Name: This Easy Chinese Hot Pot is a fun family dinner
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 5 min
Total time: 25 min
Cuisine: Chinese
Ingredients: 2 cloves garlic, peeled; 1 piece ginger, peeled and sliced thinly (about 1/2 inch piece); 1 sprig green onion, roughly chopped into large pieces; 2 shiitake mushrooms, thinly sliced; 1 tablespoon soy sauce; 2 teaspoons sesame oil; 8 cups chicken broth, (you may need more or less depending on the size of your pot); sirloin or flank steak, thinly sliced; raw shrimp, tail on; bok choy leaves; broccoli florets; canned baby corn, drained; mushrooms, cleaned and destemmed; noodles (rice noodles, udon, ramen); store-bought wontons or dumplings; soy sauce; ponzu or other sweet dipping sauce; chili garlic sauce; siracha

Whether you’re exploring different cultures or just looking for something new to try, Easy Chinese Hot Pot is a fun experience for the whole family.

Many thanks to Aneto Natural for sponsoring this post and providing the broth used in this recipe.

A Fun Family Experience

If your family is anything like ours, by mid-February, all the long, cold winter weekends have started to blend together. Lets face it, there are only so many decent family movies on Netflix. Only so many board games you can play together. It’s at this point in the year that we tend to get especially creative with our stay-at-home family fun. Over the years, we’ve made s’mores at an indoor campsite, hosted a fancy tea party and even created our own teppanyaki grill. A few weeks ago we made cheese fondue after a day of cross-country skiing. It was so fun, we decided to try another dippable dining experience: Chinese Hot Pot. It turns out, Chinese Hot Pot is by far the easiest, tastiest, healthiest and most enjoyable family dining experience we’ve tried yet!

Whether you're exploring new cultures or just looking for something new to try, Easy Chinese Hot Pot is a fun experience for the whole family.

What is Chinese Hot Pot?

As you might imagine, Chinese Hot Pot, sometimes called fondue Chinoise, originated in China — probably during the Zhou dynasty. With this cooking method, a communal pot boiling liquid is served with a variety of raw, bite-sized foods that each diner cooks for themselves. In its most basic form, the liquid can be plain water, but there are versions of hot pot that involve all sorts of ingredients — ranging from mild to super spicy — often based on regional recipes from throughout China.

For our Easy Chinese Hot Pot, we’ve created a mild-yet-flavorful cooking liquid using chicken broth as the base. We use it not only as the base for cooking our various meats, seafood and vegetables, but also as the flavorful broth to spoon over bowls of noodles (or wontons) at the end of the cooking process. As the foundation for this entire meal, it’s important that the broth be as flavorful and natural as possible. Homemade broth is always an ideal choice, but if thats not in the cards, you know I always recommend Aneto Chicken Broth. This premium broth is 100 percent natural and as flavorful as your favorite chicken noodle soup, right out of the box.

How to Make an Easy Hot Pot Broth

Creating the cookie broth for your hot pot is actually incredibly easy. I started by dropping some whole garlic cloves and slices of fresh ginger into the pot. Then I added slices of fresh shiitake mushrooms, a few green onions a little soy sauce and some toasted sesame oil. Next, fill the pot with chicken broth and heat until boiling. That’s it — you’re ready to cook hot pot!

What to cook in Hot Pot?

There are an almost endless number of foods you can cook in Chinese Hot Pot. If you’re looking for a truly authentic experience, I recommend doing additional research or taking a trip to a Chinese market for ideas. But if you’re looking for a simple way to start, I recommend a few of the following items:

Meat & Seafood

Thinly sliced beef, such as sirloin or flank steak
Thinly sliced pork tenderloin
Asian meatballs
Raw Shrimp
Raw Scallops
Thin slices of wild salmon
Thin slices of cod or halibut

Vegetables:

Bok choy
Broccoli
Carrots
Sweet potato
Canned baby corn or fresh corn cobs cut into 1-inch pieces
Mushrooms

Other fun options:

Noodles (rice noodles, ramen, udon, etc)
Tofu
Store-bought frozen wontons or dumplings

You’ll also want to offer a variety of dipping sauces. There are tons of options but we tend to go pretty simple. The kids tend. to stick with plain soy sauce. You can also make a lovely sauce by mixing soy sauce with a little garlic, sugar and rice vinegar and sesame oil. Jon and I also love adding spicy chili garlic paste or sriracha for a little heat.

What equipment do I need for hot pot?

You can get really fancy and authentic with hot pot — you can buy a special electric pot known as a sukiyaki pot, intended specifically for hot pot. You can also buy a special net tool for submerging your ingredients and all sort of special dishes and contraptions.

But we like to keep things simple for our Easy Chinese Hot Pot. We use our Electric Fondue Set to heat the broth and the fondue forks to submerge ingredients. We also use bamboo chopsticks to dunk noodles, snatch items from the pot and, of course, for eating.

Hot Pot Fun

No matter what equipment or ingredients you choose, remember that Hot Pot is meant to be a communal and fun dining experience. Adapt it to suit your family’s taste and have fun!