Hotpot

The Chinese people are often characterized as timid. They are cast as producers rather than inventors, as assembly line workers rather than innovative types. Even their art is considered in terms of tradition rather than creativity. Now, I live in China, and I agree that Chinese culture does favor placidity and stoicism over reckless abandon, to be sure. But, I am a firm believer in the potential for wildness in all people (hallelujah!), and I have certainly found it, even here: they express their passion in their food.

First of all, I am a wayward vegetarian. I eat fish so, technically, I am an omnivore. However, my “omni” does not include things that once had or still have feathers, fur, hooves, or antennae, and therefore my public eating adventures are often confined to the less exciting realms of steamed veggies and salad, no matter which continent I find myself on. I am not sure how most omnivores got the notion that vegetarians like things boring and bland; we eschew meat, not spices, and certainly not creativity. My own kitchen is a riot of flavors and ideas – I am frequently disappointed in chefs around the world who can’t think outside the box of “Buddha’s Delight” or “Pasta Primavera.” Gardenburgers. Yawn.

Happily, I live in Sichuan, and Sichuan is a province that doesn’t believe in “bland,” even if they don’t believe in vegetarianism, either. For them, a “vegetarian” dish means that the meat is minced, rather than sliced. Sichuan’s signature dish, the wonderfully spicy mapo tofu, is frequently ordered for those who don’t eat meat. In fact, mapo tofu is loaded with minced pork (and it quite tasty, I might add. I know, I know…call it a “cultural experience,”) but, as the pieces are quite small, it is not considered a “meat dish.” Nonetheless, there is a pantheon of veggie-only dishes here that have plenty of spunk: the water spinach sauteed with dried chilies, sweet-and-sour lotus root, sliced cucumbers in raw garlic and chili oil, and dried-fried string beans with pickled something-or-others are all to die for. This is not to mention my favorite, the fabulously named “tiger-skin green peppers,” spicy whole peppers blistered in a wok and then liberally doused with dark vinegar, sesame oil, and salt. The Sichuanese definitely know their way around a garden patch.

Other characteristics of Sichuanese food include liberal use of oils – sesame, chili, rapeseed – as sauces (acne is a common problem in this region, extending well beyond the teen years), and the flavor combination referred to as ma-la, or “numb-hot.” This is the result of pairing traditional red chilies with huajiao, or the dried berries of the prickly ash plant. Huajiao is a common spice here, and produces an unmistakable numbing sensation on the lips and tongue, which is in turn followed up by an earthy, pungent tang that complements the more mouth-forward heat of chilies and other typical Sichuanese spices. With all of these flavors to look forward to in a variety of meat and vegetable dishes, it is hard to imagine how one food could outshine them all. Yet, somehow, one does.

A visitor to Sichuan will always be greeted with the same two questions. First, ”Do you like Chinese culture?” (this is a doozy – I haven’t figured out a reasonable answer to that – is “Yes” enough?), and then, inevitably:

”Have you tried hotpot?”

Chongqing (aka Chungking), a huge municipality on the Yangtze river 4 hours to the southeast of Chengdu, takes credit for being the original home of hotpot, although all areas of Sichuan claim to have their own style. It began as a portside way to make butchery leftovers palatable: essentially, dipping offal into a broth so spicy and salty, the foul smell of the meat was overpowered. Since these humble origins, it has made its way from “peasant food” to a cultural icon of the region, served everywhere from shopping malls to fancy huoguo “boutiques.”

Hotpot (huoguo in Chinese, literally, “fire pot,”) is basically a boiling broth fondue with fireworks. The soup is a dense, raucous affair, opaque and dark, and flavored with a proprietary blend of whole spices: garlic, anise, large chunks of ginger, red chilies, and huajiao figure prominently, but each place has its own flavor focus. The spiciest use both dried huajiao and big clusters of the fresh berries as well, called tengjiao, literally, “branch pepper.” The effect can be overwhelming, and even borders on psychedelic in some cases. Even the grittiest pepper-belly will get the sweats from the hotter preparations, and the numbness only adds to the intense physicality of the experience. For those who want to avoid the full-body high, there is the white broth. The white broth has no chilies, and is flavored with ginger and little red gou qi, or “wolfberries.” It is tame, but also tasty.

