Fun, Festive, and Low-Stress: Why Everyone Needs to Hot Pot This Fall

In the Lau family, my dad is the veteran chef in the household. With more than 50 years of experience as a Chinese chef and restaurant owner, he is very comfortable in the kitchen. Whenever we get together for big holidays or occasions, he usually spends all day putting together nine- to 12-course meals. Those meals are always epic, but there’s a simpler meal that has always been one of my favorites: hot pot.

For me, hot pot is special because instead of my dad cooking everything in advance, we get to sit around a pot of tasty soup and cook the meal together as a family. It’s a great way to be present with one another, to serve each other, and to slow down and enjoy each other’s company.

If you’re new to hot pot, it’s a really low-stress way to have a fun and festive meal with people you love. Hot pot needs no excuses to be enjoyed on any day of the year, but in our family we usually have it for special occasions, such as birthdays.

At its core, hot pot is a social experience where you cook raw foods in a communal pot of flavored broth or soup. It has many variations across almost every Asian country, and a handful of European ones as well. Some hot pots are based around vegan broths, while others can be mild or meaty or mouth-numbingly spicy, and a wide range of ingredients are cooked in the simmering liquid. Depending on your tradition, various meats, vegetables, and carbs are cooked in the hot broth and then paired with a variety of sauces.

In China, the tradition of hot pot dates back thousands of years. Legend has it that the root of Chinese hot pot was solidified in the dining practices of Mongolia, and the practice was disseminated by Mongolian horsemen who travelled throughout Northern China. There are a ton of regional varieties within Chinese hot pot, ranging from the world-famous spicy Sichuan style to the more grounding Guangdong flavors that my dad prefers. If you’re not familiar with Guangdong’s flavors, they’re described as sweeter and lighter, with a tender focus on the food’s elements. Its principles highlight sweetness because it is believed in traditional Chinese medicine that sweetness can “tone the body” and alleviate illness and improve a person’s mood. 

To set yourself up for hot pot at home, you need a few things: a portable heating surface and a large pot, strainer ladles, and chopsticks. 

To make sure the broth is cooking-ready, you need a heat source that can sit in the middle of your table. You can use a separate free-standing burner and a pot, or you can buy a portable hot plate that’s designed specifically for hot pot that comes with the heating element and the pot in one. Some pots also come with a partition, which is helpful if you want to offer two flavors of soup base at once. 

If you don’t have a hot-pot pot or want to save money and space, you can use a rice cooker or multi-cooker (like your Instant Pot) instead. They’re both portable and can boil and simmer water, which is all you really need.

For a rice cooker, you can leave the lid open and start out on the “cook” mode to bring it to a boil. To keep the broth hot, adjust between the “warm” and “cook” modes throughout the meal as needed. If you’re using an Instant Pot, you can set it to “sauté” mode and press “adjust” to bump up the heat until it comes to a boil, and then bring the heat down to get it to simmer.

Whether you’re using a pot, a rice cooker, or an InstantPot, be careful not to add so much broth that it overflows when it’s boiling or when you add a bunch of food to the pot, which could burn guests and/or damage the heating coils.

These small scoopers make it easy to scoop noodles, fish balls, and more out of the hot broth. If you’re using a hot pot pot, you’ll want smaller strainer ladles (similar to the ones pictured above). If you’re cooking in a rice cooker or an Instant Pot, which are deeper than a hot pot, you might want to use a deeper strainer ladle to make it easier to fish out your cooked food.

For adding the food to the broth, lifting some things out of the pot, and for eating, of course, you’ll need chopsticks. For hot pot, avoid plastic chopsticks because the boiling broth can melt them.

The broth is the heart of hot pot. My dad’s soup base is on the lighter side, which is more in line with the typical Cantonese style of hot pot. Cantonese hot pot soups tend to be mild, often flavored by boiling chicken, fish, or shrimp. I’ve also heard that some restaurants use rice porridge for an interesting twist on soup base. 

Personally, I prefer my dad’s light soup base over some of the spicier, heavier soup bases out there; the broth gradually absorbs more and more flavor as the night goes on. Coupled with my dad’s dipping sauce, each bite is already packed with more than enough flavor for me.

Further up north, in places like Sichuan and Chongqing, the style of hot pot is more in line with their world-renowned mala flavor, or màhlaaht 麻辣 in Cantonese, which means numb and spicy. Their soup bases generally involve some combination of Sichuan peppers, chilies, and other spices. 

If you’re looking for additional soup base recipes, you can check out our friends at Chinese Cooking Demystified and Woks of Life. Don’t feel like making your own soup base? There are also a ton of great ready-made options — including Mongolian, Sichuan, or Seafood style — where you basically just add water. Or if you’re feeling creative and lazy, you can also use a few flavor packets from your favorite instant ramen brands, and cook the noodles during your meal.

Your soup base can be as simple as just boiling straight-up water or chicken stock, or more nuanced with as many spices and ingredients as you’d like. If you’re hosting a hot pot meal, just remember to have fun and enjoy the process. 

Our ingredient list below includes three kinds of meat, squid, tilapia, shrimp, my dad’s famous homemade fish balls, tofu, and various veggies, but all of these are suggestions. When my dad teaches people how to cook, he always stresses that his way is one of many options. This recipe is really just a starting point. 

Read more: My Dad’s Homemade Fish Balls Are Tender, Bouncy Perfection

There are so many different ways to do hot pot, and the beauty is in the freedom you have to keep it as simple — or elaborate — as you’d like. Generally, though, you’ll want a variety of leafy green vegetables, mushrooms, meat and seafood (Cantonese hot pot is known for its seafood), some root vegetables, and some rice or noodles to go with it. 

When planning and cooking for your group, a decent rule of thumb is to ballpark around 1/2 to 1 pound of food per person. We have a lot of hungry eaters in the Lau family, but you can scale up or down depending on your group/family. 

My dad has a tried-and-true hot pot sauce that I love. Its salty profile balances out the lighter, sweeter Guangdong flavors. But hot pot is based on individual taste, so anything goes. This is the perfect time to experiment with new sauces, which includes using off-the-shelf sauces like Sriracha, ponzu sauce, oils, etc. The purpose of hot pot sauces is to add and highlight the flavors of the food that you have in your bowl, so use what tastes good to you.

When you set up your hot pot, have a dedicated eating bowl, small sauce bowls, and eating utensils for each person. For hygiene purposes, don’t mix your cooking utensils with your eating utensils. If you don’t have enough utensils, you can sanitize your chopsticks by placing them into the boiling broth for a few seconds before handling the raw ingredients.

Once you sit down at the table, take your time: Wait for the water to boil before adding your ingredients. This is where the social aspect comes into play. Most conversations happen while waiting for the broth to boil.

Take and add small amounts of your chosen ingredients and keep an eye on your food while it cooks. Veggies take only a few seconds. Proteins take a bit longer, but you want to take them out while they’re still juicy and soft. Getting that right might take a little bit of experimenting, but that’s part of the hot pot fun, too.

There are times when the host will be cooking for everyone, but the general rule is that you should cook what you plan to eat. That also means that you should not be taking someone else’s item in the pot if they’re in the process of cooking it. 

Got leftovers? All of the uncooked ingredients can be used for tomorrow’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Save the broth and use it as a soup base. If you have specific ingredients that you don’t know what to do with, you can always freeze them for the next time you make a hot pot. Or visit our YouTube channel to find more recipe ideas with the ingredients. The possibilities are endless when you have a great broth and ingredients to work with!

Editor’s note: A special thank you to our on-set culinary advisor, Patty Lee.