It’s pretty simple, you have a pot of simmering broth in front of you and all you do is dip the ingredients in the broth and take it out when it’s done cooking, using tongs or chopsticks (although if you’re sharing you should probably use tongs instead of your personal chopsticks). You can also dip it in a selection of sauces if you want. It’ll either be a place where all the ingredients are in a buffet line and you take as much as you’ll eat, or a place where you check the ingredients that you want on a little card and the servers bring it out, or somewhere in between where veg/carbs/cheaper meat is at the buffet and the nicer stuff is to order. There’s two “schools of thought” in eating hotpot; either dumping a bunch of stuff at once and fishing it out one by one, or only putting in a few things at a time. Thinly sliced meat usually doesn’t take more than a few seconds to a minute to cook as does leafy veg, and heartier ingredients like potato take a few minutes. The meal is usually finished by adding noodles/rice to the broth and eating that at the end, since putting in carbs early will fill you up too quickly. If you’re at a place with a split pot, you can choose between different types of broth; usually people do a spicy one plus a mild one, although some places will have even more options (some people really like tomato-based broth, although I don’t care for it). Some hotpot places, usually Chinese, have a sauce bar where you can make your own sauce from different ingredients, whereas other places just have a premixed selection of sauces.
Post time: Mar-14-2024