A large part of hotpot’s appeal comes from its presentation. It is a communal food – even more communal than the typical Chinese banquet, where guests sit around a table and delicately dip into shared dishes with the same chopsticks they use to eat with. Hotpot is more intimate somehow, more collective, and lots, lots more fun.

Hotpot restaurants are chaotic affairs, without exception. They are loud, busy, and usually a total mess. Customers will wait for the better part of an hour to get a table at the really good establishments, so there is always a lot of elbowing and jostling and jockeying for position. The staff yell across the room and are consistently harried, racing around with great trays and bins and tubs and bottles as diners slosh oil on the floor and knock over beers, reaching through steam and smells for choice tidbits in the pot. People throw their napkins on the ground and blow their noses with their free hands. Everyone shouts to be heard.

When you are seated, you are taken to a table with the center cut out and fitted for a gas burner. There is a sub-shelf that rings the table, making it generally impossible to get one’s legs comfortably under the table itself, and so you usually sit splay-legged or side-saddle, or otherwise perched at an angle on your chair. If you take off your jacket, a server will materialize at your side to cover it and the back of your chair with what amounts to an enormous plastic bag printed with a beer ad, ostensibly an anti-theft device, but more usefully to protect it from wayward gushes of oil and bits of other diners’ meals.

Hotpot is no time for messing around. A small woman with a fierce and exhausted expression will be writing down the kind of pot you want before you even get comfortable in your seat. There are usually two kinds: two-color, which is an enormous bowl of the spicy red broth, with a smaller section of the milder white broth in the center; or just straight-up red for the true masochists. I usually go for the latter, but I appreciate the idea that some people might actually want to keep their tastebuds and go for the variety of the two.

The next step is to order things to go in the pot. The variety is mind-blowing, from thinly sliced raw meats, frozen packets of scary little cocktail sausages, stuffed fish balls, wads of hairy stomach-lining, and shining shreds of pork throat, to cubes of lettuce stalk, wedges of bitter melon, chunks of skinned cactus, a rainbow of tofu shapes and colors (yes, they all taste different), bouncy noodles made of yam starch, and every edible mushroom under the sun. This is where being a vegetarian comes in handy: I don’t have to explain why I’m not eating the stomach lining, and I don’t have to end up like some of our other foreigner friends, who have spent the long night following a hotpot extravaganza praying to a porcelain god. A waitress arrives with a clipboard and tries to hand it off: it’s like a horserace ticket, or a physics grid: hundreds of options listed out in tiny characters – check the box next to what you want. I always have to detain my server before she darts off to another table and explain apologetically that I don’t read Chinese well; “I say, you write, okay?”

This is what we typically order:
- ou pian, sliced lotus root
- bailuobo, daikon radish
- tudou, thin potato slices
- nian gao, literally “year cake,” a dense formed gluten that comes in a small block or sliced tube and acts like a flavor sponge
- anchun dan, hardboiled quail eggs
- xiang gu, shiitake mushrooms
- fen, any variety of noodles, often made of rice flour or yam starch
- dou pi, literally “bean skin,” one of my favorites: it’s essentially a wide, slippery noodle made of tofu cut into long, flexible strips
- cuipi doufu, dried tofu cubes; they are very porous and light, and become crumbly in the center as they cook
- ku gua, bitter melon – they aren’t kidding about the bitter part – but that bitter edge has a clean feeling to it that cuts through the oily stock base and acts as a nice complement to the richer-tasting starches
-mu er, “wood ear,” or black fungus – not pretty, but very tasty
-wandou jian, pea shoots: these are only available in season, and come in a tangled little pile; greens cook very quickly in the boiling soup
-zhusuntender young bamboo shoots

Each ingredient comes on a little dish and is stacked onto the small shelf that attends each table. Guests add things to the broth as they go, testing pieces for doneness and keeping a variety of things cooking at all times. Often a server will come by and offer to put things in for you; they use a special slotted spoon and gently ease the raw pieces into the boiling broth with a practiced wrist. First-time hotpot eaters have a tendency to splash, which is very annoying (and can be dangerous) for fellow diners.

