Everything I Made From — Everyone Hot Pot Cookbook

I think one of the greatest joys of eating comes in the form of hot pot.

Hot pot exists in many cultural variations. The broths, spices, and ingredients differ from region to region, but the foundation of hot pot remains the same — a bubbling pot of broth on a hot plate or stove is placed in the middle of the table while overflowing platters of ingredients are dispersed around the pot. It’s a communal dining experience that calls for everyone’s participation, but how you decide to participate can greatly vary. It also demands you to be attentive and hospitable, helping your fellow table mates fish up their slices of thinly shaved beef or bundles of pea tips when you notice that it has reached its cook time. The adaptability of hot pot goes beyond the broth and ingredients, the sauce bar is another place where one can get creative. Having multiple small sauce plates holding soy sauce, fragrant chili oil, and creamy sesame paste punctuated with toasted cumin seeds and flecks of chopped cilantro is all part of the experience.

I have been a big fan of Natasha Pickowicz since her first cookbook, More than Cake. When she announced that she was releasing a second cookbook that focuses on hot pot, I immediately pre-ordered the book to be delivered on publication day. Choosing Everyone Hot Pot to be next book in my Cookbook Club for Two series seemed like the obvious choice, especially with the arrival of Lunar New Year.

Everyone Hot Pot is a beautiful cookbook divided up into four abundant hot pot feasts. There are unique recipes for broths, sides, and salads, as well as Natasha’s recommendations for ingredients for each feast. The book made me revisit my definition of hot pot, and showed me that hot pot could be so much more than the bubbling pots of broth I grew up eating. The next six weeks were filled with many handmade dumplings, sauces from scratch, satiating starches, and unique broths that go beyond what you will find at hot pot restaurants and grocery store shelves. We wrapped up the six weeks by remaking all our favourite components of each hot pot feast.

Week 1: The Northern Classic

“My parents signature hot pot feasts start with a base of filtered water, rather than a strongly seasoned, fatty broth. The quality of the purchased ingredients like leafy greens and tender meat, is the focus here. The endless, communal dipping and swishing of the savoury morsels enriches the water, resulting in a transportive sauce.”

We kicked off this volume of cookbook club with the first hot pot feast guide and recipes, The Northern Classic. With every guide, there are recommendations for broth, sauce, starch, salad, drink, dessert, and spread (ingredients) pairings. From this feast guide we made:

the “broth”
toasted cumin and white sesame sauce
not-just-scallion pancakes
shrimp and peashoot dumplings
the spread: kabocha and tofu skin skewers, sliced lamb, firm tofu, bok choy, bean thread noodles

Week 2: The Land and the Sea

Though hot pot is a natural framework for budget-strapped dining, there is a time and place to pull out all the stops. When cost is no object, hot pot is a glorious opportunity to convey abundance, especially in a themed surf-and-turf dinner.

The Land and the Sea was a great segue from The Northern Classic. A homemade mushroom dashi is the base of this second hot pot feast, providing a very clean but fragrant base to all the luxurious ingredients and delicate seafood flavours. The highlights for me besides the broth was the kombu and brown butter texas toast, which asks you to use the kombu from the broth to make the kombu brown butter. The toast with miso and brown butter might be my new favourite way to have toast, and felt like a grown-up version of garlic bread. The garden wontons were equally enjoyably, with a full shisho leave in each wrapped inside each dumpling.

mushroom dashi broth
DIY sauce bar
kombu and brown butter texas toast
garden wontons
the spread: shrimp and kale skewers, bay scallop and fava bean skewers, enoki mushroom and beef skewers, enoki mushroom and bean curd skewer, whole clams, king crab legs, sliced beef, tofu skin rolls, bok choy, celtuce, pea shoots

Week 3: This Heat

In southwestern China’s Sichuan province, the hot pot feast is a mouth-numbing affair. Unlike the more tranquil broths found in the north, here the hot pot base is dyed a brilliant vermillion, carpeted with a sea of bobbling dried chiles

In my 30+ years of hot pot consumption, I can count the amount of times I’ve had spicy or mala hot pot on one had. A spicy soup base is never the one I choose because I often find that it overpowers the flavour of the ingredients that are being dunked in the bright red broth. What I really appreciated about this hot pot feast is that the spicy soup is paired with an aromatic and cooling royal chrysanthemum broth, which provides the perfect refuge from all the spice. Using a dual-chambered pot is best strategy.

tingly beef broth
royal chrysanthemum broth
cashew-lime salsa macha
charred and candied orange sauce
the spread: sliced pork belly, cubed fish fillet, shrimp, fried tofu puffs, napa cabbage, kabocha squash, lotus root, daikon radish, variety of mushrooms (from the farmers market!)

Week 4: The Endless Forest

I find myself craving hot pot during our most explosive growing months of later summer and early fall. This is the time to visit your farmers for impossibly gorgeous and flavourful vegetables — flounced bundles of greens, flowering herbs like chives and cilantro, fat heirloom tomatoes, pearly ears of corn, taut lobes of eggplant, peppers, and squash — before plunging them into a fragrant lemongrass-spiked broth.

This was an effortlessly vegan menu and embodies everything I love hot pot: an abundance of vegetables, deliciously fragrant broth, and homemade chili crunch. I got many ingredients from the farmers market and what I couldn’t find there was bought from my local Asian grocery store. Vegetables have always been my favourite ingredients to cook in broth, especially leafy greens and sheets of bean curd that easily soak up all the flavours of the broth. The charred tomato and lemongrass broth and tea bag broth were my favourite ones from this cookbook, and I repeated them before the end of this volume of cookbook club. This sesame chile crunch was also my favourite sauce from the book, and I used it for many of the other recipes of the book, including the spicy woodear mushroom salad.

charred tomato and lemongrass broth
tea bag broth
sesame chile crunch
the spread: kelp noodles, firm tofu, smoked tofu, tofu skin rolls, maitake mushrooms, lion’s mane mushrooms, beech mushrooms, corn, gem lettuce, green beans

Week 5: Return of the Favourites

The four weeks of hot pot recipes came and went so quickly that we didn’t feel like we were quite done with the book. Since we finished all four hot pot feasts as listed in the book, we decided the fifth week will be the return of all our favourite components from the past four weeks. The sesame chile crunch definitely made a triumphant return to our sauce bar. We made shrimp and pea shoot dumplings and the garden dumplings as well as the new favourite: scallop and fish roe dumplings. The other returning components included: the charred tomato broth, tea bag broth, and large variety of bean curd.

Week 6: Salads, Snacks, and Starches

Growing up, hot pot to me was just hot pot. I never thought about pairing hot pot with sides and salads because there was already such an abundance of ingredients at the table. This book really showed me the true potential of a hot pot meal. A crisp and cool wood ear mushroom salad is the perfect accompaniment to a bubbling pot of broth. A toothsome and chilled bean curd and corn salad with raw Chinese celery provides such a unexpected break from all the savouriness at the table. And nothing is more quintessentially Chinese than a fruit plate to end a meal.