu
- 1 cup of fried taro
- ½ cup of Taiwanese barbeque sauce / Sha Cha Sauce / Taiwanese Satay Sauce(沙茶醬)
- ½ cup of soy sauce
- 3 green onions
- 7 cloves of garlic
- Prepare a pot of chicken broth
- Prepare all ingredients by cutting vegetables and other food ingredients
- Prepare all sauce ingredients
- Wait until the pot is boil, add ingredients you want, close the lid until it’s boil
- Once it’s cooked, you can open the lid and start eating
- Add new ingredient and repeat step 4 to 5
There was a hole in the wall place in Kaohsiung, Taiwan 25+ years ago run by three old gentlemen. Old metal pans and open flame and the fish dumplings and especially the sacha were to die for. We went there all the time and every time we went back to Taiwan for a visit (usually every year), but then one year it was gone. My wife (a Taiwan native) and I have looked and looked and bought every brown paste I could find in an asian grocery and can’t find anything close. It was a finer texture and had a little sweetness to it. It was so good. If only I could find the recipe.
There are so many hot pot locations in Taiwan, but what makes one stand out from another are the broth and the sauce. I know what you mean!