After things have cooked for a while, you fish them out with your chopsticks and place them into your bowl to cool. This is the really great part: your bowl isn’t just a bowl – it’s a bowl full of pure toasted sesame oil, to which you’ve added a good two tablespoons of minced raw garlic and a liberal pinch of chopped cilantro. Each table comes ready with a little mountain of each on small plates, along with other, optional oil additives: salt, MSG crystals, dark vinegar, and oyster sauce are the most common. There is something both heavenly and diabolic about using pure sesame oil and raw garlic as a dipping sauce; it’s so unapologetic. In any given hotpot experience, you can expect to ingest half a cup or more of this sauce, and it’s wonderful – no regrets, although your skin does tend to look a little less pure the next day. These are the prices we happily pay.

As with any great dining adventure, what you drink is an important part of the experience. Tea is always brought at the beginning – it is China’s version of the ubiquitous glass of water in American diners – but is quickly abandoned for more flavorful and effective complements to the food. The tea cups are seldom refilled more than once over the course of the meal. Locals usually go for bottles of soy milk, or “bean milk,” as they call it, a phrase I find really unappetizing. The chalkiness damps down the heat somewhat, and is favored by women and children, in particular. The other option, and the one we tend towards, is beer: lots and lots of cheap, warm beer. Nothing settles the sting of ma-la de huoguo quite like a mouthful of one of the totally boring, locally-made 4% lagers, like Xuehua, or “Snow.”

A typical hotpot meal for two, plus a couple of beers, will cost around 65 yuan, less than ten U.S. dollars. But for students and others on tighter budgets, even cheaper versions are available. University districts commonly have one or more Chuanchuandian. Chuanchuan is just like hotpot, but instead of ordering whole plates of things to cook, customers browse through long buffets of goodies on trays. Everything is skewered on thin bamboo sticks: mushroom on a stick, dumpling on a stick, gross little gristly sausage on a stick. Patrons then are free to try only a few of whatever it is they would like, and put the sticks directly into the pot. Once an item cooks, you pry it off into your sesame oil, and drop the stick into a plastic bucket at your feet.

The best part about chuanchuan is that you can sample more flavors for considerably less money. Chuanchuan places tend to be even more casual than hotpot restaurants, as well, and it’s not uncommon for street performers to wander in with small amplifiers and electric guitars. They hand out laminated song lists of the titles they know, and for a couple of yuan will sing and play and otherwise entertain the huge tables of students who are well into their fourth round of Snows. They are rarely “good,” but the effect is certainly entertaining.

When you finish eating chuanchuan, you wave over one of the waitresses (for some reason, they’re always women), and they crouch next to your table and dump out your bucket of sticks. Different things have different values, and these values are measured in the number of sticks poked into the thing itself. A wedge of bitter melon, for example, may only be on one stick, but a quail egg, more expensive, would likely have three stuck into it. So, when it’s time for the check, the servers simply count out how many bamboo skewers you have in your bucket, and you pay by the stick. It’s generally about half as expensive as hotpot, and every bit as delicious, though the atmosphere tends to be less thoughtful. There are seldom any decorations, and the lighting is usually glaring fluorescents, giving the experience a waiting-room-at-the-end-of-the-universe feel, made even more surreal by the performers and the noise, the birthday party going on in the corner, the drunk young man vomiting into his stick bucket two tables over. (That really happened.)

Communal-pot eating is not unknown in American culinary culture. Fondue parties have had their moments in food fame, as has the Japanese version of hotpot, shabu-shabu, and the tabletop grilling of Korean barbecue. What I don’t understand is why every major city in the U.S. doesn’t have a hotpot restaurant. The spices, the smells, the plumes of steam, the friendly noise, the sharing of a meal – all of these things make for a beautiful food experience. Too often we Americans use food as an excuse or distraction from other things: for business, from heartache, for practicing self-restraint. Too seldom do we allow a meal to be an end and experience in itself, a practice and meditation on taste, a collective cooking and chewing and smiling together, of doing nothing more than just eating with family or friends. I would love to predict a new ethnic epicurial phenomenon in America, the Hotpot Craze, but I know that not all Americans like to dine with a gas tank between their legs. In any case, it has become our new comfort food: mac n cheese, popcorn, tacos, mashed potatoes, and hotpot.

~ by knifemaker on May 27, 2008.